Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children's Literature

Blanka Grzegorczyk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317962618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book considers how contemporary British children's books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain's imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children's novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity.

Postcolonial children's literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children's fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as complex, hybrid products of colonialism, global migrations, and the ideology of multiculturalism. By examining the ideological content of these novels, Grzegorczyk demonstrates the centrality of the colonial past to contemporary British writing for the young.

1 The Politics of Children's Literature

Children’s fiction is the site in which ideologically ambivalent or contradictory ideas about childhood are articulated and negotiated. Children’s books have often sparked controversies, not the least of which concern the definition and value of the genre or the local and culture-specific nature of each text. Nor can children’s writers escape from the conflicts and political realities of their time, since these will resonate in some way in all reading material for the next generation. Authors such as Nina Bawden, Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Aidan Chambers, Michael Morpurgo or David Almond, to name some of the most successful British authors of the postwar period, write novels whose plots, in Maria Nikolajeva’s terms, “describe situations in which the established power structures are interrogated without necessarily being overthrown” (“Theory” 16). The list includes works that strike a chord in popular consciousness by virtue of their engagement with the reality of Britain’s postcolonial heritage, offering fresh treatments of imperial themes. While Perry Nodelman attributes the subversiveness of such narratives to the characteristic ambivalence of children’s literature (whose defining traits are often antithetical and impossible to reconcile) and its status within the field of literary production, Nikolajeva points to the changing perceptions of age-related power hierarchies that began to be more noticeable in the new world order after 1945. Youth is no longer construed as a time of innocence or stasis followed by gradual change when the agencies and institutions of society exert their influence. Rather, as for Nikolajeva, it is the child or young adult who interrogates adult power and gains insight into social injustice, although later they may conform to existing socio-cultural norms or see that revolt suppressed by adult society (“Theory” 18).

This chapter addresses questions about the immediate social function of the children’s novel, its credentials as a teaching tool in a society that promotes interracial and intercultural harmony, and its ability to assist our comprehension of pressing social issues or to stimulate reflection on socially situated truths as well as to model ideas about the future. More specifically, it considers how children’s books are packaged to meet (and to create) reader expectations, and explores similarities in the way they are perceived by critics, educators and parents to help explain what is peculiar to the children’s novel as a vehicle for adult ambivalence toward childhood. In doing so it seeks to justify the notion, which underpins this book, that children’s fiction is an important means of working with and against dominant ideologies. This in turn involves a repudiation of the long-standing assumptions about children’s literature as an apolitical genre. To facilitate further discussion of the intrinsically political character of children’s fiction, the following section situates writing for children within the larger field of cultural production and in the context of literary and cultural studies at the present time.

In his A Sense of Story: Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children (1971), John Rowe Townsend argues that “[t]he only practical definition of a children’s book today—absurd as it sounds—is ‘a book which appears on the list of a publisher’” (10). Along the same lines, after claiming that “ ‘children’ includes any and all persons who fall between the ages from birth to eighteen,” Roderick McGillis in his The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (1996) goes on to say that children’s literature “includes all books published and marketed for people falling between the ages [. . .] set out above” (viii–ix). Peter Hunt’s article “Criticism and Children’s Literature” (1974) offers an alternative to this idea, with a focus on children’s authors rather than on publishers: “If a book, in the intention of the author, was for children,” writes Hunt, “then it is within our frame of reference” (117). Three decades later, Hunt calls children’s literature “(among many other things) a body of texts (in the widest senses of that word), an academic discipline, an educational and social tool, an international business and a cultural phenomenon” (International xviii). Margaret Meek’s (2004) argument, on the other hand, is that “children’s literature appears not as something which requires definition in order to be recognised or to survive, but as a ‘total text,’ in what Jerome J. McGann calls ‘a network of symbolic exchanges,’ a diverse complexity of themes, rites and images” (2). These approaches share an attempt to find a definition of children’s literature that would encompass all the varying uses of the term, which in effect extends it to a point beyond usefulness, for it becomes too inclusive. Thus defined, the term has been applied to a variety of novels and its use and misuse in literature and criticism has continued to devalue children’s literature even further, creating difficulties for anyone who wants to approach children’s books critically. As a result, scholarly discussions of children’s literature have often begun with defenses of the genre, spurred by what Sandra Beckett in her Introduction to Reflections of Change: Children’s Literature since 1945 (1997) sees as the need to “demonstrate the seriousness and value of [children’s] literature and to justify their own existence” (x). This constant struggle for justification has not only permeated the criticism of children’s fiction but also influenced both the development of the genre and the business of publishing and marketing books for children.

