Soon Come Home to This Island. West Indians in British Children’s Literature (review)

Unlike Africa and India, the Caribbean territories played a less prominent role in the British Empire. Both British literature and literary colonial studies reflect this fact. Thanks to Karen Sands-O’Connor’s seminal study, readers can now learn more about the representations of West Indians and their culture in British children’s literature.

Focusing on the territories under British rule, most notably the island of Jamaica, Sands-O’Connor, associate professor at Buffalo State College, traces the theme in novels, picture-books, poetry, comics and school textbooks published between 1700 and the present.

She convincingly demonstrates that children’s literature has always mirrored its historical and sociocultural contexts. Countless examples illustrate the conflicting but complementary workings of deprecatory/stigmatising and romanticising stereotypes, most readily recognisable in the figure of the savage, who was in turn perceived as either primitive and threatening or noble and unadulterated. This racist and colonial gaze gradually changed as large numbers of West Indian immigrants settled in Britain following World War II. Beginning in the 1960s, authors of Afro-Caribbean origin enriched British children’s literature with their specific perspective and idiom, introducing a new tone.

Extensive footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography as well as a person and subject index round off this thorough and worthwhile volume, which finally puts the West Indies back on the map of the history of (British) children’s literature.