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Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. A Book Talk with Camille Owens

October 28 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. A Book Talk with Camille Owens,with Kristen Maye (Mount Holyoke) as discussantLike Childrenargues 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 Childrenrecenters 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 Childrendisplaces 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.Free and open to the public.Camille Owens is an assistant professor of English at McGill University, and works at the intersection of black studies, disability studies, and the history of American childhood. She is the author ofLike Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America(NYU Press, 2024), and has published essays inAmerican Quarterly,Early American Literature, andDisability Studies Quarterly. She received her PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale in 2020, and held a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2020 to 2023.Kristen J. Maye is the Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Her research resides at the intersection of cultural studies, critical feminism, and literary theory, taking up questions of knowledge production and disciplinarity. Maye completed her PhD in Africana Studies at Brown University in 2023, and also works as an Associate Editor withdifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Details

Date:
October 28
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Event Categories:
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Website:
https://events.brown.edu/live/events/blackprodigy

Venue

Pembroke Hall
172 Meeting St02912