<i>Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America.</i> By Camille Owens

The Black child's place in modern America is one of profound significance. Over the past two decades, the field of Black childhood studies has grown significantly, making the study of Black children not only legitimate but essential to broader discourses in history, literature, and cultural studies. Yet, until relatively recently, this area of inquiry received limited attention within the academy. Even as childhood studies emerged as a recognized academic discipline, a deep engagement with Black childhood has been latent, and they remained marginal to broader theoretical and conceptual studies of children. Early scholarship in Black childhood studies concentrated on first establishing the mere presence of Black children in the historical record—particularly in the transatlantic slave trade, and then for the exploitation of their labor during slavery, as exemplified by the foundational work of Wilma King with Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (1995). Within studies of literature and culture, Anna Mae Duane, Robin Bernstein, Nazera Sadiq Wright, and others have advanced the study of Black children, showing how their marginalization was a racialized dynamic that was central and constitutive to the development of modern American childhood. Collectively, this scholarship has exposed the academy's failure to recognize Black children as worthy of scholarly inquiry, while revealing the racism embedded in their treatment across time, space, and cultural development.Camille Owens’ Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America marks a shift in this scholarship. Rather than focusing on exclusion and marginalization, Owens argues that “by mapping the relations of the black prodigy to the child, the childlike, and the human, this book charts Black children's place not in the margins of American childhood but at the center and thus at the center of the larger structure of American humanism.” (9). Owens focuses on individual Black prodigies, including Phillis Wheatley, Tom Wiggins, Philippa Schuyler, Oscar Moore, and literary figures like Sammy Tubbs. These figures, Owens contends, reveal not how Black children were seen as exceptional, but rather how their performances of prodigy and negotiation of the category of the child, shape the development not only of American childhood, but more crucially, of humanism.Owens examines Wheatley's biography and oeuvre, illustrating how her writing made “strategic claims to childhood, family, and freedom” (46). Owens’ engagement with Wheatley's childhood poetry, written to deceased children, effectively demonstrates how Wheatley “did not take up childhood as a settled or commonplace subject but understood its emergent power and set it to her own use” (51). The second chapter on Tom Wiggins, commonly known as “Blind Tom, the Marvelous Musical Prodigy,” is especially noteworthy. Owens provides close readings and interpretations of Wiggins’ sheet music and performances. She juxtaposes these analyses with archival research and historical interpretations of Wiggins’ extended status as unfree and dependent. For example, Wiggins’ song, “Mother Dear Mother,” unveiled a new form of child-suffering and enslavement that “allowed those before him to witness and sublimate his plight, to see, hear, and feel Wiggins still bound in the Bethune family fiction while imagining that it was of someone else's sorrow he sang” (80). Owens’ investigation into the complicated legal battle that results in Wiggins’ constant bondage provides a striking argument that makes this chapter stand out as particularly compelling and original.Owens’ exploration of the character of Sammy Tubbs in the illustrated volume Science in Story: Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and “Sponsie,” the Troublesome Monkey, (1874) by Dr. Edward Bliss Foote, brings education to the fore, to show how white children were taught science through the abstract vision of a Black prodigy. The subsequent story of Oscar Moore centers science and the role of pseudo-scientific, racialized ideas of genius. A final focus on Phillippa Schuyler brings in the role of parental aspiration, racial uplift, and gendered and classed visions of Black children's intellectual potential, ending with Schuyler's own departure from the idealized visions put upon her to chart her path of Black giftedness and success.Each of these chapters offer new readings of how Black children negotiated the burden and promise of prodigy, and how this notion was weaponized against them. Such a study of prodigy, childhood, and humanity, narrates a new kind of history of the development of modern American childhood—one focused not on the crystallization of white childhood, but on the instability of the category itself, as shaped by ideas of Black exceptionalism. As a text that enters into an evocative conversation on Black childhood, some of the subjects, archives, and texts may be somewhat familiar. Wheatley, for example, has received considerable attention as of late. However, Like Children’s focus on Black prodigy is fresh and generative. Owens’ resistance to a tendency to examine the exclusionary dynamics of American childhood does not refute earlier waves of scholarship on Black children but breathes new life into them. Like Children highlights the evolution of Black childhood studies, ushering in a new era in which childhood is firmly established as a field of inquiry—and Black children are engaged as subjects of serious theoretical and intellectual consideration.