Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America

Like Children

Hardcover
$89.00
$89.00
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Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America
  • Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America
  • Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America
Like Children

Like Children

$89.00
$89.00
$89.00 each
Binding

2025 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Honorable Mention, 24th Annual William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given by the Modern Language Association
Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Literature

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.

Book Details

ISBN
9781479812912
Binding
Hardcover
Authors
Camille Owens
Publisher
New York University Press
Published Date
July 30, 2024
Language
English
Pages
336
Physical Info
0.81 in H x 9 in L x 6 in W (1.31 lb)

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