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Notes to chapter 8 on pages 248–50. 199 8 Allegories of Place and Race Within postcolonial literary studies, allegory has generally been regarded as a key form of counter-discourse, a strategy by which colonialist versions of history and dominant modes of representation are contested and resisted. Stephen Slemon was one of the first theorists to recognize the power of postcolonial allegory, observing that, within postcolonial literatures, “Allegory becomes a site upon which post-colonial cultures seek to contest and subvert colonialist appropriation through the production of a literary, and specifically anti-imperialist, figurative opposition or textual counter-discourse.”1 Bill Ashcroft points out that “fundamentally, all historical writing is allegorical” because “narrativity reproduces, metonymically, the teleological progression of the history it ‘records.’”2 Postcolonial allegory is, then, a particularly potent mode of historical revision, since it lays bare the tropes, figures, and teleologies on which dominant versions of history are built. In this chapter I discuss children’s texts that treat historical and contemporary sociopolitical processes and outcomes by way of metaphor and allegory . These texts are, however, not all equally counter-discursive. Rather, their treatments of colonial and postcolonial issues track a continuum between militant, open, and critical approaches, and those whose figurative effects fold into the dominant representational practices of colonialism. The most openly and self-consciously allegorical works for children, Thomas King and William Kent Monkman’s A Coyote Columbus Story and Gavin Bishop’s The House That Jack Built, are picture books by Indigenous authors and artists, a fact that suggests that the dialogical form of the picture Hello, says one of the men in silly clothes with red hair all over his head. I am Christopher Columbus. I am sailing the ocean blue looking for India. Have you seen it? Forget India, says Coyote. Let’s play ball. —Thomas King and William Kent Monkman, A Coyote Columbus Story book is particularly well suited to the layered and ironic treatments of colonial discourse evident in these texts. In A Coyote Columbus Story, the trickster Coyote is at the centre of a narrative that begins as follows: “It was Coyote who fixed up this world, you know. She is the one who did it. She made rainbows and flowers and clouds and rivers. And she made prune juice and afternoon naps and toe-nail polish and television commercials. Some of these things were pretty good, and some of these things were foolish. But what she loved to do best was to play ball.”3 When Coyote changes the rules of the ballgame and “doesn’t watch what she is making up out of her head,”4 Christopher Columbus and “those Columbus people” arrive, intent on plunder . In this way, King’s narrative attributes contingency, haphazardness, and ulterior motivations to a sequence of historical events generally represented within dominant discourses as inevitable and heroic. In A Forest of Time, Peter Nabokov outlines the “motivations and practices through which American Indians have remembered their diverse pasts.”5 One such practice is to invest traditional stories with counter-discursive meanings. Nabokov notes that these stories are often about “randy animal tricksters who get their comeuppance and yet straggle on to entertain us for another day,”6 and are “couched in seemingly apolitical, amusing forms, and featuring culture heroes, evil monsters, and other familiar characters whose fantastic antics seem outside historical time.”7 In line with these narrative practices, Thomas King’s Coyote shows how not to behave toward the colonizers . She is slow to recognize Columbus’s mercantile and selfish interests, and she misreads his intentions of selling human beings into slavery: “When Coyote hears this bad idea, she starts to laugh. Who would buy human beings, she says, and she laughs some more.”8 The human beings are indeed enslaved and sold “to rich people like baseball players and dentists and babysitters and parents,”9 whereupon Coyote makes the empty promise that she will “take Christopher Columbus back.”10 Coyote is a black joke precisely because she does not appreciate that the advent of Columbus represents a cataclysmic and irreversible change to a world previously ordered and balanced. In line with the subversive stories described by Nabokov, she “enacts a new set of unwelcome cultural actions and values that have been introduced by alien historical actors,”11 showing herself up as a bad judge of character and a foolish optimist. The figure of Coyote thus simultaneously refers to colonial imaginings of docile and collusive Native...

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