Overview

A new history of manhood, race, and hierarchy in American childhood Like Children argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American period. Camille Owens demonstrates that white men’s power at the top of humanism’s order has depended on those at the bottom. As Owens shows, it was childhood’s modern arc—from ignorance and dependence to reason and rights—that structured white men’s power in early America: by claiming that black adults were like children, whites naturalized black subjection within the American family order. Demonstrating how Americans sharpened the child into a powerful white supremacist weapon, Owens nevertheless troubles the notion that either the child or the human have been figures of unadulterated whiteness or possess stable boundaries. Like Children recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts. Through the stories of black and disabled children spectacularized as prodigies, Owens tracks enduring white investment in black children’s power and value, and a pattern of black children performing beyond white containment. She reconstructs the extraordinary interventions and inventions of figures such as the early American poet Phillis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century pianist Tom Wiggins (Blind Tom), a child known as “Bright” Oscar Moore, and the early-twentieth century “Harlem Prodigy,” Philippa Schuyler, situating each against the racial, gendered, and developmental rubrics by which they were designated prodigious exceptions. Ultimately, Like Children displaces frames of exclusion and dehumanization to explain black children’s historical and present predicament, revealing the immense cultural significance that black children have negotiated and what they have done to reshape the human in their own acts.

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9781479812912

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Reviews

Camille Owens’ Like Children is a tour de force. Culling from a dazzling array of archival materials, including letters, photographs, poetry, and primers, Owens traces the beginning of modern American childhood. She carefully peels back the layers, revealing the prominent place of Black children in the construction of white manhood and American humanism. Black prodigy, as Owens writes, then becomes “a rule, or pattern itself,” with a figure like Phillis Wheatley coming into view as a progenitor of American childhood. This book achieves what it sets out to do: “to show that childhood is our major pedagogy, and measure of being human.” Owens makes apparent, especially in the unsettling story of musician Tom Wiggins, how white men reconstructed forms of power in slavery’s afterlife. And, at the same time, she narrates the power that Black children have wielded – through poetry or music, in law or politics – in the face of this. Owens writes with sheer elegance, brilliant clarity, precision, and sophistication that unfolds page after page, chapter after chapter. She beautifully weaves together theory and history, offering insightful close readings and intriguing ideas that leave the reader in deep wonder long after closing the book. Like Children is rich, dynamic, and moving, not to mention timely. This is scholarship at its best—and a spellbinding showcase of interdisciplinarity. * Kabria Baumgartner, Northeastern University *

Author Information

Camille Owens is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University.

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