Voices of the Other: Children's Literature and the Postcolonial Context (Children’s Literature and Culture 10)

Description

This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children's and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Cover VOICES OF THE OTHER: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT Copyright Contents General Editor's Foreword Preface Contributors Introduction Section 1: Theory CHAPTER 1 Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as an Unfinished Project CHAPTER 2 "We Are the World, We Are the Children": The Semiotics of Seduction in International Children's Relief Efforts CHAPTER 3 The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children's Literature CHAPTER 4 Continuity, Fissure, or Dysfunction? From Settler Society to Multicultural Society in Australian Fiction CHAPTER 5 Text, Culture, and Postcolonial Children's Literature: A Comparative Perspective Section 2: Colonialism CHAPTER 6 Saved by the Word: Textuality and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Australian Texts for Children CHAPTER 7 Making Princesses, Re-making: A Little Princess CHAPTER 8 Colonial Canada's Young Adult Short Adventure Fiction: The Hunting Tale CHAPTER 9 Lies My Children's Books Taught Me: History Meets Popular Culture in "The American Girls" Books Section 3: Postcolonialism & Neocolonialism CHAPTER 10 Bedtime Stories: Canadian Multiculturalism and Children's Literature CHAPTER 11 Multiculturalism in Canadian Children's Books: The Embarrassments of History CHAPTER 12 "Initiation for the Nation": Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Writing for Children CHAPTER 13 Wrestling with the Past: The Young Adult Novels of Buchi Emecheta CHAPTER 14 "And the Celt Knew the Indian": Knowingness, Postcolonialism, Children's Literature CHAPTER 15 Reviving or Revising Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo: Postcolonial Hero or Signifying Monkey? Afterword: The Merits and Demerits of the Postcolonial Approach to Writings in English Index