1908 by the Government of the Netherlands East Indies [when Indonesia was a
Dutch colony]. Sunindyo 1987:44–45Japanese critic Tadashi Matsui notes that in 1920s Japan the growth of ‘large cities with
dense populations generated the birth of a middle class...among [whom] the ideas of
European liberalism, the urban mode of living, free mass education and a modern
concept of the child were being fostered’ (Matsui 1986– 1987:14). Birgit Dankert, when
noting the background to the development of children’s literature in Africa, draws
attention to another aspect of response to Western influences:
In addition to many other cultural ‘achievements’, the former colonial powers also
introduced children’s books to Africa. These cultural imports elicited then (and
elicit still today) the same ambivalent mixture of respect and rejection which
characterises African reactions to so many other borrowings from former colonial
powers... If arguments in favor of children’s books are brought up, then they
resemble those of the early years of European children’s literature: that children’s
books should educate, that they should preserve folk culture, that they should help
guarantee Africa’s transition to a culture of the written word, that they should
support African cultural identity.
Hunt 1992:112The disparities between the various definitions of ‘children’s literature’, ‘children’, and
‘literature’, are problematic to children’s literature criticism because they undermine the
goal it sets itself. In this situation, children’s literature criticism’s prescriptions or
suggestions of reading for children become problematic, with critics attempting in
different ways to assert the validity of their particular views. Important social issues,
such as racism, have led critics with the same anti-racist orientation to differ utterly in
their judgement of a book. For instance, British critic Bob Dixon praises Paula Fox’s The
Slave Dancer (1973) as being ‘a novel of great horror and as great humanity...
[approaching] perfection as a work of art’ (Dixon 1977:125), while American views have
included Sharon Bell Mathis’s: ‘an insult to black children’ (Mathis 1977:146), and
Binnie Tate’s claim that it ‘perpetuates racism...[with] constantly repeated racist
implications and negative illusions [sic]’ (Tate 1977:152–153). The assumption that
children’s books somehow affect children makes the issues crucial: does, or can, The
Slave Dancer perpetuate racism or does it counteract it (or does it do other things
altogether)? In each case children’s literature critics inevitably ultimately resort to one
basic claim: that they know more about children or the child and how and why it reads
than the critics they disagree with.
In examining various attempts to define ‘children’s literature’ we find a constant
assumption of the existence of the (reading) child (that is: the assumption that there is
such a thing as a unified, consistent, ‘objective’ ‘child reader’) together with the capacity
for knowing it that each critic claims for himor herself. This holds true for all children’s
literature critics, even if they claim to be ‘literary’ critics of children’s books, because the
‘literary’ is defined in terms of how the book is supposed to affect the ‘child’. Examining
the processes of defining ‘children’s literature’ and the ‘child’ which is essential to its
20 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES