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  • Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law by Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham
  • Susan Honeyman (bio)
Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law, by Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Sarah Higinbotham, an early modernist, and Jonathan Todres, a professor of law, are relative newcomers to children’s literature criticism and offer a refreshing cross-disciplinary view of the larger picture in which such literature can influence personal understandings of human rights. Informed by the ethical prerogatives of international law rather than children’s literature theory, Todres and Higinbotham demonstrate how the popular canon is interpreted by young citizens and how we can use it to further educate them as potential rights-holders, because “Children’s books convey human rights issues to children—both rights-respecting and rights-denying models of how children are treated” (206). The rationale for choosing texts is balanced but generally positive instead of reactive—ultimately favoring titles that are rights-respecting and explicating them accordingly with nuanced instruction about the actual rights in question. With the practical aim of finding germane yet influential sources, Todres and Higinbotham “prioritized children’s books that children actually enjoy” (207). What results is a revisitation of familiar works “through interdisciplinary analysis of international human rights law, human rights education, and literary studies, as well as by listening to children themselves respond to the stories in our qualitative study” (207). The inclusion of young people’s voices in often sophisticated discussions of justice issues caps each lesson in a particularly rewarding, convincing, and relevant manner.

In some ways Human Rights in Children’s Literature codifies yet another vocabulary and method for doing what we’ve been doing for decades—implicitly [End Page 239] evaluating books by their potential for modeling agency to child readers through empowering themes or the self-determination of child characters. Readers will find a useful new analysis of exploitative labor and identity rights in “Cinderella,” juvenile justice in Augusto and Margret Rey’s Curious George, age discrimination in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and participatory rights in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. The authors also demonstrate that such readings can educate adults as defenders of social justice. For some this method and argument will seem to fall back on close reading of children’s books as didactic instruments reduced to their pedagogic purpose, but, informed by human rights law, it strikes me as a very timely and indispensable revamping of literary interpretation for our current political and critical context.

One of the most fascinating things about the study of children’s literature in the past two decades has been its unique position in literary study as a genre written for an audience with a contested identity, written predominantly by persons outside of that category of social subjectivity. Many of us have invested much time and effort in dealing with the politics of identity, power, and subjectivity for those defined as children. We’ve debated definitions of that subjectivity, tested the limits of constructivism, and swung back into various extremes of embodiment, essentialism, or technically avoiding the subject (in both senses of the term). Multiple “impossibilities” of the genre have required a whole lot of theorizing.

Judith Butler has seen such inquiry as a broader trend in the humanities, asking of the reputed demise of humanities publications: “Have the humanities undermined themselves, with all their relativism and questioning and ‘critique,’ or have the humanities been undermined by all those who oppose all that relativism and questioning and critique?” (Butler 129). However we answer this question, it is clear that the rise of theory, which traded in problematizing first the individual and then the subject, destabilized assumptions about how scholars should approach human relationships to literary texts. Valentine Cunningham suggests that “if there is one feature of what reading should do and engage with, and yes, theorize, ‘after’ Theory, it is the presence, the rights, the needs of the human subject, in texts, in the originations of texts, in the reception of texts” (142). Human Rights in Children’s Literature provides a worthy example of how we can refocus on...

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