Reading Ethnicity in Children's Literature

Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children's Literature brings together criticism, interviews, and personal essays to explore culturally specific themes, subject matter, and forms in Native American, African American, Latina/o, and Asian American children's literature. Because distinct, culturally specific aesthetic traditions often inform this literature, it resonates more fully with adult texts from the same cultural matrix than with Euro-American children's literature. Not recognizing this distinction is common, according to editors Michelle Pagni Stewart and Yvonne Atkinson, resulting in interpretations and evaluations that depend more on Euro-American literary standards than the aesthetic traditions that actually shape many ethnic minority writers' work. Although texts by such writers certainly may bear the influence of Euro-American traditions, ignoring their "ethnic base" can obscure or displace the texts' motifs, themes, situations, and significance (5). This volume provides much-needed critical perspectives through which to apprehend the culturally specific forms, patterns, and themes in individual works of ethnic youth literature, such as Cynthia Leitich Smith's Rain Is Not My Indian Name, Angela Johnson's First Part Last, Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, and Rigoberto González's Antonio's Card / La Tarjeta de Antonio. The editors aim for the collection to serve as a springboard for reading, teaching, and writing about these and many other texts with greater sensitivity and insight.

Of course, one could argue that delineating a gestalt or ethnic tradition can be reductive, excluding practices and beliefs that do not fit a conception of ethnic expression on which many scholars and nonprofessional readers agree. The case has been made in African American studies, for instance, that conceptions of African American literature that simply rely on black folk expression or representations of blackness are misleading, because they obscure the importance of other kinds of literature by African American writers (Carby 126-27; Jarrett, Introduction 2). Among these other works are Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, Ann Petry's Country Place, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Sewanee, and Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," whose narrative priorities either do not emphasize the experience of black characters or lack clear ties to black folk expression, such as spirituals or the blues. Even with this caveat, however, the fact remains that racial emphasis and a debt to oral culture are identifying qualities of much African American literature. And it may be that these qualities shape African American children's literature more than other black aesthetics do. Certainly, the essays in Ethnic Literary Traditions acknowledge the riches of ethnic writing in general and should inspire more attention to ways in which texts reflect or challenge particular aesthetic traditions.

In promoting understanding of the distinct gestalt of each group under consideration, Stewart and Atkinson divide the collection into four sections, each focusing on traditions associated with a broadly defined ethnic group. Each section opens with a celebrated author's aesthetic statement, either in an interview or a personal essay, and proceeds with a critical overview of culturally specific children's and adult literature and criticism attuned to the ethnic nuances of key literary works. The collection closes with a useful bibliography of primary texts from each tradition, as well as literary criticism on ethnicity and literature in general and the four ethnic traditions in particular.

Both editors and contributors are aware that in many respects the designations "Latina/o," "Asian American," "African American," and "Native American" are politically convenient ones that do not refer to homogeneous populations. Yet the contributors seek to delve deeply into issues relevant to particular groups (for instance, Chicano or Japanese American) within a larger ethnic category (Latina/o or Asian American). The first section, for instance, concerns literature by and about Native Americans, a group that is admittedly composed of many cultures and linguistic groups. As contributor P. Jane Hafen remarks in "Survival through Stories: An Introduction to Indian Literature," "Within each [of these American Indian cultures there] are complex social structures, adaptive techniques and origin stories which reflect the moral universe...