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  • "Standing on the Wrong Side":Bias and Ambivalence in Lauren St. John's African Books
  • Donnarae MacCann (bio)

The difficulty for us in analyzing the concept of race is to employ it with the required critical distance … to avoid racial stereotyping or uncontrolled mythologizing. … [One controversial issue] is how to conjoin critical theory and interpretation in an approach to problems that is historical and political without being narrowly historicist or propagandistic.

—Dominick LaCapra (1, 4)

[It] is essential that a critic be neither indifferent to the … cultural elements that a writer has incorporated into her text, nor ignorant of their form and function in the cultural milieu outside the text on which the artist has drawn.

—Florence Stratton (144)

Lauren St. John's debut as a novelist has been evolving steadily into an appreciable media triumph. Its elements include the children's book The White Giraffe (2006); a transcription of this novel as a talking book (Listening Library, 2007); a movie version (20th Century Fox, 2009); and then three more novels to make a series—all pleading the cause of wildlife preservation and the rescue of animals from torturous forms of abuse.1 These environmental messages, as significant as they are, reach young readers at a great cost, even the misrepresentation of African character, culture, and progressive historical change. St. John's fiction is a throwback to Eurocentric notions of superiority, as well as to the colonizers' proprietary claims on Africa—mainstays of White rule that can be examined in The White Giraffe, Dolphin Song (2007, 2008), The Last Leopard (2008), and The Elephant's Tale (2009, 2010). [End Page 373]

Ambivalences in European perceptions of Africa have an exceedingly long history. The record left by ancient Greeks and Romans was largely favorable in its depiction of Africans in sculptures, fresco paintings, and other plastic arts, but written records contain some of the derogatory descriptions that are not unlike those in children's literature today. "There were two streams of information emanating from the classical writers," according to historian William Leo Hansberry, "and the unfavorable characterization has had the greatest influence on the image and treatment of blacks in our own times" (xx).2 This recognition that negative portraits have had greater currency in modern times points to the problems so discernible in St. John's fiction. On the positive side St. John creates in her series two Black characters who are said to resemble the protagonist's much-loved deceased father—a child protagonist, in this case, who is a veritable Christ figure. But in contrast, the novelist has populated her narratives with a disproportionate number of Blacks who are poachers, corrupt politicians, and either devious or laughable traditional healers. The novels show St. John to be a writer who can logically blend portraits of contemporary children with supernatural wonders; however, the credibility of her work breaks down unless viewed through a biased Anglo-European lens. Such a perspective is xenophobic at its worst and narrow at its best given the novels' settings in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. The "cultural milieu outside the text," Florence Stratton suggests, is not only important in relation to cultural elements the artist places inside the narrative. Those features also have a function outside the text—a reality that warrants space in a literary critic's reflections (144).

The use of interdisciplinary approaches can bring critics closer to an understanding of how this inside/outside relationship works and how St. John's creative output connects with it. A critical menu benefits especially from a critic's interest in the milieu within which characters interact. What historical horizons are authors placing before readers? What kind of historical evidence underpins relationships, such as the way political "centers" and "margins" connect? This question comes to mind in children's book criticism that leans toward "universalism." Kenneth Kidd has noted in his study of Newbery Award winners that the American Library Association gave priority "to American work … [and] what was American was established through and against contact with the cultural other, usually safely removed across time and space" (177). Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka sees "neo-colonialist literary critics … project[ing] their history [and] their social neuroses on...

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