Insiders, Outsiders, and the Question of Authenticity: Who Shall Write for African American Children?

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. "Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false impressions. Stick to Bath & the Foresters. There you will be quite at home." (Jane Austen [from a letter to Austen's niece, who had sent her the manuscript of a novel], qtd. in Mercer 307)This romance was sketched out during a residence of considerable length in Italy, and has been rewritten and prepared for the press in England. The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character. He has lived too long abroad not to be aware that a foreigner seldom acquires that knowledge of a country, at once flexible and profound, which may justify him in endeavoring to idealize its traits. Italy, as the site of his romance, was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct .... (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The Marble Faun vi) My themes are universal. And because the black people are the people I know, and the part of the group that I am, that is my center, so to speak, so my characters are black. Most of the time ... . But it's very difficult when you're a black writer to write outside of the black experience. People don't allow it; critics won't allow it. If I would do a book that didn't have blacks, people would say, "Oh, what is Virginia Hamilton doing?" Yet a white writer can write about anything. (Virginia Hamilton, qtd. in Rochman 1021)This is a popular Japanese folktale and tells the story of a devoted pair of wild ducks. The illustrations in this beautiful book are subtle and suggestive but also an education in the dress, hairstyles, hierarchical levels of society, homes, customs and, not least, in eighteenth-century Japanese art. (I have been told that there are "inaccuracies" in the representations; the cummerbunds of the ladies are the wrong width and the upper-class ladies sport the hair styles of courtesans. And the Japanese never wear shoes in the house. This doesn't lessen my bonding with this book and, indeed, makes me want to find out more.) (Judith Graham [commenting on The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks, retold by Katherine Paterson and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon] 24) O ne central concern of scholars, literary historians, and critics these days is the matter of authenticity, especially the authenticity of cross-cultural and multicultural stories, and the ensuing conflict or question, Who will produce the literature of parallel cu...

“But This Story of Mine Is Not Unique”: A Review of Research on African American Children’s Literature

“…It is because of these kinds of culturally unauthentic representations that there are frequent debates in regard to how African American children's literature should be defined. In academic circles, there have been numerous articles (Aronson, 1995;Lasky, 1995;Mikkelsen, 1998;Seto, 1995) and even a book (Fox & Short, 2003) devoted to this topic often described as "the right to write" or the "insider/outsider debate." African Americans are indeed Americans and so there are shared experiences among them and Whites, for example.…”

Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults

“…Educators believe that the authentic literature or books include only those written by a member of an ethnic group about that ethnic group, its cultural traditions, and its people, whereas authority refers to the role of authors who represent multicultural literacy or have control of the plot and characters in writing authentic literature (Aoki 1992;Mikkelsen 1998).…”

“The Blues Playingest Dog You Ever Heard Of”: (Re)positioning Literacy Through African American Blues Rhetoric

“…Since the Civil Rights era, literary artists such as Myers, Virginia Hamilton, John Steptoe, Eloise Greenfield, Patricia and Fredrick McKissack, and Lucille Clifton have crafted narratives of history and identity, using African American rhetorics. AAL is not used merely for dialogue but as the very structure and theme of folklore, identity, cultural politics, and history (Hamilton, 1981;Mikkelsen, 1998;Moss, 1985;Trites, 1998). Thus, the "linguistic, musical, folkloric, and religious practices of common African Americans" (Gilyard, 2004, pp.…”