In the 1930s, Shirley Temple was heralded as “America’s sweetheart,” and she remains the icon of wholesome American girlhood, but Temple’s films strike many modern viewers as perverse. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines her early career in the context of the history of girlhood and considers how Temple’s star image emerged out of the Victorian cult of the child. Beginning her career in “Baby Burlesks,” short films where she played vamps and harlots, her biggest hits were marketed as romances between Temple and her adult male costars. Kristen Hatch helps modern audiences make sense of the erotic undercurrents that seem to run through these movies. Placing Temple’s films in their historical context and reading them alongside earlier representations of girlhood in Victorian theater and silent film, Hatch shows how Shirley Temple emerged at the very moment that long standing beliefs about childhood innocence and sexuality were starting to change. Where we might now see a wholesome child in danger of adult corruption, earlier audiences saw Temple’s films as demonstrations of the purifying power of childhood innocence. Hatch examines the cultural history of the time to view Temple’s performances in terms of sexuality, but in relation to changing views about gender, class, and race. Filled with new archival research, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood enables us to appreciate the “simpler times” of Temple’s stardom in all its thorny complexity.

In the 1930s, Shirley Temple was heralded as “America’s sweetheart,” and she remains the icon of wholesome American girlhood, but Temple’s films strike many modern viewers as perverse. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines her early career in the context of the history of girlhood and considers how Temple’s star image emerged out of the Victorian cult of the child. Beginning her career in “Baby Burlesks,” short films where she played vamps and harlots, her biggest hits were marketed as romances between Temple and her adult male costars. Kristen Hatch helps modern audiences make sense of the erotic undercurrents that seem to run through these movies. Placing Temple’s films in their historical context and reading them alongside earlier representations of girlhood in Victorian theater and silent film, Hatch shows how Shirley Temple emerged at the very moment that long standing beliefs about childhood innocence and sexuality were starting to change. Where we might now see a wholesome child in danger of adult corruption, earlier audiences saw Temple’s films as demonstrations of the purifying power of childhood innocence. Hatch examines the cultural history of the time to view Temple’s performances in terms of sexuality, but in relation to changing views about gender, class, and race. Filled with new archival research, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood enables us to appreciate the “simpler times” of Temple’s stardom in all its thorny complexity.

"This collection brings together an eclectic range of prominent scholars in architecture, education, history, law, literary criticism, and cultural studies to explore how the field of childhood studies questions some of the most basic tenets of humanities scholarship-and to consider how these questions can bridge disciplines. Each essay pairs childhood studies with another field of inquiry to ask explicitly how foregrounding the child reorients long-established scholarly foundations in that field. Childhood studies' insistence that we need to rethink the symbolic work of the child necessarily realigns a host of other fields that, often uncritically, draw upon the false dichotomy separating the vulnerable, dependent child from the allegedly independent and autonomous adult. By complicating our assumptions about the child, we are also providing a new way of thinking through some of the most basic tenets of the humanities. Anna Mae Duane notes that much of the exciting work in the humanities seeks to recover the voices of those who have been infantilized, including women, people of color, and the GLBT community. This volume features thirteen essays by leading scholars who reveal how childhood studies offers a vital methodological and theoretical roadmap for engaging issues that are among the most important and provocative in the humanities-the recovery of colonized voices, the definition of agency, the performance of identity, and the construction of gender and race, to name a few. Each of the essays seeks to understand how rhetorical views of childhood shape views of power, politics, knowledge, and sociality"--

"In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement. Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself." -- Publisher's description.

In Precocious Charms, Gaylyn Studlar examines how Hollywood presented female stars as young girls or girls on the verge of becoming women. Child stars are part of this study but so too are adult actresses who created motion picture masquerades of youthfulness. Studlar details how Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones, and Audrey Hepburn performed girlhood in their films. She charts the multifaceted processes that linked their juvenated star personas to a wide variety of cultural influences, ranging from Victorian sentimental art to New Look fashion, from nineteenth-century children’s literature to post-World War II sexology, and from grand opera to 1930s radio comedy. By moving beyond the general category of “woman,” Precocious Charms leads to a new understanding of the complex pleasures Hollywood created for its audience during the half century when film stars were a major influence on America’s cultural imagination.

"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingham takes readers on the journey of a melody, from its inception by a white northerner, to its enormous success on the blackface circuit, in recordings by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to its countless screen appearances, including Shirley Temple movies, The Simpsons, and Mad Men. For almost two centuries, "My Old Kentucky Home" has never been just a song—it continues to be a resonant, changing emblem of America's original sin, whose blood-drenched shadow haunts us still. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song investigates the tune's hidden history, lodged in the nation's cultural DNA, and ends with a startling solution for what to do with this artifact of race and slavery.

Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours including theatre, dance, folklore, popular entertainments, performance art, protests, cultural rituals, and the performance of self in everyday life. Performance Studies in Canada brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the national emergence of performance studies as a field in Canada. To date, no systematic attempts has been made to consider how this methodology is being taught, applied, and rethought in Canadian contexts, and Canadian performance studies scholarship remains largely unacknowledged within international discussions about the discipline. This collection fills this gap by identifying multiple origins of performance studies scholarship in the country and highlighting significant works of performance theory and history that are rooted in Canadian culture. Essays illustrate how specific institutional conditions and cultural investments – Indigenous, francophone, multicultural, and more – produce alternative articulations of “performance” and reveal national identity as a performative construct. A state-of-the-art work on the state of the field, Performance Studies in Canada foregrounds national and global performance knowledge to invigorate the discipline around the world.