Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children's Literature before 1900

by Katharine Capshaw (Editor), Anna Mae Duane (Editor)

Overview

Until recently, scholars believed that African American children’s literature did not exist before 1900. Now, Who Writes for Black Children? opens the door to a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children. This volume’s combination of analytic essays, bibliographic materials, and primary texts offers alternative histories for early African American literary studies and children’s literature studies.

From poetry written by a slave for a plantation school to joyful “death biographies” of African Americans in the antebellum North to literature penned by African American children themselves, Who Writes for Black Children? presents compelling new definitions of both African American literature and children’s literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane bring together a rich collection of essays that argue for children as an integral part of the nineteenth-century black community and offer alternative ways to look at the relationship between children and adults. 

Including two bibliographic essays that provide a list of texts for future research as well as an extensive selection of hard-to-find primary texts, Who Writes for Black Children? broadens our ideas of authorship, originality, identity, and political formations. In the process, the volume adds new texts to the canon of African American literature while providing a fresh perspective on our desire for the literary origin stories that create canons in the first place. 

Contributors: Karen Chandler, U of Louisville; Martha J. Cutter, U of Connecticut; LuElla D’Amico, Whitworth U; Brigitte Fielder, U of Wisconsin-Madison; Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State U; Mary Niall Mitchell, U of New Orleans; Angela Sorby, Marquette U; Ivy Linton Stabell, Iona College; Valentina K. Tikoff, DePaul U; Laura Wasowicz; Courtney Weikle-Mills, U of Pittsburgh; Nazera Sadiq Wright, U of Kentucky.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517900274
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	05/30/2017
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	906,629
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Katharine Capshaw is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (Minnesota, 2014) and Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Anna Mae Duane is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut and coeditor of the journal Common-place. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim. 

 

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Part I. Locating Readers
1. Conjuring Readers: Antebellum African American Children’s Poetry
Angela Sorby
2. Free the Children: Jupiter Hammon and the Origin of African American Children’s Literature
Courtney Weikle-Mills
3. “Ye Are Builders”: Child Readers in Frances Harper’s Vision of an Inclusive Black Poetry
Karen Chandler
Part II: Schooling, Textuality, and Literacies
4. Madame Couvent’s Legacy: Free Children of Color as Historians in Antebellum New Orleans
Mary Niall Mitchell
5. Black Childhood Innocence in Susan Paul and Ann Plato’s Antebellum Children’s Biographies
Ivy Linton Stabell
6. Equiano as Role Model for African American Children: Abigail Field Mott’s Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano and White Northern Abolitionism in the 1820s
Valentina K. Tikoff
7. The Child’s Illustrated Anti-Slavery Talking Book: Abigail Mott’s Abridgment of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative for African American Children
Martha J. Cutter
Part III: Defining African American Children’s Literature: Critical Crossovers
8. “Our Hope Is in the Rising Generation”: Locating African American Children’s Literature in the Colored American’s “Children Department” (1840-1841)
Nazera Sadiq Wright
9. “No Rights That Any Body Is Bound to Respect”: Pets, Race, and African American Child Readers
Brigitte Fielder
10. Finding God’s Way: Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corrine as a Path to Religious Resistance for African American Children
LuElla D’Amico
Part IV: Bibliographic Essays
11. Nuggets from the Field: The Roots of African American Children’s Literature, 1780-1866
Laura Wasowicz
12. Children’s Literature in the AME Christian Recorder: An Initial Comparative Bio-Bibliography for May 1862 and April 1873
Eric Gardner
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Was any literature written specifically for black children living before 1900 in the Western Hemisphere? By posing this question, Capshaw and Duane force a reckoning with a gap in children’s literature studies that is predicated on the assumption that slavery invalidated a space for black children to consume literature."—V. A. Murrenus Pilmaier, University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan

"The volume’s strength lies in the interdisciplinary perspectives it provides on both African American children’s literature and the experiences of African American child-readers."—The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"Striking the hard-to-accomplish balance between in-process scholarly exploration and textbook framing, this collection manages not only to profess but also, impressively, to teach."—MELUS

"Who Writes for Black Children? is a compelling collection of scholarly essays and primary material that will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of childhood—or in book history, reading and reception history, materiality, ephemera, or interpretation. Examining poetry, fiction, biography, illustrations, periodicals, friendship albums, pamphlets, marginalia, and more, the collection analyzes the goals and rhetorical strategies of diverse genres published for African American children and (perhaps) read by them."—Journal of American History

From the Publisher