#  Camille Owens, "Hand-Book of the Wonderful Boy: Reading Black Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Archives" 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 15, 2022** 

 05:00PM - 05:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 133**  



 

 



 

##  [HISTORY OF THE BOOK](/history-book)

##  SPEAKER: Camille Owens, Harvard Society of Fellows

 The history of American childhood depends on books. This is because white Americans have understood children through their literacy acquisition since the eighteenth century, because adults vividly rendered children in nineteenth-century literature, and because children left many marks upon books and comparatively few marks in other archival sources. Indeed, while children can be difficult historical subjects to decipher, books are a major source for their illumination. Yet, while nineteenth-century black children were reading—and black adults were writing for them—the extent to which we can tell black childhood’s history through books is limited by slavery, literacy prohibitions, and lack of access; and by the antiblackness of childhood’s dominant literary imagination. These limits raise a question: can we depend on books to tell black children’s history? And if so, how should we read them? This lecture approaches these questions through the *Hand-Book of the Wonderful Boy* (1888), a souvenir of “Bright” Oscar Moore, who performed as a “negro prodigy” and “infant encyclopedia” at the nineteenth century’s end. Through the prodigy’s symbolic exception to childhood, and the Hand-Book’s unstable status as a book, this talk examines the archival problem of books and black childhood, and the epistemic tensions beneath them. By placing black performance studies in conversation with the literary history of childhood, this talk identifies a method to “unbind” the book-child relationship, toward a more critical history of American childhood.

 **Camille S. Owens** is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She received her PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale in 2020. Her dissertation, Blackness and the Human Child: Race, Prodigy, and the Logic of American Childhood, was the winner of the American Studies Association’s 2020 Ralph Henry Gabriel dissertation prize and Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone dissertation prize. Her work reconsiders American formations of white supremacy, antiblackness, and liberal humanism through the history and racialization of childhood. She is currently at work on her first book, *Like Children: The Black Prodigy's History of American Humanism*.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ History of the Book ](/seminars/history-book)
 
 

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