it was a work of post-colonial theory, Colonial Encounters by Peter Hulme, that spurred
her to write the novel. But there are changes, as children’s literature increasingly
includes the images and voices of people of colour. I’m thinking especially of writers for
children like John Agard, Grace Nichols, James Berry and Joy Kogawa who probe at the
ways patriarchal powers have screwed up, how they’ve ruined the environment in favour
of profit, and how they locked-up people designated as ‘other’ on the grounds that if they
were foreign they were dangerous.
The unpicking of the child/primitive trope is also the subject of academic study.
Stephen Slemon and Jo-Ann Wallace, professors at the University of Alberta in Canada
taught a graduate course together called, ‘Literatures of the child and the colonial
subject: 1850–1914’. In an article they wrote together about their experience ‘Into the
heart of darkness? Teaching children’s literature as a problem in theory’ (1991), they
discuss their struggle with the construction of the child in pedagogical and institutional
terms. They write about the child who, like the ‘primitive’ is treated, ‘as a subject-in-
formation, an individual who often does not have full legal status and who therefore acts
or who is acted against in ways that are not perceived to be fully consequential’ (20).
Post-colonial discourse illuminates ways in which authority over the ‘other’ is achieved
in the name of protecting innocence. The ideological assumption is that primitives and
children are too naïve (or stupid) to look after themselves so need protecting—like rain-
forests.
The critical lessons in feminist/post-colonial theory increasingly have to do with
ideology and with constructions of the subject. That’s quite different from what used to
be the common feature of children’s literature and children’s literature criticism—the
notion of the identity quest, with its attendant assumption that there was such a thing
as a stable identity. Instead, contemporary critical emphasis is on the ways we are
constructed by the socialising forces pressuring us in all aspects of our lives:
relationships with parents and families, class, gender and cultural patterns and
expectations.
The implications for the unpicking of the child/primitive trope are part of something
provoking a new crisis of definition in children’s literature and children’s literature
criticism and teaching. While children’s literature is predicated on the notion that
children are essentially blank or naïve and in need of protection and instruction, then
issues of suitability or unsuitability are important. But as children become differently
constructed in the light of feminist and post-colonial theory, so does children’s literature.
Distinctions between them and us no longer become categorising features and
suitability recedes as an issue.
The effects of this ideological shift begin to become apparent in criticism and in texts.
Critics who work in feminist theory, post-colonial studies and children’s literature all
find themselves interested in common grounds: in the dynamics of power, in ideology, in
the construction of the subject. And authors produce texts in which child/adult
categories are no longer the significant ones. Jane Gardam’s books, for example, appear
in Abacus editions that don’t make adult/child distinctions. And Angela Carter’s Virago
fairy tales are catalogued in the library not with children’s literature or women’s
literature—but as anthropology.
106 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES