Voices of the Other Children's Literature and the Postcolonial Context [Hardcover]

This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of otherness and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. The second section presents discussions of the colonialist mindset in children's and young-adult texts from the turn of the century. Here, works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S., and Britain; works of early Australian colonialist literature; and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section Three deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content, and includes studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

General Editors Forward Preface Contributors Introduction Roderick McGillis Section I: Theory1. Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as an Unfinished Project Shaobo Xie2. We are the world, we are the children : The Semiotics of Seduction in International Childrens Relief Efforts Nancy Ellen Batty3. The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Childrens Literature Peter Hunt and Karen Sands4. Continuity, Fissure, or Dysfunction: From Settler Society to Multicultural Society in Australian Fiction John Stephens5. Text, Culture, and Postcolonial Childrens Literature: A ComparatilSv