by Robin Bernstein

About Robin Bernstein

Robin Bernstein is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), which won five book awards, including prizes from the Children’s Literature Association, the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Performance

book Keywords for Children's Literature

The word performance is often traced to the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman and Middle French word parfournir, which means “to carry out,” “to fulfill,” “to accomplish,” or “to execute” (OED; Turner [1982] 1992, 13). Later, in the sixteenth century, the word became associated with mimesis, or bodily imitation, mimicry, or repetition. Today, the word performance carries the legacy of these apparently contradictory meanings. Performance can refer, in the older sense, to performing an action, to completing an operation—that is, to making something, to causing something to exist. We invoke this meaning when we speak of “performing one’s duties” or of a worker’s “high performance.” In the newer sense, however, performance can refer to theater, to acting. Performance scholar Richard Schechner (2013) has pithily described these distinct meanings as “making” and “faking” (Turner [1982] 1992, 93). Both these meanings—separately and together—have profound implications for the study of childhood.