Making Visible the Invisible Ideologies of Race

Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature, by Clare Bradford. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2001.

Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985–1995, by Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Amadu Maddy. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Those interested in ethnic as well as international literature will find both Clare Bradford's Reading Race (winner of the 2003 Children's Literature Association Book Award) and Donnarae MacCann and Yulisa Amada Maddy's Apartheid and Racism worth reading. Although obviously focused on the children's literature of different locations, Bradford and MacCann and Maddy find common ground in discussing the way the literature of Australia and South Africa, respectively, impacts young readers—particularly from the respective countries— and imparts problematic, often stereotypical depictions of Australian Aboriginal and South African Black peoples.

Bradford begins by indicating her intention of interrogating the "invisible" ideologies that affect child readers, often inculcating racist beliefs despite their being disguised in seemingly neutral or even positive literature. Bradford's study covers the history of Australian children's literature—in particular the illustrations and language found in school texts required from 1900 to 1960; religious discourses of predominantly late twentieth-century texts; the intersection of gender and race; oral Aboriginal stories reproduced as written texts; contemporary dilemmas; the use of indigenous language(s) to represent Aboriginal culture; and cross-cultural stories consisting of retellings of traditional stories directed to a mixed audience, autobiographies, and historical and biographical narratives. The final chapter has at its base a worthwhile concept in which Bradford seeks to analyze Australian texts alongside texts from other former British settler colonies, such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Yet the connection she sees between the various texts in this chapter is not clear.

Bradford has an impressive knowledge of Australian children's literature in various genres and from various time periods. A reader interested in exploring Australian children's literature will find many titles with which to begin such a study in Reading Race. Yet Bradford goes beyond a simple listing of what exists in the way of Australian children's literature, as she queries the texts, exploring the subtle yet pervasive racist mindset that underlies much of the literature available for children in Australia. She argues that even though some of the dated texts may represent a mindset of a particular period in time, we must still question the way these texts encode a vision of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. She analyzes more than the language, recognizing that simply cleaning up offensive language will not eliminate the structure and semantics that continue to emphasize a colonial mindset.

The chapter on gender and race, "Intersecting Discourses: Gender and Race in Children's Books," is fascinating, in part because of the similarities to discussions of African American and white conflicts in the United States. Much in the way the fear of miscegenation and the sexuality of the African American drove racist mindsets in the United States in the nineteenth century, so do white Australians see Aboriginal sexuality as a threat to the white culture. Bradford contrasts the more typical descriptions of white boys (adventurous, aspiring to marriage) to those of aboriginal boys (desexualized or infantilized). She also discusses the way texts authored by women treat race and gender compared to those authored by men.

In the chapter titled "Indigenous Voices in Children's Literature," Bradford begins by discussing the "ownership" of stories, introducing the conflict of an outsider telling an Aboriginal story. This chapter demonstrates how conflicts of indigenous literature in Australia parallel those of ethnic Americans in the United States: capturing another language while writing in the dominant culture's language; maintaining a sense of orality in a written text; and determining whether a dominant culture's mindset is implicitly affecting the way a story is retold. Bradford also has a very interesting discussion of Aboriginal dialect and grammar, and how it has been misrepresented by the critics, in the chapter titled "White...