Katharine Capshaw Smith
In The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), Carter G. Woodson asserts that "there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom" (2). By suggesting the formative influence of children's culture on social relations, Woodson highlights an idea that courses through the body of ethnic American children's literature. Whether writing in the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first centuries, authors infuse texts with the hope that through childhood, that potent period in an individual's development, sensibilities can be transformed. Children's literature allows readers a means to reconceptualize their relationship to ethnic and national identities. Telling stories to a young audience becomes the conduit for social and political revolution.
For some readers of MELUS, this volume may be their first introduction to the vital field of ethnic children's literature. Most interesting for scholars will be the field's special contextual and theoretical issues. A primary factor that distinguishes ethnic children's literature from adult literature is its complexly layered audience, for children's literature reaches various adult mediators as well as child readers. Publishers, librarians, schoolteachers, and parents read and evaluate children's texts in anticipation of a young audience, which is also multiply constituted. Ethnic children's literature becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest, for various groups of adults struggle over which versions of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in school, home, and library settings; groups and individuals often advance specific reading and purchasing guidelines.
Extending the tiers of adult mediation are the multiple prizes and awards which help shape marketplace demand and expectations for ethnic children's literature. (1) In addition to the Caldecott and Newbery Awards, prizes specific to ethnic texts are becoming determinative, including the Pura Belpre Award given by the American Library Association (ALA), the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature sponsored by the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP), the ALA's Coretta Scott King Award, the Wordcraft Circle Award, the Carter G. Woodson Book Award, and the Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award, among others.
Institutions in their various forms--parents' groups, school systems, library associations, publishers--are powerful forces shaping the contours and content of ethnic children's texts. Julia Mickenberg's essay and the interviews here with Christopher Paul Curtis and Nicolas Kanellos acknowledge the complex ideological exchanges that preface the publication of any ethnic children's text. Because works often narrate and explain details of a traumatic past, like the internment of Japanese Americans or the enslavement of African Americans, to an audience innocent of historical knowledge, the stakes are high: adult mediators recognize the gravity of their role as gatekeepers to history and arbiters of ethnic identity. Scholars of ethnic literature will therefore find much complexity in the ways writers construct history and negotiate the demands of various audiences.
In addition to adult mediators and young readers, ethnic children's literature is often targeted both to insider and outsider groups. If part of its agenda is didactic in advancing revivified versions of history and identity, texts often consciously address both the ethnic child reader and those in other populations. For children of the ethnicity represented textually, authors encourage resistance to pejorative categorizations by asking the reader to reimagine herself, to identify herself with the texts' cultural models. For a reader from another ethnic group, texts often encourage cross-cultural amity and understanding as a means to dispel prejudice. Early children's literature (perhaps because of the features of the marketplace) appears even more sensitive to the presence of a non-ethnic child audience and seems deeply invested in realignments of social power and in responding to ethnic stereotypes, as Tony Dykema-VanderArk's essay reminds us. Reversals of power have always had special force in works for children. For many ethnic children's texts of any era, the presence of a white audience is palpable. Writers imagine the fact of a multiple audience as an opportunity to change the minds of adults and children, of both insiders and outsiders. To speak to children particularly reflects their special position as readers within the terrain of ethnic literature, for writers assert that children are open to the rewards of the imagination in ways that adults may not be.
While MELUS readers will recognize Charles Eastman, Sui Sin Far, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, many of the authors examined in this volume belong to artistic communities somewhat hidden from view. Even major children's writers like Laurence Yep, Virginia Hamilton, and Christopher Paul Curtis may be unfamiliar to some MELUS readers. But because the field shares many qualities with adult ethnic writing, MELUS readers may recognize moments of exchange between the concerns of adult literature and those of children's texts. Many of the major writers we associate with the ethnic experience in America--Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Frank Chin, and Louise Erdrich, among others--have written texts intended for children or appropriated by young readers. Reconsidering our major writers as children's authors changes our sense of the breath of their readership and enhances our understanding of writers' complicated aesthetic and political purposes. Layers of meaning and a recognition of polyvocalism emerge from considering the poems of, say, Langston Hughes as "crosswritten" for both a child and adult audience.
Certainly there is much thematic crossover between adult and child ethnic literature: issues of identity, assimilation, nationalism, and cultural pluralism permeate both genres. Children's texts manipulate perception and language, rendering whiteness as an ethnicity and playing with constructions of cultures as "other," as Leona Fisher argues about Laurence Yep in our volume. Theoretically, however, issues fundamental to ethnic studies take on a different cast when examined through the lens of children's literature. Identity formation takes center stage, as Rocio G. Davis indicates, in fictional and non-fictional autobiography, coming of age stories, and the bildungsroman since such forms emphasize childhood and child protagonists. Artists often rewrite their childhoods or narrate their contact with their own children, which establishes a kind of reciprocal relationship with the child reader who is both audience and a form of inspiration, a cycle which might not occur in adult literature. Themes common to adult texts, like the relationship of the individual to collective identities of family, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, are brought into relief by children's writers who often unravel the child character's hybrid cultural position. Just as adult ethnic writing incorporates oral traditions and folklore, children's texts also frequently spotlight orality, but they also exploit issues of language acquisition since their subjects and readers are consciously grappling with the gap between oral child culture and learning written languages. Through play and experimentation, children's texts foreground the possibilities of linguistic hybridity, bilingualism, and biculturalism. Additionally, examination of children's literature highlights the thread of inter-generational storytelling that runs through the fabric of many ethnic texts and traditions. In our volume, Jarasa Kanok and Nina Mikkelsen discuss related themes regarding the oral tradition and language.
