Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002 (review)

Literary criticism about African-American literature reflects certain traditions. One tradition entails the emergence of young scholars who offer provocative ideas that contradict some prevailing beliefs about the literature, its creators, publishers, and audience. Famously, some writers and artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bruce Nugent, for example, announced their rejection of the conservative cultural aesthetics of their elders, principally W. E. B. DuBois and Charles Johnson (editors of The Crisis Magazine and Opportunity, respectively) who fought against Sambo-like imagery in art, music, and literature in low and highbrow manifestations. The younger artists voiced a desire to bring into existence a "new Negro," hoping to depict the Negro in all of his/her complexity. Variations of this tradition are evident throughout the twentieth century. Literary debates in the 1960s and 1970s centered on the Black Arts Movement and those in the 1980s and 1990s pitted advocates of cultural critiques against those who supported postmodernist theories as seen in the articles published by Henry L. Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, and Joyce A. Joyce in New Literary History. Some comparable debates are evident in children's literature, for instance, Exploring Culturally Diverse Literature for Children and Adolescents (Henderson and May, 2005) and Stories Matter (Fox and Short, 2003).

Michelle Martin contributes to this tradition with a, perhaps deliberately, provocative volume that argues, among other things, that African-American children's picture books really emerged with Heinrich Hoffman's tale, "The Story of the Inky Boys" in Struwwelpeter and Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo. I can appreciate intellectual ideas that transgress and interrogate selective traditions, ideas, and beliefs; however, I also value documented research and arguments that delineate the social and cultural milieu that shaped the traditions, ideas, and beliefs being challenged as well as documentation of the same for oppositional ideas and beliefs. Martin is provocative and succeeds in offering some new ideas, but she is not entirely convincing in her support for her more controversial pronouncements.

In the introduction to Brown Gold, Martin identifies her major theses, and the text itself contains three sections with nine chapters, divided into notes and a bibliography. Section one presents an overview of the history of African-American children's picture books. The focus of section two is the professional evolution of African-American children's picture books. The last section identifies some of the criticism and pedagogy associated with African-American children's picture books.

Martin, in her first chapter boldly asserts that the beginning of African-American children's picture books can be traced to a story not written by an African American nor that is indeed even an American story: namely Hoffman's "The Story of the Inky Boys," is the beginning of African-American children's picture books. Now Martin acknowledges that some materials, principally antislavery tracts, depicted African Americans in a humane fashion but she does not consider antislavery tracts a part of African-American children's literature. Similarly, Martin argues that The Story of Little Black Sambo is one of the first examples of children's literature that depicts Black characters as intelligent, with a sense of agency, and human. Related to these assertions is the belief that many books, especially those written by well-intentioned Whites, can be considered African-American children's literature. This is bound to be a controversial point of view.

I assert that one can identify African-American children's literature as literature created by African Americans (individuals of African descent). Further, I would argue that those who are not of African descent and who create works that feature African Americans do not create African-American literature in the way that Wole Soyinka would not be considered a Russian writer simply because he includes a Russian character in a novel set in Nigeria. Of course, terminology is further complicated by biracial authors and illustrators who must self-identify in a manner...