Dissertation Title: "Blackness and the Human Child: Race, Prodigy, and the Logic of American Childhood"
Abstract: "“Blackness and the Human Child” argues that since the eighteenth century, developmental hierarchies and racial hierarchies—from child to Man, and black to white— have operated in tandem. Analyzing the nineteenth-century white supremacist claim that black people were childlike, this dissertation asks how the assumed nature of children—ignorance and dependence— historically emerged, becoming a scientific, cultural, and legal tool to deny black reason, self- sovereignty, and full humanity. Across five chronological chapters, this dissertation interrogates the nexus of race and childhood through figures who unsettled their interlocking schemas: black child prodigies. Early American poet, Phillis Wheatley, nineteenth-century pianist, Tom Wiggins, a fictional boy doctor, Sammy Tubbs, “Bright” Oscar Moore, and twentieth-century polymath, Philippa Schuyler each anchor a chapter, while a discussion of prodigy’s older meaning—monstrous birth—threads across, forming the site for understanding the racial imaginary of black childhood, past and present."