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  • Archives and Magic Lanterns
  • Katharine Capshaw

Recently I participated in a Jessie Ball DuPont Summer Seminar at the National Humanities Center (USA): “Constructing Childhood: Words and Images,” led by Laurie Langbauer. Many of the scholars were pursuing intensive archival projects on historical constructions of childhood, examining collections at their home institutions, in online archives, and at the University of North Carolina’s special collections. I found myself reflecting on the importance of the ephemeral to our work, the way in which objects permit moments from the past to break the surface of the present. A handwritten letter from student to teacher, an adolescent’s scrapbook of poems and advertisements, a child’s needlepointed record of her family’s members, a young reader’s marginalia in his favorite book—these are all local, intimate glimpses into children’s responses to the world. These objects survive—when they do survive—because of the care of the child and of adults, their desire to preserve the fact and shape of the young person’s engagement with the world. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler reminds us, “Archival work in childhood studies should not deny the elusiveness of childhood and the inequalities of power between adult scholar and child object that vexes all work in this field, but it does strive to mitigate that absence, to locate in the historical record the child’s voice and aspirations, to find traces of what children ‘are’” (216).

What interests me is the way in which archival objects permit us to examine how children act, whether creatively, politically, emotively, or academically, and how their agency is articulated and mediated through objects and adult curators. I find myself thinking about how these objects open a window into the intellectual and emotional lives of young people in the past. Many of us who are attracted to work in the archive experience the thrill of holding in one’s hands an object that bears aesthetic and affective weight; Kenneth Kidd reads the “wonder” of the archive through space, arguing that it “intersects with and reinforces a book-love bordering on the spiritual and/or the fetishistic” (2). In thinking about these archival objects, I remember Lynda Barry’s “Magic Lanterns” chapter in One! Hundred! Demons!, in which she describes the investment of children in favored objects, recounting the feel of the thing [End Page 313] a child loves: “A book, a blanket, a cloth rabbit. The place on our bed post we liked to touch as we fell asleep. Each with a magic lantern inside, capable of conjuring worlds” (156). In holding the archival object—the child’s book, the letter, the scrapbook, the needlework—we engage another’s life, and the magic lantern of that person’s experience can open up for us as scholars as we enter new landscapes for the study of childhood.

This issue contains five compelling essays. The first two focus on representations of Native American communities. Karen L. Kilcup’s “‘Frightful Stories’: Captivity, Conquest, and Justice in Lydia Maria Child’s Native Narratives” argues that Child reshaped generic conventions in order to advocate for Native sovereignty. Kilcup also explains that Child’s children’s work “portrays children as ethical negotiators between long-established Native peoples and the emergent American polity, as she proposes young people’s potential agency and represents them as nascent citizens.” E. Kay Harris’s “Feeling Good Inside: Benevolent Happiness in The Trail of the Go-Hawks” tells a different story of non-Native engagement with Native cultures. Examining the way in which Emilie Blackmore Stapp employs the notorious “playing Indian” trope, Harris argues that “white child characters emerge as the inheritors and agents of civilization, who in making other people happy celebrate their own generosity and prosperity; in turn, the novel configures prosperity and benevolence as natural privileges of being white.” M. Tyler Sasser offers sharp insight into literary history in “The Snowy Day in the Civil Rights Era: Peter’s Political Innocence and Unpublished Letters from Langston Hughes, Ellen Tarry, Grace Nail Johnson, and Charlemae Hill Rollins.” Examining Ezra Jack Keats’s landmark picture book, Sasser acknowledges the tensions around race and representation in the mid-1960s and offers archival...

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