It's a Small-Minded World After All: International Perspectives on Children's Literature and Censorship

Censorship in Children's Literatureis as complex and significant as the issue of censorship. "[B]ecause the concept hovers around the ragged edges of cultural values," writes co-editor Alleen Pace Nilsen in her comprehensive introductory essay, "Focus on Censorship," censorship itself can be difficult to define: "If we didn't have boundaries, we might have to create them just so there would be something to let us know when we had gone beyond them. The problem is that different people want different boundaries" (308). Censorship and Children's Literaturecovers a wide range of issues and perspectives and will provide an invaluable resource for those interested in questions of academic and artistic freedom, children's rights, and the production and consumption of children's and young adult literatures. One of its many strengths is its examination of censorship from many points of view, bringing together articles that address the concerns of authors, publishers, teachers, librarians, and academics, written by an international collection of scholars analyzing censorship issues in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, the United States, Bulgaria, Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, and Greece. Though the essays contained in this double issue of Para•Doxaare occasionally uneven—and at times provide frustratingly brief discussions of complicated cultural, pedagogical, and literary situations—they offer important introductions to a variety of censorship issues and invaluable starting points for further study, including a list of resources on censorship compiled by Hamida Bosmajian and Ken Donelson.

In her own essay, Nilsen organizes the issues addressed by the collection into four interrelated categories of censorship: "political, pedagogical (or educational), economic (or marketplace), and internal (or private)" (308). The articles in the first three categories examine censorship as an assertion of hegemonic, institutional authority that "does not protect the individuality of the child; rather, it protects the power of the system itself" (Batycki 325). The collection makes clear, however, that the same patriarchal ideologies that motivate censorship by institutions such as governments, schools, and churches can also inform "private" acts of censorship by parents and other individuals. "If we look at censorship not as a conflict of values but as a way to assert power," writes Sara Fine, "then censorship, particularly when it comes to children, is notabout their moral development; it is about the fear of losing control over them. Authoritarian parents are more often outraged by books that portray young people defying their parents' values than by the language the book contains. . . . Dirty language is still cleaner—and easier to control—than rebellion" (quoted in Apseloff 481).

Essays such as Christa Kamenetsky's "Censorship in Totalitarian States," Meni Kanatsouli's "Censorship in Greece: 1974 to the Present," Midori Todayama's "Censorship in Japan," and Maria Nikolajeva's "The 'Serendipity' of Censorship" each study governments' political control over and use of children's literature as a tool for disseminating official ideologies and thus influencing behaviors and beliefs. Nikolajeva's insightful essay looks at censorship in the Soviet Union, where she grew up, describing "how children's literature functions under abnormal social conditions, what strategies it establishes in order to survive and how oppression can, paradoxically enough, influence the literary evolution in a positive way" (379). Alexandra Zervou, in her fine essay on Walter Benjamin's Nazi-era radio play for children, "Walks in Berlin," calls this paradoxical relationship "the game of rules and infractions": strategies by which writers may "pretend to conform to some of [an oppressive government's] rules in order to deal with them more effectively, thus creating for themselves a secret means of resistance" (452). Nikolajeva suggests that fairy tales and fantasy are a major form through which children's writers, in "the cat-and-mouse play between the writer and censorship," have best been able to express subversive ideas (382). Indeed, in her analysis of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Millicent Lenz argues that the fantasy genre can enable...