Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children's Literature

Mirrors, Windows, and Doors

Maria José Botelho, Masha Kabakow Rudman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135653743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

"Children's literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics…. Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children's Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field…. Surely all of us – children, teachers, and academics – can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books." Sonia Nieto, From the Foreword

Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes children's literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change.

Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children's literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of children's literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of children's book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected children's literature journals and online resources.

CHAPTER 1
The Metaphors We Read By¹: Theoretical Foundations

The metaphors of mirrors and windows have often framed the scholarship of multicultural children’s literature. Children need to see themselves reflected so as to affirm who they and their communities are. They also require windows through which they may view a variety of differences. Books are one way they learn about the world. Once these foundations of story and society are internalized, literature can become a conduit—a door—to engage children in social practices that function for social justice. Literary works focusing on African Americans, Native Americans, Latino/a Americans, and Asian Americans are strongly based on the black/white paradigm that is historically rooted in U.S. power relations. The publication of children’s literature by and about people of color was a response to biased sociopolitical and publishing practices that contributed to the underrepresentation of people of color in U.S. public education and children’s literature.

Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature (Botelho, 2004) demands a shift from the dominant paradigm of race relations between African Americans and European Americans to one that combines the U.S. power relations of class, race, and gender together. Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature acknowledges that all literature is a historical and cultural product and reveals how the power relations of class, race, and gender work together in text and image, and by extension, in society. (We appreciate the power of image and consider it consistently alongside text. For the purpose of conciseness, we will use text to be all encompassing and inclusive of image.)

Critical multicultural investigations of children’s literature focus on the analysis of power relations as factors in the trends of what gets written, illustrated, and published. In other words, meanings found in children’s books are not exclusively derived from language but also from institutional practices, power relations, and social position (Weedon, 1997). Children’s books offer windows into society; they are sites for struggle among shifting, changing, overlapping, and historically diverse social identities (Shohat, 1995).

Critical multicultural analysis deconstructs hierarchical power relations around which language plays a critical role. The analysis centers on the sociopolitical function of linguistic and visual signs. Stephens (1999: 57) maintains that “The form and meanings of reality are constructed in language: by analyzing how language works, we come nearer to knowing how our culture constructs itself, and where we fit into that construction.” We do not live outside of language. How we use language constructs who we are as people, as cultures, and as a society. Language circulates the dominant ideologies of gender, race, and class.

Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus (1997) analyze the Sony Walkman as a way to illustrate how to conduct cultural studies. Their study is instructive because it demonstrates how culture works in contemporary society. Du Gay (1997b: 3) argues that “the biography of a cultural artefact” can only be studied when the process of its articulation is made visible by locating a host of cultural processes. Articulation refers to the process of “connecting disparate elements together to form a temporary unity.” Literature is a cultural artifact. Thus, cultural artifacts come to be through a combination of processes and linkages that emerge from particular times and places. He asserts that there are five principal cultural processes: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. These processes considered together complete a circuit, “the circuit of culture.” The circuit of culture helps to show how critical multicultural analysis makes these cultural processes visible and highlights its capacity to disrupt power relations.

The analysis of the representation process shows that meaning does not come directly from words but instead is re/presented in language (written or visual). Thus cultural meaning is established through representation, drawing on literary and nonliterary texts (imbedded with discourses) that play a central role in fixing the meaning in literature: Dominant meanings get encoded in books. These cultural meanings offer particular subject positions, which are associated with social identities. Identity is the interface between subject positions and historical and sociopolitical circumstances (Woodward, 1997). Drawing attention to subject positions invites readers to actively construct their own identities, while at the same time taking action in the constructing of society. Children’s books are encoded with particular meanings during their production process, meanings that are constructing identification between the books (cultural artifacts) and particular groups of readers (consumers). In focusing on production, we need to look at the cultural meanings that are imbedded in the literature by examining the textual influences (e.g., genre, focalization, story closure) as well as sociopolitical and historical considerations.

How is the book made culturally meaningful? Du Gay (1997a: 4) argues “in thinking about the production of culture … we are also simultaneously thinking about the culture of production.” This attention to the culture of production connects us back to representation and identity, while bringing up questions of consumption. Meaning does not begin or end with the book, but is instantiated or made meaningful through reading. The circuit of culture highlights the dynamism of meaning making; it is an ongoing process. Du Gay (1997a: 5) argues that this encoding of particular meanings in products, in this case, in literature, is not where the story ends, but that “meanings are actively made in consumption.” In reading the book, the reader can actively resist the subject positions offered by the text and take up new ways of being in the world. Thus the reader is not regulated in how he/she can be in society, but is an active member of society, co-constructing as it changes over time.

The circuit of culture demonstrates that meaning making is a dynamic process: writers encode particular meanings in books and readers often receive them inadvertently, but it is through reading/consuming that meanings are actively made. Critical multicultural analysis calls attention to the reading process. If they are conscious of this process, readers can detect how these messages or ideologies try to regulate their lives, and their society. They can interrupt ideologies that privilege particular groups over others. Critical multicultural analysis calls attention to how identities are constructed, how texts are constructed, how society is constructed, and how language/discourse creates us as much as we create it.

