Stories Matter: The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children's Literature (review)

For the past several years, I have used Don Gallo's Join In, a collection of multicultural short stories, in the young adult literature course I teach. Each year, the discussion among the students centers (without prompting from me) on one of the stories, Barbara Beasley Murphy's "Eagle Cloud and Fawn," which drives the students to question whether a writer whose background does not appear culturally similar to that of her characters can write in an authentic way about their experiences. These students, virtually all of whom are planning to be secondary English teachers, are drawn immediately to the heart of the debate over multicultural literature in teaching and academia; this debate is at the heart of Stories Matter. Over and over again, the book raises the perennial questions in this discussion: what is cultural authenticity, how is real authenticity achieved, and how do we know true cultural authenticity when we see it? While the questions are recurring, the answers vary with each of the contributors to this collection.

Fox and Short are former editors at The New Advocate whose reading of articles on cultural authenticity there led them to explore this complex debate further. Accurately reflecting that complexity drove the editorial decision that this multifaceted controversy called for a multiplicity of voices and methods, so that the collection is just that—a compilation of often disparate voices. Rather than offering a single definition of cultural authenticity, Fox and Short also chose to forgo a unifying editorial position in favor of allowing "the authors of each chapter [to] offer their own perspectives related to how cultural authenticity should or should not be defined" (5). Because the many definitions of cultural authenticity parallel the debates over the meaning of multiculturalism, the essays in Stories Matter also examine that contested term as a curricular reform movement, as an educational perspective, as "political correctness," and as a pedagogical construct.

The first two of the book's five sections, "The Sociopolitical Contexts of Cultural Authenticity" and "The Perspectives of Authors, Illustrators, and Editors on Cultural Authenticity," would probably be most helpful to my students and others who are just starting out in the field. For those with a greater depth of knowledge, these discussions cover somewhat familiar terrain by laying out the context of the debate from a variety of sociopolitical, historical, and ideological perspectives. Comprising primarily essays by leading children's and young adult authors and illustrators (including Jacqueline Woodson, Susan Guevara, and Thelma Seto), these segments do, however, highlight one of the book's most interesting features: its deviation from the standard collection format by including cross-over debates between the articles included in the text. The interplay between Kathryn Lasky's views expressed in her article "To Stingo with Love: An Author's Perspective on Writing Outside One's Culture" and Violet J. Harris's statements in section three, "Political Correctness and Cultural Authenticity," exemplifies Stories Matter's strategy at its most direct. Lasky, well-known for both her numerous books and for her position that multiculturalism at its most fanatic acts to censor authorial freedom, calls it "a kind of literary ethnic cleansing, with an underlying premise that posits that there is only one story and one way to tell it" (88). In "The Complexity of Debates About Multicultural Literature and Cultural Authenticity," Harris responds to Lasky's assertions by pointing out the potential for authorial distancing and the compensatory need for extensive research when writers seek to write outside their lived cultural experience. Harris also notes continuing power discrepancies, such as that "book publishing in its various aspects—editorial, marketing, and sales—remains overwhelmingly in the province of whites" (127) and the unwillingness of some authors to "acknowledge their privilege and the sense of entitlement they possess that affords them the chances to write about any topic imaginable even when they acknowledge that their works are stereotypic" (128...