In her new book, , Camille Owens explores a new history of manhood, race and hierarchy in American childhood, arguing that the child has been the key figure giving measure and meaning to the human in thought and culture since the early American Period.
A graduate from the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, Owens joined the Department of English during the Fall 2023 semester as an assistant professor.
Like Children, her first book, recenters the history of American childhood around black children and rewrites the story of the human through their acts.
We spoke to Professor Owens about the idea behind Like Children, the archival research she undertook to write this book, and more.
Q: How did the idea of this book come about?
A: I wrote this book as a way to find historical answers to contemporary questions about childhood and race in America. In the last decade in the US and Canada, there have been important conversations raised about the status and treatment of black children, especially with regard to police killings of black children, and the wider systemic harms that black children face.
Coming to terms with these issues, I was among many people asking: Why aren’t black children included in the category and protections of American childhood? Why aren’t they valued like white children? These were important questions, and they still are. However, at some point I began to question the premises underlying my questions. For example—when we put black children’s value in historical perspective—especially in perspective of American slavery—we see that the issue has not necessarily been the devaluation of black children, but rather, the exploitation of their value.
The more historical pressure I placed on questions of value, inclusion, or exclusion, the more I began to see a different story of American childhood taking shape. Not a story of black children’s exclusion from a stable, ideal category of white childhood, but a more complicated story where black children were made integral (often in exploitative ways) to the formation of white American childhood and family on economic, social, and cultural levels.
Ultimately, this story led me to a very different appraisal of the present, and to the different set of questions I answer in my book: What has it meant to be included in the category of childhood? How did that category take shape? Who has it historically benefited? And how well does it protect any American child?
Q: Your book begins with a photograph of "bright" Oscar Moore. Who is Oscar Moore and what will readers discover about black prodigy and the history of American childhood through his story?
Oscar Moore was a black, blind child who performed across American stages as a prodigy during the 1880s-1890s. Moore was born in Texas, but by the age of three he was touring in New York City, apprenticed to a series of white men who profited from his performances of intelligence and memorization.
I encountered a photograph of Oscar Moore in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale when I was a graduate student. Upon finding it, I immediately wanted to know who Moore was, and why, in a period where white supremacists were relentlessly questioning black intelligence, this child’s intelligence—or “brightness”—held entertainment value for white Americans. When I began researching Moore, I assumed that his story was rare and exceptional—a prodigy is, after all, meant to be an exception. Yet the more research I did, the more I saw a pattern of black children like Moore being labeled as prodigies and placed in the cultural spotlight across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. This subverted, again, the idea of black children’s exclusion, and supported a different history of their exploitation and cultural significance to American childhood writ large.
Q: What kind of archival research did you undertake for this book? Were there any photographs or testimonials that stood out to you during your research?
A: Writing about childhood and children in the nineteenth century and earlier requires some creative archival methods, because children were not often subjects who left written testimony deemed important for archiving. When writing about black children, especially before Emancipation, it gets even harder. That said, there are so many archival materials that can shed light on the social meaning of childhood in the past, and on the experiences of black children.
I work with everything from court cases, to human anatomy textbooks, to poetry, sheet music, and performance souvenirs. In the last chapter of my book, I work with a set of scrapbooks or “baby books” created to document the 1930s childhood of Philippa Schuyler—a child pianist described in the press the ‘Shirley Temple of American Negroes.’ Most of the material in the scrapbooks is written from the perspective of Philippa’s mother, Josephine, but there are some amazing moments where Philippa’s own storytelling, drawing, and songwriting intervene in the dominant narrative told about her, taking the text in completely different directions. That source stands out as a highlight.
Q: You write that the black prodigy's history cannot be told in a series of biographies but as a history told from "between", through the consultation of financial contracts, bills of sale, custody rulings, stories and stage props, among others. How do these various sources help create the portraits you discuss in your book?
A: Historians often work toward a practice of telling history from below—that is, history not from the perspective of those who had the power to shape dominant narratives, but from the perspective of those who were structurally disempowered from telling their stories in their time. I aspire to this in my work, but I am equally interested in looking at the relationship between black children and white men’s power, and between childhood as a construct and humanism as a structure. For me, working “between” is better suited this kind of relational inquiry. As an example, I write about the “script” used by a white showman to direct Oscar Moore’s repertoire on stage. The script is titled The Hand-Book of the Wonderful Boy—so it is ostensibly about Moore. But its composition and use tells me as much about the showman than about the child, if not more. Like many other sources in my book, it helps me look in both directions at once.
Q: Like Children blends both performance studies with literary studies. What similarities and differences of experience did you notice in the stories of a writer and poet like Phillis Wheatley and composers and musicians like Philippa Schuyler and Tom Wiggins?
My book’s blending of literary and performance studies methods has a lot to do with my subjects’ differing access to literacy, and with issues of textual knowledge versus other forms of knowledge. A subject like 18th-century poet, Phillis Wheatley, published a volume of poems and wrote letters and manuscripts—all of this after she taught herself to read and write as an enslaved child. Other subjects that I write about did not, or could not, do what Wheatley did.
Tom Wiggins, for instance, was an enslaved, blind, and neurodivergent pianist and composer. He did not leave behind his own written narrative of his life, but his performances and musical compositions (transcribed by others) are incredibly valuable, if complicated, sources for investigating the conditions of his captivity and his limited forms of freedom. Working across literary and performance studies methods allows me to engage deeply with both Wheatley and Wiggins. Doing so also highlights the fact that the connection between literacy, textual knowledge, and authority has never been arbitrary—it is deeply tied to the developmental, racial, and often ableist systems of measuring the human developed across the last three centuries. So it is more than a methodological move—it leads at the heart of the book’s arguments.
Q: During the Winter 2024 semester, you taught ENGL 414: "Critical Race Readings of American Children's Literature", which draws on some themes from your book, such as the formations of childhood across historical periods. How did you engage students with your work and research?
When I taught “Critical Race Readings of American Children’s Literature” last year, my students did an incredible job of engaging with the history of children’s literature on its own terms, from The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765) to Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885 ) to Fun with Dick and Jane (c. 1930s)—while also making connections to contemporary issues of childhood, race, and reading. From the outset, my students poked holes in the political argument that children are too young to be exposed to something called “critical race theory.” As they pointed out, children have been learning about race through their experiences of colonization and slavery, and through their introduction into systems racial oppression since the early American period. It was a pleasure to teach this course as I wrapped up my book, because my students gave me the gift of re-opening questions that I thought I had finished answering—it ultimately helped point me toward what’s next in terms of research and writing.
Camille Owens is an assistant professor of English at McGill University. Owens researches and writes on American childhood, race, and disability. At McGill, she teaches courses on a range of topics in black studies, African American and Indigenous literatures, children’s literature, interdisciplinary research methods, and archival theory.