The Sturdy Fabric of Cultural Imperialism: Tracing Its Patterns in Contemporary Children's Novels

[T]he "afterlife" of colonial discourse is very different for the colonizer and for the colonized.

—Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani

[T]he recognition of empire's determinate place within modern western culture . . . invites the appraisal of our own times as still implicated in the worlds imperialism made.

—Keith Ansell-Pearson, et al.

Protest movements are born to confront trauma.¹ The Black Power movement is a case in point, an organized challenge to internal colonization.² This movement recognized multiple centers of power, but defied the white power structure for its monolithic and exploitive character regarding matters of race (Carmichael and Hamilton 7). In a similar way, Africans have formed liberation movements in response to the traumas of slavery, the Middle Passage, and imperial oppression. In short, Blacks are hardly newcomers in analyzing and opposing traumatic experiences. The same applies to Native American, Asian, and Latino/Latina groups—populations seriously victimized by conquests, land thefts, slavery, forced migration, and cultural denigration. Moreover, children have often been key players in such struggles—pivotal in their inspirational role and sometimes important in the frontlines, as in the overthrow of apartheid.³

Ironically, in children's literature the battle against imperialist influence has not been won, since many children's books still function as instruments of a colonial mentality. In fact, children's literature has a special connection with imperialist policies, since the ideal imperial strategy is to impel the young to colonize and marginalize themselves. To some degree, children are not intellectually autonomous and can be led to embrace prejudice against their own identity. Psychologist Kenneth Clark says it this way: "children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve no more respect from the larger society than they receive. These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self-and group-hatred. . . ." (63). Children's literature is one means of sending these messages of rejection, underscoring the role of the writer in society's perpetuation of itself. Accordingly, novelist Toni Morrison makes a connection between writers and social responsibility:

Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and the mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. . . . How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art.

(xiii)

Colonialist children's books are agents of art that help produce a colonial-based socialization. Colonialism operates to dehumanize, and the power of imperialist discourse only makes this condition more intractable. Authors, publishers, critics, and educators have all had roles on this imperialist stage, moving a culturally hegemonic literature through the schools and channels of entertainment. Complicating this dynamic is the way "the readers of all American fiction," as Morrison notes, "have been positioned as white," regardless of the actual race of the author (xii). The most grotesque extremes in colonialist literature may be partially explained by this construction of a white-only audience and the effect it may have on the literary imagination. At the end of the day, this complex mix points to unfinished tasks in literary scholarship. At this juncture, trauma study programs have not taken sufficient account of the wounds inflicted by imperialism. Researchers are not keeping abreast of the latest colonialist children's books,⁴ and there is a need for historically-informed methods in critical literary practice, a topic I will address later.

Admittedly, these matters have social/political as well as aesthetic dimensions. In the novels featured here, racism and colonialism can be seen in partnership, as when racist laws underpin the movement of Native Americans farther and farther from their homelands in the Ohio Valley⁵ —a resettlement program played out in Ann Rinaldi's The Second Bend in the River (1997). Race-based segregation is an issue in Anton Ferreira's Zulu Dog (2002), in which post-apartheid whites still conceptualize their existence as either separate from Blacks or within apartheid's master/servant relationship. In Julia Holland...