"Oh How Different!": Regimes of Knowledge in Aboriginal Texts for Children

In his essay "Different—But Oh How Like!," Kevin Crossley-Holland outlines his definition of traditional narrative, arguing that folktales transcend boundaries of gender, race, color and nation. He recommends that those who retell stories from cultures different from their own should have "some knowledge" of such cultures, but maintains that storytellers have the right to choose their material from wherever they wish:

Let the storyteller be assured . . . that traditional tale is indeed a jeu sans frontières, and that desirable sensitivity to cultural difference is not to be confused with political correctness, which is reductive and stupid. I give little credence to the notion that, because I am a man and white and Anglo-Saxon (a deadly trio!) I may not give words in a tale to, say, an Aboriginal or Inuit woman, on the grounds that I can have no imaginative empathy with her condition. (19)

If Crossley-Holland were here merely claiming an author's right to construct fiction representing the perspective of a character whose gender, race and birthplace were different from his own, his statement would be unexceptionable, even if one might wonder how a white, Anglo-Saxon male author would ensure that he had the close knowledge of historical and cultural contexts to be empathetic with the "condition" of "an Aboriginal or Inuit woman." But his argument refers not to fiction but to traditional stories,and this raises a different set of questions.

In those domains of traditional story—such as classical mythology, fairy tales and hero legends—which are informed by what Stephens and McCallum term "the Western metaethic" (7), retellings for children draw upon a body of narratives which have shaped and been shaped by Western humanist traditions. Such retellings interpret these narratives in accordance with the preoccupations and ideological formations of the times and cultures in which they are produced. Aboriginal and Inuit narratives, on the other hand, derive from non-Western cultures with particular understandings of the place of stories within cultural practices; cultures, moreover, where indigenous peoples have struggled to maintain and protect their traditions in the face of colonization under British imperialism. One problem with Crossley-Holland's representation of traditional narrative is his assumption that universality and Western traditions are coterminous, so that Aboriginal and Inuit stories are readily assimilable into a jeu sans frontières which can be played by anyone who wishes. The larger issue, buried beneath the surface of the disparaging turn through which Crossley-Holland identifies "desirable sensitivity to cultural difference" with "political correctness, which is reductive and stupid," is that of race; specifically, a form of textual colonization in which the narratives of indigenous peoples are assimilated into a Western narrative schema.

I cite Crossley-Holland's representation of storytelling and traditional narratives because it exemplifies a view of traditional narratives which has survived far longer in children's literature than in the domains of literary and cultural studies. The latter disciplinary fields have been powerfully influenced by postcolonial theory, with its focus on the effects of colonization on indigenous cultures and its valorization of local and particular forms of textuality. In contrast, critical discourses in children's literature generally mobilize humanist principles that emphasize what humans have in common across time and space; and Jungian frameworks which interpret religious beliefs, ritual practices and narratives in terms of "the primordial images" of the collective unconscious (Jung 50). The intersections between children's literature and studies in folklore (the latter deeply imbued by Jungian paradigms) contribute to the continuing dominance of universalizing interpretations of non-Western narratives in the critical discourses that attend children's literature.

The contrast between humanist/Jungian and postcolonial approaches constitutes something of a crux in children's literature research and engenders lively debate, as Michael Levy has noted (183-85). To cite a few recent examples of critical work from both sides of the divide: the Australian...