Although debates about legitimacy often undergird discussions of adult ethnic texts, authenticity becomes a particularly potent issue for children's literature because of the didactic imperatives both embedded in the texts and imposed contextually by adult arbiters. Since narrative can influence political realities, those adults who purchase and distribute children's texts recognize their responsibility to offer "true" depictions of ethnic experience, particularly when these books are endorsed by institutional structures. Likewise, authors writing to children realize that their texts can influence a child's socialization, and so work consciously to respond to prejudiced narratives of ethnicity through signification, allusion, and confrontation. Texts recoup lost heroes, fill the gaps of historical memory, subvert ethnic stereotypes, and advance revisionary versions of cultural identity. Children's texts are often intensely dialogic: they interact with biased versions of the past that have previously been fortified within the classroom setting. In our volume, issues of authenticity permeate nearly all of the critical articles, but are especially important to Michelle Pagni Stewart.
If adult mediators often advance specific texts as the "true" versions of ethnic American identity, authors contend with both their desire to represent ethnicity accurately and their awareness that the pressure for authenticity often delimits the multiple and fluid nature of lived cultural experience. If some adults find it convenient to imagine cultural identity hermetically, so that their students or children can gather knowledge about their own culture or outside cultures, writers often resist easy compartmentalization of ethnicity by revealing the permeable boundaries of ethnic communities. Flux often characterizes ethnic identity in children's texts, for child characters face the junctures of cultural contact, generational tensions, and evolving senses of history. The "authentic" ethnic experience becomes associated with fluidity, for few writers describe their culture outside a historical moment of change. In this way, writers are able to react against essentialization and the "othering" of ethnic experience, for identity is relational and emerges in moments of cultural interaction. In our volume, the interview with Naomi Shihab Nye and Martha Cutter's essay explore issues of fluid ethnic identity.
Many ethnic children's texts also refuse to "fix" their stories within a single genre or mode. Aware of the various cultural influences that create identity, texts combine folklore, oral histories, songs, school knowledge, memories, and family stories, moving seamlessly through various strategies and narratives. In this way, texts imagine a sophisticated and multiply literate ethnic child reader, one who can speak the language of the schoolhouse as well as the language of the folk, one who can negotiate the traditions of family life as well as the demands of school institutions, as Katharine Rodier notes within our volume. Importantly, depicting such a range of knowledge and experience underscores the fluidity of the ethnic child's identity as well as the child's ability to traverse boundaries imaginatively.
An awareness of ethnic children's literature may open up our approaches to studying and teaching adult texts, for children's literature enriches our knowledge of the vast artistic achievement of ethnic writers in America. We cannot tell the story of ethnic American writing without the voice of children's literature. Additionally, recognizing the intersections between the two genres can be an important development in resisting the compartmentalization of children's literary studies, and ethnic children's literature in particular. As a discipline, children's literature continually combats marginalization within the academy. Ethnic scholars, who have waged similar battles on behalf of their own fields, can seize the opportunity to position ethnic children's literature at the center of academic study rather than on the periphery.
Notes
(1.) Groundbreaking texts include Larrick; Hirschfelder; Johnson-Feeling; MacCann; Slapin and Seale; Gregory; Thompson.
Works Cited
Gregory, Lucille H. "The Puerto Rican `Rainbow': Distortions vs. Complexities." The Children's Literature Association Quarterly 18.1 (1993): 29-35.
Hirschfelder, Arlene B. American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1982.
Johnson-Feelings, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African-American Literature for Youth. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
Larrick, Nancy. "The All-White World of Children's Books." Saturday Review 48 (11 September 1965): 63-65, 84-85. Rpt. in The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism. Ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard. Metuchen: Scarecrow P, 1972. 156-68.
MacCann, Donnarae. "Multicultural Books and Interdisciplinary Inquiries." The Lion and the Unicorn 16.1 (1992): 43-56.
--. White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction. Urbana IL: NCTE, 1982.
Slapin, Beverly and Dora Seale. Through Indian Eyes: Native Experience in Books for Children. Philadelphia: New Society, 1992.
Thompson, Melissa Kay. "A Sea of Good Intentions: Native Americans in Books for Children." The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 353-74.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-Education of the Negro. 1933. Nashville: Winston-Derek, 1990.
Katharine Capshaw Smith is writing a book on children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance. She teaches African American literature, ethnic American literature, and children's literature at Florida International University in Miami.
COPYRIGHT 2002 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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