Nomadic Criticism

Honored by the IRSCL Book Award in 2009, Jean Perrot's Mondialisation et littérature de jeunesse ("Globalization and Youth Literature") extends a well-known French tradition of the literary grand tour. One of the first such tours was Xavier de Maistre's satiric Voyage autour de ma chambre ("A Journey Round My Room" [1794]), in which the chamber serves as an imaginatively resistant reading space: as the author travels through his room, he writes; he rarely follows a straight line. He describes the cost of such peregrinations as low; in fact, he wrote while in prison, and he recommends the benefit of an imagination liberated through texts to rich and poor, old and young—the entire family of men. Half a century later, following a spate of individualist French robinsonnades, G. Bruno (Augustine Fouillée, née Tuillerie) applied the concept of the tour for children to the national horizon. Her Tour de la France par deux enfants ("Tour of France by Two Children" [1877]) mapped a republican space through the travels of two Alsatian boys on the road, who were searching for their family; it became a school classic that sold seven million copies by 1914. Following the French territorial losses in 1871, this adventure story imagined a reconstituted French whole, in which children would become citizens of the future.

Now, in Mondialisation, Perrot offers us a richly comparative exploration of a globalized literary marketplace with international publishers, multicultural themes encouraged by educational institutions, and a potential new readership of polyglot and creolized children. Moving beyond a national children's literature, he has progressed to international and transnational literatures that must wrestle with the commodification of children themselves. While big topics such as the expansion of social or cultural horizons and the rights of the child draw Perrot's attention, the book also wanders around the globe gathering and analyzing diverse recent publications from Mongolia, India, Japan, Alaska, and New Zealand. Part of the cultural work Perrot's book performs is to call attention to important translation series within the French marketplace, such as the rich list of Japanese books published by Ecole des loisirs or Seuil; such internationalist publishers bring a lively array of fiction and picturebooks home for French consumption. At the same time, he singles out recent French books that focus realistically on immigrants or other groups marginalized in France, such as the homeless, as well as those that borrow their aesthetic from cultures of the Third World.

Like one of Sendak's jolly Wild Things, Perrot insatiably devours new texts and new media, and encourages us to embrace a similar cannibalism of readerly love. From the start, he emphasizes the problem that the banquet Western children encounter at the bookstore or in the media is a product of a consumer society. Children must therefore learn to transform texts into vehicles of exploration instead of merely fast-food fun to be gobbled by intellectual couch potatoes. They must become smart consumers, "writerly" and actively open readers rather than merely "readerly" decoders with short attention spans, trained by quick responses to games played with only the thumbs, not the whole hand or the brain. Citing Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of modern mobility, accompanied by a dissolution of values and thirst for immediate satisfaction, Perrot brings a particular passion to the discovery of texts that celebrate respect for the individual and that portray traditional cultures such as those of the Pacific Island Kanak or Indian Dalit tribals, whose survival is at risk. While France often has been accused of racism in its failure to integrate the children of immigrants, Perrot here responds by reading with care works about minority cultures not only in France but around the world. Some of the French authors whose pages he opens up for us encourage readers to become interested in homelessness, the diseases such as AIDS endemic in ghettos and orphanages, girls' desire for an education, or the disappearance of the languages of a group's elders. It is no surprise that one of the...