Preempting Parochial Patriotism

A s I write, it is about a month before the presidential election here in the United States, and I have been devoting many hours registering voters and campaigning for my candidate. I am obsessed with politics and the economic meltdown at present. By the time this issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly appears, the election will have been decided (hopefully), but the article that opens this issue, Anastasia Ulanowicz's "Preemptive Education: Lynne Cheney's America: A Patriotic Primer and the Ends of History," will remain timely. The editors had hoped to reproduce some illustrations from Cheney's primer, including using one as our cover illustration, but Simon and Schuster responded too late to the repeated permissions requests and refused even to consider waiving a permissions fee. Whether this is the typical practice of large corporate publishing or a more sinister political decision we cannot know. Ulanowicz's article makes what I consider to be a most persuasive case that Cheney's alphabet book—her "patriotic primer"—promotes "a willful negation or repression of the more painful and distasteful moments of the American experience." In lieu of the colorful and upbeat illustration from the book, I have selected the Farm Security Administration photograph on the cover as an antidote to Cheney's rosy version of history, which, as Ulanowicz argues, "validates the concepts of justice and equality without ever giving its reader a sense of what injustice and inequality might look like, or what humiliations countless individuals have had to endure in their pursuit of a just society." In any event, this portrait of a heroic schoolteacher teaching the alphabet in rural Louisiana in 1939—a time of economic distress—is, if you'll forgive the expression, worth a thousand words.

If our intention to illustrate "Pre-emptive Education" with telling visual examples did not quite work out, it is serendipitous that we are able to present two articles on the children's fiction of Neil Gaiman, both of which take advantage of psychoanalytic approaches but that complement rather than duplicate each other. Elizabeth Parsons, Naarah Sawers, and Kate McInally's critique of postfeminism in two Gaiman novels though the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis is provocative both in its argument and in its acknowledgement of the collaborative process among the three authors. While I did not afford them the opportunity to collaborate further with Richard Gooding, his article and theirs speak to each other in ways that, I hope, will extend beyond a discussion of the work of the very gifted Neil Gaiman. Gooding's analysis of Coraline in terms of Freud's concept of the uncanny is most provocative in suggesting further inquiry into the promises and limitations of adult-child cross-reading and cross-writing.

Sarah Fiona Winters's postcolonial Bakhtinian reading of four Margaret Mahy novels discusses the ways in which the "fluidity of adolescence" acts to "destablilize expectations of race as self-contained and complete." Mahy's novels focus on "the nature of being a Pakeha, a New Zealander of European descent." Winters allies this figure with the adolescent and sees "Mahy's Pakeha [as] a chronotope that embodies the fault lines of Maori space and European time. In doing so, she takes exception to Clare Bradford's reading in Unsettling Narratives and argues that the white children in Aliens in the Landscape do not find themselves "comfortably fixed and at home."

I am grateful to all of these writers for showing us ways in which we may begin to preempt the parochial patriotism perpetuated by the soon to be-former Second Lady ever since she helped initiate the so-called culture wars during her tenure with the National Endowment for the Humanities. These articles are nuanced, impassioned, and carry on their conversations within a global community of scholars. They demonstrate that a narrow patriotism surely is the last refuge of scoundrels.