The history and politics of the term have been rehearsed by many scholars, and yet, as Beckett points out, there is surprisingly “less and less consensus about what constitutes a text for children” (x). However, all this fine work would still get us somewhat closer to a definition of children’s literature were it not for the resulting contradictions in the application of the term, which many if not the majority of scholars have found upsetting, even to the point that some recent works have refused to define precisely with what they associate the term. Indeed, we are sometimes told that children’s literature never existed (Rose 1984; Lesnik-Oberstein 1994) or that the problematic term should be reconsidered in the light of the concentrated focus on individual agency in feminist, postcolonial, gender and queer studies (Jones 2006) or in the context of a critical commentary on the connection between childhood and adulthood (Natov 2003). In order to account for the perception of the children’s novel as a form of discourse driven by conflicting impulses, the following section puts the problems inherent in defining children’s literature in the context of the competing claims of different critical approaches, from a focus on the text itself to a consideration of authorial intent and of external pressures and expectations. Rather than present the incredible plethora of definitions of children’s literature, or descriptions of its distinctive characteristics, it offers an investigation of several attempts at defining the children’s novel whose centrality to the study of the ideological work of children’s literature makes an overview of their interrelated assumptions helpful.

The first and most comprehensive of these is Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (2008), not without some foundation called by Hunt “a fundamental, indispensable book for anyone with any pretensions to understanding the ideas surrounding children’s literature” (“Hidden” 190). Of particular relevance is the fact that Nodelman sees the complexity of the relationship between the adult consciousness of the author and the child reader’s perception of the fictional world, that is, described by Nikolajeva as “age-related cognitive discrepancy” (“Theory” 13), as the very essence of the difference of children’s literature:

The simplicity of texts of children’s literature is only half the truth about them. They also possess a shadow, an unconscious—a more complex and complete understanding of the world and people that remains unspoken beyond the simple surface but provides that simple surface with comprehensibility. . . . The unconscious of a text of children’s literature is the adult consciousness that makes its childlikeness meaningful and comprehendible, so children’s literature can be understood as simple literature that communicates by means of reference to a complex repertoire of unspoken but implied adult knowledge.

(206)

His assertion that the adult impulse to govern children and, by extension, children’s literature itself lies at the heart of writing for children is not merely a recognition of the dichotomous nature of the genre which manages at the same time to “celebrate and denigrate both childhood desire and adult knowledge” (181). Rather, it is also an indication that texts for children can be as elaborate as literature for adults, the difference being in the degree and nature of that elaborateness. After all, children’s literature in Nodelman’s terms is “a project whose . . . foundational considerations” create complexities in that it “always tries above all else to be nonadult, and it always, inevitably, fails” (341). The question of childlike and adult knowledge assumes central importance here because it highlights the question of the power structures visible in children’s literature. An emphasis on the adult activity behind the production of texts for children allows Nodelman to expand the more traditional view of children’s literature as a reflection of the status of children and childhood in a given society (Zornado 2000; Natov 2003; Clark 2004), as a way for adult writers to influence children for the children’s good (Hunt 1991), or as an expression of adult writers’ desire for an image of an innocent childhood dating back to Locke, Rousseau and the Romantics (Inglis 1981; Rose 1984; Nikolajeva 2002, 2010). This emphasis may also facilitate a consideration of how adult assumptions about and constructions of childhood might account for the characteristic markers of children’s literature as a genre.

