An Introduction to "Staging Childhood" (Patricia Pace, 1952-2000)

In the fall of 2000, both my wife, Patricia Pace, and I had just been promoted to full professor and were enjoying our first sabbaticals. Patti was working on a book on the performance of childhood in the twentieth century; in her own words, it was to be "a book about the representation of the child in film, theatre, children's literature, popular literature, and photography." Among her computer files was a tentative table of contents for this project:

Introduction Childhood and Performativity

1. Staging Childhood I: Lewis Hine's Child Labor Photographs

2. Staging Childhood II: Children on Stage

3. Baby Peggy to Jackie Coogan

4. Shirley Temple: Temptress and Minstrel

5. Harlem Renaissance Photographs of Dead Children

6. Depression-Era Kids

7. The Psychologizing of the Child Star; the Fifties and Afterwards

8. The Inner Child and the Big Screen

9. Family Photography: A Performance Piece

10. "All Our Lost Children": Trauma and Testimony in the Performance
of Childhood

Before her untimely death on November 17, 2000, Patti had just finished revising what would have been the first chapter of this study, the essay printed here. On a research trip we took to Los Angeles, where she was researching children in silent films at UCLA, she experienced complications from the liver disease diagnosed four years earlier (a result of hepatitis C, most likely contracted through blood transfusion in the 1970s). Patti died of a respiratory infection a few days after we returned to Georgia.

Patti's death was a shock to her family and her many friends and colleagues. We miss her wit and her insight, her sharp critical intelligence and her generosity, her serious scholarship and her remarkable sense of humor. I especially appreciate the many testaments from students past and present who told me how she changed their lives.

This essay is printed largely as Patti left it, with only a few small, silent corrections, many of them a result of my not being able to identify a few of the photographs mentioned in passing. While Patti may have planned on tidying up a few things here and there, I have generally not tampered with the manuscript. I imagine that she would have, perhaps, provided a footnote to the New York Times story of 16 August 2001 that reported an FBI investigation of an eminent Lewis Hine scholar suspected of selling "original" signed Hine prints, on paper that only could have been made well after Hine's death in 1940. At the very least, she would have made some ironic remark about how she never imagined that her questions about the authenticity of representation would extend to the photographic prints themselves.

For me, the publication of this essay is a labor of love, but there are many people to whom I am indebted for making it possible. Foremost is the editor of this issue, Judith Plotz, my personal mentor, who asked if the conference paper she heard Patti give at the Modern Critical Approaches to Children's Literature Conference in Nashville existed in publishable form. Professor Bruce Henderson of Ithaca College also read the manuscript and gave me valuable advice. Professor Hal Fulmer, Patti's chair in the Department of Communication Arts and the Faculty Research Committee at Georgia Southern University, offered great assistance with permissions fees.