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The case of children's literature : colonial or anti-colonial?

Bradford, Clare 2011, The case of children's literature : colonial or anti-colonial?, Global Studies of Childhood, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 271-279.


Title The case of children's literature : colonial or anti-colonial?
Author(s) Bradford, Clare
Journal name Global Studies of Childhood
Volume number 1
Issue number 4
Start page 271
End page 279
Total pages 9
Publisher Symposium Journals
Place of publication Oxford, U.K.
Publication date 2011
ISSN 2043-6106
Summary 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.
Language eng
Field of Research 200508 Other Literatures in English
Socio Economic Objective 950203 Languages and Literature
HERDC Research category C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal
HERDC collection year 2011
Persistent URL http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30045293

Document type: Journal Article
Collection: School of Communication and Creative Arts
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