Postcolonial Children’s Literature
In this paper, I will explore several ways in which readers and writers of “children’sliterature” have used postcolonial theory to analyse and expand the cannon of “children’sliterature.” Specifically, this paper will refer to postcolonial concepts of Place, Other, Race, andNationalism and highlight the ways in which they have impacted the scholarship on “children’sliterature.” In each section of this paper, I will explain the relevant postcolonial concept, giveexamples of how it helps us challenge narratives and assumptions in “children’s literature” and endthe section by elucidating examples of counter-narratives that exist or that can be developed.
To clarify the concept of postcolonialism, more generally, I cite Ashcroft, et al,“postcolonialism deals with the effects of colonisation on cultures and societies. ‘Post-colonialism/postcolonialism’ is now used in wide and diverse ways to include the study and analysis ofEuropean territorial conquests, the various institutions of European colonialisms, the discursiveoperations of empire, the subtleties of subject construction in colonial discourse and the resistanceof those subjects, and, most importantly perhaps, the differing responses to such incursions andtheir contemporary colonial legacies in both pre-and post-independence nations and communities.While its use has tended to focus on the cultural production of such communities, it is becomingwidely used in historical, political, sociological and economic analyses, as these disciplinescontinue to engage with the impact of European imperialism upon world societies” (Ashcroft 168).
Postcolonial literary theory, broadly, offers several ways to “read” texts. To “read” through apostcolonial lens means to look for the ways in which the ideas in a text depict western perspectivesas a Universal perspective, to be critical of the author’s representation/depiction of cultures as2deficit/superior, including their own (without expecting a novel to carry the burden of representingan entire culture), to pay attention to what is happening spatially and temporally in the place wherethe novel is set and to expose the silencing of colonising histories. With respect to the writing ofpostcolonial literature, authors employ flashbacks as a technique to place emphasis on the loss ofculture, language and identity, and characters often struggle within larger socio-political-cultural-economic structures, rather than as ahistorical individuals. Many texts written with a postcoloniallens use satire, allegory, symbolism, allusions, vocabularies from different cultures and employgenre bending as well. Finally, while some have argued that it is crucial for such work to beauthored by people from post-colonies and by those who have been marginalised because of thecolonial matrix of power, others are more sympathetic to works that have employed a postcoloniallens but that have not been authored by people who occupy these subject positions.
Section 1: On Place and Identity
Postcolonial theory pays attention to how colonisation affects the experience and idea ofplace. Specifically, it emphasises how colonisation transformed place as “embedded in culturalhistory, in legend and language” (Ashcroft 161) into an ahistorical piece of land and geographicallocation on “the map”. This altered perspective served two purposes — to characterise colonisationas a “discoveries” of “empty spaces” (Ashcroft 162) and to further allow colonising power to ownland (as it was “discovered”) rather than be owned by it (Ashcroft 163). In this manner, colonisingpower succeeded in accumulating land, by dislocating cultures, languages, and histories, andthrough the imposition of their languages.
In “Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial readings of children’s literature,” Clare Bradfordlooks closely at how several children’s books indeed depict place and the ways in which they3resemble the colonising discourse. Specifically, the author points out how, in many contemporarytexts, the narrative proceeds with characters entering spaces (such as forests, icy expanses, andmountainous regions) with “ambivalence and unease” as these places are depicted as “hostile, alien,or threatening” (Bradford 124). As these stories proceed, they often end in one of the following twoways. In the first scenario, the white child characters are indigenised, and consequently rendered “athome” in places formerly associated with Indigenous people (Bradford 127). As Bradfordhighlights, such narratives pose several issues. First, the trope of indigenisation is to reassurereaders of the legitimacy of white settlement by depicting children as having rights and attachmentsto those places (Bradford 127). Another problem with such an ending is that they draw onuniversalised and romanticised representations of Indigenous traditions by depicting white childrenas experiencing dreams and visions (Bradford 127). A second way in which these narratives end arethrough domination, wherein the land is conquered and transformed into a “settled anddomesticated space” (Bradford 135). Characters solve problems against the background of theforest and seacoast to attain selfhood and their identity is formed by their determination to contendwith the environment (Bradford 135).
Postcolonial theory, as employed by Bradford, assists in identifying how “children’sliterature” mirrors a colonising relationship to place, especially with respect to narratives whereplace is depicted as “empty spaces” to be discovered, conquered, or owned as a means for childrento come “home” and attain selfhood. Moreover, Bradford “reads” these literatures though apostcolonial lens by emphasising the difference between narratives where characters struggle tobecome individual heroes of ahistorical places as opposed to characters who struggle in relation totheir specific socio-cultural-historical backgrounds. Hence, Bradford also mentions the ways inwhich constructions of place and identity in “children’s literature” does not abide by the colonisingdiscourse. In these examples, the formation of selves depends on the intersection of community, self4and land (Bradford 135). And, the narratives proceed under the pretext that “places constitute a vasttext redolent with meanings accessible to its Indigenous inhabitants” (Bradford 135).
Section 2: Othering Children
Postcolonial theory has focussed much of its attention on how the colonising discoursecreates a “subject people,” who are described as lacking and in need of control by those who havegenerated the knowledge (Bhabha 37). For this reason, the colonising discourse made use of binarydistinctions to justify control, ideas of progress and development. Othering, in postcolonial theory,refers to the ideological frameworks (or the systematised criteria) that defines, for the colonisedsubjects, how they may come to understand the world (Ashcroft 156). Moreover, it is by defining‘the Other’ in specific ways that the colonisers locate their place in the world. While the Othercorresponds to the focus of desire or power in relation to which the subject is produced, the other isthe excluded or ‘mastered’ subject created by the discourse of power (Ashcroft 156).
M Gubar, in “Risky Business talking about children’s literature,” speaks of how children areoften framed as the other by parents, teachers, and curriculum designers. Specifically, she points outthat when children are viewed as lacking the abilities, skills and powers that adults have, we areadhering to a deficit model of childhood (Gubar 451). Consequently, viewing children as deficit canalso produce the very incapacities we claim merely to describe (Gubar 451), and thereby having asimilar effect as that which the colonising power has when defining “Other.” The alternative to thisview, which the author refers to as the difference model of childhood, adheres to the “radical alterityor otherness of children, representing them as a separate species, categorically different fromadults” (Gubar 451). The author argues against this account on the basis that such claims actuallysuggest that adults have power, voice and agency and children do not (Gubar 452). Here, I5understand Gubar to be utilising a postcolonial lens as she opposes an understanding of childrenthat is based on a deficit or difference logic.
Instead, Gubar asks to focus on the ways in which children function as not just recipients ofadult produced texts, but also, sometimes as coproducers and enactors of child-oriented texts(Gubar 452). Such a focus, moreover, motivated the author to develop the kinship model ofchildhood, as a counter-narratives to the deficit model and difference model of childhood. Such amodel also speaks to the work in postcolonial theory to resist the clear-cut distinction betweencolonising and colonised subjects. Specifically, the kinship model is premised on the idea thatchildren and adults are akin to one another, which means that they are neither exactly the same norradically dissimilar (Gubar 453). Furthermore, children and adults are separated by differences ofdegree, and not of kind (Gubar 453). Importantly, the kinship model highlights how children haveabilities that adults lack, such as a greater facility for learning new languages (Gubar 453), and howadults do not function as completely independent agents with unique voices (Gubar 454). In thisway, kinship urges us to neither underestimate the capacities of young people, nor overestimate theabilities of older people, and instead to see the many ways in which there is relatedness andconnection and similarity, without implying uniformity, homogeneity and equality (Gubar 453).
Here, I am reminded of Bhabha’s theory of ambivalence as it disrupts the clear-cutdomination of adult authors of “children’s literature” and of adult/child binary, more generally.According to Bhabha’s theory, since the colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects,who reproduce its assumptions, habits and values — that is, ‘mimic’ the coloniser, it insteadproduces ambivalent subjects whose mimicry is never far from mockery (Ashcroft 10).Ambivalence describes a fluctuating relationship between mimicry and mockery because thecolonised subject is never simply and completely opposed to the coloniser (Ashcroft 10). Utilising6mimicry, mockery and ambivalence as literary techniques in the writing of children’s literature canthereby further ideas of kinship and move us away from the domination of adult authors ofchildren’s literature.
Part 3: Race, Slavery and African
American Studies
“Race,” is a category invented to legitimise the classification of human beings into“biologically, physically, and genetically” distinct groups (Ashcroft 180). Race, as a category, ispertinent to colonialism because the division of people in this way is inextricably linked to thedomination and justification of colonialism (Ashcroft 181). Specifically, colonial powers used racistlogics, i.e ways of thinking that considers a group’s unchangeable physical features as a means todifferentiate between “superior” and “inferior” groups (Ashcroft 181). Furthermore, colonialpowers used racism to further the institution of slavery, to strengthen their own economies.
Postcolonial theory and African American studies have emphasised the erasures in Blackhistory, culture and societies due to colonialism. An example of such efforts is seen in “The RadicalWork of Reading Black Children in the Era of Slavery and Reconstruction,” where Capshaw andDuane focus on the lack of study of African American children’s literary cultures in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries (Anna Mae Duane 10). In this case, postcolonial theory is utilised to signalthe absence of knowledge about literatures for Black children during the eras of slavery andreconstruction. Further, the authors aim to “unsettle the traditional histories and theorisations ofchildren’s literature to permit an expanded appreciation of the investment and accomplishments ofblack children’s literatures” (Anna Mae Duane 10). For this reason, some of the authors of theessays had to also conjure children as readers and agents, as they were otherwise excluded, erased,or objectified by white-supremacists literary conventions (Anna Mae Duane 19). The technique of7conjuring, in this manner, can be viewed as a postcolonial literary technique, as it exposes thepurposeful silencing of colonising histories.
The authors pay attention to the powerful racist rhetorics of the nineteenth and twentiethcentury, wherein “all black people were perpetual children” and at the same time, actual AfricanAmerican children were excluded from definitions of “childhood” and denied leisure, play andschool (Anna Mae Duane 11). Hence, to “imagine the black child as literate, upwardly mobile, andcapable of inhabiting the same stories that were told to the future white citizens of the US was toattack racial hierarchies at its root” (Anna Mae Duane 11). By researching figures in the AfricanAmerican canon, who were both child readers, and later authors, Capshaw and Duane do the radicalwork of providing counter-narratives to the continuing racism of the “children’s literature” cannon,and also do the postcolonial work of countering Universal perspectives about African American children.
Through this edited book, “Who writes for black children?”, we learn about texts that wereread by both adults and children as group exercise rather than the hierarchical model where adultsread to children (Anna Mae Duane 12), about children readers who often interpreting texts foradults (Anna Mae Duane 13), and the ways in which engaging black child readers challenges theliterary and historical investments in linear and exclusionary ideas about maturity and development(Anna Mae Duane 14). As the authors of this volume resist depicting children through a deficitmodel of childhood, and intentionally highlight the ways in which cultures had not divided“children’s literatures” from “adult literatures,” they can be interpreted as employing a postcoloniallens. Additionally, the authors of this book not only claim grounds for African American “children’sliterature,” but also stretch the definition of the same to include works that were written by whiteauthors and read by African American children (Anna Mae Duane 17).
Part 4: Nationalism and childhood
Postcolonial theory has shed light on the connections between anti-colonial movements,nationalism and coloniality. Specifically, postcolonial theory focusses on how “anti-colonialmovements employed the idea of a precolonial past to rally their opposition through a sense ofdifference, but they employed this past not to reconstruct the pre-colonial social state but togenerate support for the construction of post-colonial nation-states based upon the Europeannationalist model” (Ashcroft 139). This implies that the sense of nationalism that grew out of manyanti-colonial resistances incorporated much of the colonial logics in that “race” (or religion) wasused as a means of differentiating and assimilating, and new structures were put in place to controllabour, resources and its products.
In “The affective construction of Chinese child citizenship in Little Friend,” Xiang analysesthe long-running children’s periodical Little Friend, during a time when Chinese society wasundergoing a transition in imagining the nation. In her account, we can interpret a postcolonialreading because she draws connections between the depictions in the periodical and what wastaking place in Chinese society, spatial-temporally and historically, during that period ofpublication. For instance, she notes how the magazine visually represents proletariat children asenjoying labour (Xiang 174). Moreover, she reads this visual representation in connection to thenation-building that the Chinese government was focussed on during the post-war period given theirneed for physical labour (Xiang 177). In other words, it is only when we employ a postcolonial lensthat we can see the links between Chinese nationalism and the control of labour and that we beginto notice the ways in which it is propagated through the images and stories of children happilyperforming labour in the periodicals.
Conclusion
Through the course of this paper, I looked at several ways in which postcolonial theories on Place, Race, Other and Nationalism can be used to critique and expand notions of children,childhood and children’s literature.
