NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

American Studies Association Conference
Session Report: Coloring Outside the Lines: Performing Race in Children’s Books
Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 2008

Mona Gleason,  University of British Columbia

Chair: Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University (TN)
PAPERS:

1) Jennifer A. Hughes, Emory University (GA): “The Right to Laugh: Children, Race, and Humorous Publication in Antebellum America”
2) Michelle H. Martin, Clemson University (SC): “ Performing Race, Performing Music, and Black Identity: The Sad-Faced Boys of Arna Bontemps”
3) Philip Nel, Kansas State University (KS): “The Black Cat in the Hat: Seuss and Race in the 1950s”

The American Studies Association Conference in Albuquerque this past October had much to offer historians interested in children and youth.  A particularly engaging session was entitled  “Coloring Outside the Lines: Performing Race in Children’s Books,” chaired by Cecelia Tichi. The session featured papers from Jennifer A. Hughes, Michelle H. Martin, and Philip Nel.  Children’s literature has typically represented fertile ground for historians. This session built on that tradition, offering fresh analyses of both novel and more familiar literary sources, and compelling explorations of the connections among race, racialized identities, and “being young” in America’s past.

The first paper of the session, presented by Jennifer A. Hughes, focused on the antebellum period and the rise of America’s comic industry. Nineteenth century American humor, Hughes argues, served important political, cultural and social functions. This was particularly true for children.  Laughter, and the ability to evoke it through political cartooning, served as a bellwether of the strength of America’s democratic traditions. Antebellum era debates about the rights of children to laughter and frivolity paralleled debates about when children and if African Americans could bear democratic franchise. While the medical and moral benefits of cultivating laughter in childhood was discussed in popular comic almanacs and magazines of the period, uncoerced laughter on the part of African Americans was not acceptable. Unlike African Americans, white (male) children were expected to develop competencies for their eventual enfranchisement, including the ability to understand political humor. The former could make had no such claim on the rights of citizenship training of any stripe.          

Shifting ahead to the early decades of the 20th century, Michelle H. Martin explored the novels of Arna Bontemps, particularly his Sad-faced Boy, published in 1937. Bontemps, a critical contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, crafted stories for young Americans that highlighted African American history, music, and culture. The novel explore the story of Slumber, and his brothers, Rags and Willie, who leave their home in northern Alabama to seek out the excitement of New York City.  Along the way, Martin demonstrates throughout her analysis how the boys’ ability to make music helped them cope not only with racism, but also with the boredom and homesickness they felt on the road. Martin demonstrates Bontemps use of jazz music as a vehicle for a whole spectrum of emotions and desires on the part of the boys, including the desire for freedom, resistance to racism, and the longing to travel to parts unknown.

In his re-reading of the popular Dr. Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat, Philip Nels put the spotlight on the period just prior to, and after, World War II in America. In his very engaging paper, he encouraged the audience to read the Cat as centrally bound up with the politics of race and racism. The backdrop for Nels’ argument was the evolution of Seuss’s own personal politics. Seuss, whose real name was Theodore Seuss Geisel, had a rather checkered history of promoting racist stereotypes in his early cartooning work. His political and moral outlook was profoundly changed by the experience of World War II, however. During that period, Seuss published numerous political cartoons that lambasted racism, anti-Semitism, isolationism, Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese, as well as conservative political forces at home.  Seuss’s children’s books reflect these shifts in his political thinking, exploring themes of racial tolerance, suspicion of dictators and environmental causes. Nels argues that the Cat performs in the story as a figure in Blackface evoking  a traditional minstrel story line. Interpreted through the lens of race in mid-twentieth century America, The Cat in the Hat becomes a metaphor for the politics of race and nation writ large.

All three papers in this very engaging session were wonderfully thoughtful and thought provoking. They complemented each other by teasing out a variety of examples of the power of children’s literature to illuminate broader cultural forces. Each paper evoked the politics of race and racism as they were experienced at different temporal moments through a variety of literary sources. Together, the presenters expertly highlighted how central these varied politics were to ideas about being young in America.

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