Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature (review)

Clare Bradford's newest book is groundbreaking, and its title, Unsettling Narratives, hints at the complexity of the subject matter and its multiple dimensions. At a basic level, the book deals with "settler society texts," a term that denotes children's books emanating from countries with an indigenous population settled by the British, namely Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. In addition, Bradford emphasizes that the stories have too often been told from the point of view of the settlers and that there is a need to unsettle this viewpoint, to move it around. Finally, the texts she considers are themselves unsettling, or troubling, in any number of ways.

Bradford is not the first to consider children's texts from a postcolonial perspective. Numerous articles with postcolonialist readings of individual texts have appeared recently, including those collected in Rod McGillis's Voices of the Other (Garland, 2000). Some scholars, including Bradford herself, have examined numerous texts from a single country, but Bradford is, to my knowledge, the first to apply comparative literature techniques across the board to the children's literature originating in these four countries. What do these literatures have in common in how they represent indigeneity? How do they differ? This book is the next logical step following her 2001 book, Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature, and makes ample use of some of the observations and analyses from that earlier work.

Bradford employs Richard Terdiman's study of counter-discourse and shows how it works in children's texts. She cites examples from each country that reinforce Terdiman's observation that in dominant discourse, it "goes without saying"—that is, certain common assumptions about indigenous culture have until recently remained unquestioned in children's texts, for example, Australia was an empty and uncharted continent before the arrival of Europeans. In addition, she cites examples, harder to find, of counter-discourse at work in children's books, most often present in texts with indigenous authors or co-authors. This counter-discourse can take one of several forms, including a dialectical relationship between the dominant and counter-discourses of the text; defamiliarization, with a well-known event being focalized through an indigenous character; irony, caricature, or outright mockery of a situation; and/or using an indigenous character to voice resistance.

Particularly important is Bradford's distinction between alterity and otherness, which she demonstrates through a description of the Canadian picture book Caribou Song by Tomson Highway. "Pervaded as it is by Cree values and perspectives, [the book] at once constructs difference and enables non-Cree readers to engage with the significances constructed through the narrative" (57). Bradford observes that instead of locating the Cree in relation to the dominant society, the author produces a sense of alterity through his depiction of the Cree worldview. While otherness presumes a hierarchy, alterity does not.

In the United States the outsider/ insider debate has polarized discussions of cultural authenticity in children's texts for over a decade. Bradford is candid about her preference for texts by cultural insiders, based on extensive reading of nonindigenous texts from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. Too many centuries of white privilege stand between nonindigenous writers and their subjects, obscuring their vision. She does an especially good job of pinpointing how indigenous stories become subsumed by European paradigms when told by cultural outsiders, no matter how well-versed the authors may be in the cultures about which they are writing. She points out, for instance, that some of Paul Goble's most highly acclaimed retellings of Lakota narratives draw on sources written by ethnographers who filtered what they heard through their own Eurocentric worldviews. In fact, she asserts—and here she draws on the Canadian writer Thomas King for corroboration—the past as subject matter is virtually lost to the Native writer in North America, having been told so often and so authoritatively by the dominant culture that it is no longer open to...