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Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. By Katharine Capshaw Smith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Reviewed by Michelle H. Martin
Identifying the Harlem Renaissance as the "dynamic point of origin" of African American children's literature, Kate Capshaw Smith offers a definitive study of the early decades of this genre, concentrating on the first forty years of the twentieth century. Smith labels her work "an inauguration" (xxvi), seeking to spark research interest in a marginalized subgenre within an historically marginalized genre. Firmly grounded in both the history and the literary history of the "New Negro Renaissance," Smith offers three apt justifications for this study. First, because Dianne Johnson's Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (1990) has long been the only book-length critical study of early black children's literature, this study adds to the development of a "more fully historicized account of black writing for children" (xiii). Such a study also contributes to a richer understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. Furthermore, this project initiates the recovery of many worthy black authors of this era such as Jane Dabney Shackelford, Effie Lee Newsome, and Mary Church Terrell, who either should be but are not a part of the African American children's literature canon or who have faded into obscurity altogether.
Rather than painting a monolithic picture of black children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Smith problematizes the genre by illustrating how children served as a site of contestation for many factions who all had a vested interest in helping to shape black youths' ideas about racial amity. Smith's chapters draw clear dividing lines between W. E. B. DuBois, the dramatists, southern writers, Carter G. Woodson's Circle, and the longtime friends and collaborators Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Painstakingly researched, Smith's study sometimes resembles detective work because of its level of detail, but it also makes the book a fascinating read that will surely realize Smith's goal of encouraging related research.
The first chapter, "The Emblematic Black Child," focuses on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, including children's literature within the Crisis, the journal of the National Association of Colored People, as well as the Brownies' Book magazine (a monthly journal for black youth, or "Children of the Sun," published in 1920-21)....