The Case of Children's Literature: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?

Abstract

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children's literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children's books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose's rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children's literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children's texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

Algerian Children’s Literature: From the Labyrinth of Colonialism to the Cornucopia of Postcolonialism

“…The introduction of the notion of colonialism to children's literature is often accredited to the work of Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, in which she referred to the totality of the genre as a manifestation of colonization where adults have colonized children by writing for them and on their behalf (Bradford, 2011). Though the work was and is still highly influential among scholars, Bradford (2011) considers the use of such analogy to be problematic since "by conflating children with colonized peoples, scholars who use this language seem to condone a strategic forgetting of the materiality of colonization, its deleterious effects on the lives and cultures of colonized people, its repercussions in the present" (p 274). Moreover, she (2011) signals out the gravity of such stipulations by contending that "to refer to children's literature as a site of colonization is, then, to mute, to downplay, even to trivialize the effects of colonization on Indigenous peoples" (p 274).…”