Topsy’s Afterlives: Dr. Brigitte Fielder on Black Girlhood, Past and Present

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Brigitte Fielder, whose scholarship focuses on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century – when real life offered plenty of terrifying material, particularly for Black children. Dr. Fielder shares her research on how children are held up as sites where racial histories are constructed, revisited, and reimagined, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Misha Green’s HBO series Lovecraft Country, from minstrel shows to picture books to school curricula. 

Dr. Fielder is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and the co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). Her work has been published in journals such as American Quarterly, Legacy, J19, and American Literary History, and in various edited collections. She is currently working on a book about racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for humanization and racialization. 

Follow Dr. Fielder on Twitter @BrigField. For images and readings related to our conversation, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.