The circuit of culture demonstrates the matrix of discourses that have a hold on us and society: Meaning making is not sent from “one autonomous sphere and received in another autonomous sphere” (du Gay, 1997a: 10), but in a process of dialogue.

Reading against culture disrupts bounded and timeless notions of culture; it is an interruption of the status quo. Critical multicultural analysis is an invitation for readers to be researchers of language. Thus, readers are given opportunities to actively investigate how language works and the hold culture has on them because, as Roland Barthes (1977: 146) contends “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” He further maintains:

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.

(Barthes, 1997: 148)

Critical multicultural analysis focuses on the reader as the midwife of meaning. The theoretical constructs of discourse, ideology, subjectivity, and power lead the reader to locating how the power relations of class, race, and gender are exercised in text.

A critical multicultural analysis focuses on the “constructedness” of literacy practices and knowledge (Wooldridge, 2001). The way we read books can further encode coercive power interactions if we wittingly or unwittingly accept the messages in the text and images. Because texts are socially constructed they can be deconstructed. This unpacking of the textual layers helps the reader become more conscious of the decisions that the author and/or illustrator made, foregrounding the choices and omissions. This process leaves the reader poised to pose critical questions, much like the ones proposed by Nathalie Wooldridge (2001: 261):

• What (or whose) view of the world, or kinds of behaviors are presented as normal by the text?
• Why is the text written that way? How else could it have been written?
• What assumptions does the text make about age, gender, [class], and culture (including the age, gender, and culture of its readers)?
• Who is silenced/heard here?
• Whose interests might best be served by the text?
• What ideological positions can you identify?
• What are the possible readings of this situation/event/character? How did you get to that reading?
• What moral or political position does a reading support? How do particular cultural and social contexts make particular readings available? (e.g., who could you not say that to?) How might it be challenged?

Children are invited to read and reread the text, taking stock of their reactions and responses. The point of view of the story is considered because the perspective determines the position(s) of power from which the reader “sees” the story. The social processes among the characters are explored to determine how power was exercised along the continuum from domination and collusion to resistance and agency. The story ending is considered in this process, examining the assumptions imbedded in the story’s closure. The illustrations may be analyzed to determine how the text and images work together as well as to take stock of how power is represented in them. The genre of the text is closely examined because these conventions influence how the story gets told. They have an impact on the reader’s expectations for the text.

Children’s literature is read against its sociopolitical context. Readers ascertain what cultural themes are imbedded in the work. They search for ways in which the sociopolitical situations of the characters shape these themes. The text is considered within its historical context over time. In addition, it is important to discern the prevailing ideologies/worldviews about class, race, and gender.

We grappled with many ways of naming our theoretical framework. We considered “critical analysis” and “multicultural analysis;” both designations fell short of what we are trying to accomplish through these dynamic and disciplined reading practices. “Critical” and “multicultural”, together, captured our analytical lens because they are the best words we have available to us at the present time. “Critical” demands reading beyond the text and making connections between the local and sociopolitical/global and the personal and the political, all grounded by historical analysis. It calls attention to the power imbalance in society as well as its organization. “Critical” implores us to pay attention to the social work of language because how we use language shapes perceptions and social processes. “Multicultural” acknowledges the multiple histories among us; the dynamism, diversity, and fluidity of cultural experience; and unequal access to social power. Critical multicultural analysis requires inward and outward examination, recursively.

Theories inform theories, and through their application, we theorize practice. Theories are dialogical (Cummins, 2000). Our theoretical framework builds on Masha’s (1995) issues approach to children’s literature and Sonia Nieto’s (1997, 1999, 2004) research on Puerto Rican children’s literature and multicultural education. Maria José’s (2004) dissertation research on critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature anchors this book project. Masha argues for a critical reading of the social issues such as gender and heritage. Sonia demonstrates how cultural specificity contributes to the analysis of the Puerto Rican experience in children’s literature. She advocates for multicultural education that is antiracist, basic, and critical education for all children, that is pervasive and dynamic, grounded by social justice imperatives. Maria José’s doctoral thesis develops the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of the critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature.

Like some social scientists, we consider children’s literature as social transcripts. Sherry Ortner (1991) claims that the United States’ great ethnography is in the form of literature. Maxine Greene (1988: 184) refers to literature as “an encounter with the text [that] relates very closely to the experience of qualitative research, since it makes so very clear that the meaning of any situation is always a meaning for particular human beings with different locations in the world.” Critical anthropology (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Behar, 1993; Dirks, Eley & Ortner, 1994; Goode & Maskovsky, 2001; McLaren, 1999; Moss, 2003; Ortner, 1991, 1994, 1998) and critical ethnography (Carspecken, 1996; Goodall, 2000) contribute to a complex reading of children’s ...