Calling children’s literature a “genre” brings with it the articulation of a particular cultural and critical practice. And children’s literature is a genre, in Nodelman’s opinion. Having defined it as “the literature published specifically for audiences of children and therefore produced in terms of adult ideas about children,” he goes on to place it in its field (242). His definition of “field” here follows Pierre Bourdieu’s essays from The Field of Cultural Production (1993); it is “an area of human interaction,” and thus “books for children . . . are sociological phenomena that can be accounted for in terms of [the] operational characteristics and structural principles they share with other social activities” (Nodelman 117). The contention that the characteristic generic markers of children’s literature are shaped by many forces that operate simultaneously, from the history of literary production to the nature of the economy and the marketplace, resonates well with similar ideas expounded in works such as Jack Zipes’s more recent books, notably Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling (2009). It would seem that the ability to make a clear distinction between “genre” and “field” might well be what has allowed Nodelman to appeal to multiple audiences: those who perceive children’s literature as a single genre, and those who see it as a coherent subset of some greater whole, or, as does Peter Hunt, those who recognize the vast body of children’s literature as a mode. An important consequence for the criticism of children’s literature ensues if Nodelman’s claims are accepted, and that is the recognition that any talk about the nature and purposes of literature for children implies the use of generic categories, even if these are not named as such but are implied through their formal qualities. That recognition, I want to argue, is crucial to the definition of children’s literature. However, I would not want this to serve as a basis for a definition of children’s literature as a genre, unless it be in terms of a rather different notion of genre than the one that passed into literary criticism with Aristotle’s Poetics, namely as Stephen Heath’s “ representative, typical codifications of discursive properties corresponding to typical situations of communication and with typical conceptions of who is being addressed” (169). Genres thus become “socio-historical operations of language by speakers and listeners, writers and readers: orders of discourse that change, shift, travel, lose force, come and go over time and cultures” (168–169). Such an overt imbrication of genres in the social and the historical is, after all, one of the central concerns of recent work in the criticism of children’s literature.

Successive critics of the children’s novel have been less certain of its political and ideological underpinnings. Three assumptions have remained more or less constant in the popular perception of children’s literature (a perception that academic theorizing about children’s fiction has often reinforced): that it is unsophisticated and creatively dependent, that it has an innately conservative effect on the child audience and that it is too childish for adults to consider seriously. My aim is to problematize these assumptions in a way that underscores children’s literature’s ability to participate in the making of cultural and political history. Perhaps the most basic of these assumptions concerns the genre’s childlike simplicity and incapacity for experimentation or innovation. C. S. Lewis wrote that he was attracted to writing children’s books because “[t]his form permits, or compels, one to leave out things I wanted to leave out. It compels one to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind but discerning critic called ‘the expository demon’ in me” (236). As Nikolajeva points out, “One of the strongest conventions of children’s fiction is the absence of all the prominent aspects of human (i.e. adult) civilization, including law, money, and labor. . . . Children, real as well as fictional, are supposed to grow up unaware of and unrestricted by these tokens of adulthood” ( Rhetoric 205). Nodelman offers us one possible explanation for the exclusionary potential of texts for children: children’s literature is a literature of sublimation. The seeming simplicity of books written for children is deceptive; in reality, they are “so full of absence that it is possible to imagine an entire range of shadow texts to be resident in their unconscious” (200). This assertion rests on a view of children’s writing similar to that of Lucy Rollin and Mark West (1999), or of Karen Coats (2004), for whom the genre’s apparent simplicity invites a more deconstructive reading, a recognition of what has been left out.

The contradictions that accompany the criticism of children’s literature thus indicate the complexity of the children’s writer’s position as an adult trying to empower child characters and readers, yet bound to rehearse a certain complicity with the suppression of their dissident energies. The children’s nov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Politics of Children's Literature
• 2 The Empire Within: Migrant and Post-Migrant Coming-of-Age Novels
• 3 Rewriting Colonial Histories in Historical Fictions for the Young: From Below and Above
• 4 "Empires of the Mind": Intersections of Children's Fantasy and Postcolonialism
• 5 The (Post) Colonial Exotic: Representing the Other in Adventure Stories for the Young
• Conclusion
• Index