Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane (review)

In their introduction to this superb volume, Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane describe realizing that the logic behind the central question of their title has actually helped make early African American children's literature itself difficult to find. After all, that question—Who writes for black children?—presumes that black child readers were readily identifiable before 1900 as both children and readers, "two subject positions that were reserved for the white and the middle class" (x). The more fruitful question, Capshaw and Duane came to understand in the process of assembling the volume, focuses on black children as agents rather than objects: What did black children read?

The fascinating and often surprising answers to this question shape this innovative collection, which includes materials of immense critical and practical use for scholars, archivists, and instructors alike. The volume argues powerfully for an expanded and inclusive conception of early African American children's literature, one that unsettles a number of prevailing assumptions about authorship as well as audience. New cases are made for considering prominent early black writers as authors for children; new sites for the circulation and production of black children's reading are brought into view; and new parameters for defining what counts as early black children's literature (and authorship) are proposed. Indeed, anyone interested in the intersections between early African American literary studies and children's literature studies—the "two largely separate fields" that Who Writes for Black Children? brings into fresh contact—will learn much from this book (x).

Capshaw and Duane have divided the volume into five parts that together advance three "overlapping conversations" (xix) in critical analysis (parts 1–3), bibliography (part 4), and textual recovery (part 5). The three analytical essays in part 1 ("Locating Readers") focus on theorizing early black child readers, highlighted by Angela Sorby's brilliant examination of the way early black writers of poetry for children frequently had to resort to "conjuring" their readers, since the dominant culture often denied African American children their "status, as children, as students, and as citizens" in the first place (5). In their essays, Courtney Weikle-Mills and Karen Chandler reframe Jupiter Hammon and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, respectively, as writers for children, by conjuring the slave children readers of Hammon's poetry and the "family culture" of group reading (at home, school, and church) in which Harper's work was likely recited (42).

The four analytical essays in part 2 ("Schooling, Textuality, and Literacies") focus on the nineteenth-century schoolroom as a site of reading and writing. Mary Niall Mitchell's study of the exuberant letterbooks produced by free children of color for their English composition class, in which the students were invited to report on the political events shaping mid- 1850s New Orleans, shows how a set of classroom exercises might also be understood as "part of a student-authored collective history" (64). Ivy Linton Stabell argues for the importance of antebellum "joyful death" biographies of black children, such as those produced by Ann Plato and Susan Paul, for their revolutionary appropriation of white notions of childhood innocence for the black subjects of their narratives (78). Both Valentina K. Tikoff and Martha J. Cutter examine the children's edition of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) prepared by white Quaker writer Abigail Field Mott in 1829 for the use of students at the New York African Free School. For Tikoff, Mott's excision of much of the original text's social commentary presents Equiano as a "safer, less complicated" figure for young black readers to emulate, simultaneously assuaging white anxieties about black citizenship (102). For Cutter, however, the heightened "visual rhetoric" of Mott's rewritten text (118), in both its literal illustrations and textual figurations, foregrounds black children "capable of claiming power in their own...