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  • The Child Savage, 1890-2010: From Comics to Games ed. by Elisabeth Wesseling
  • Joe Sutliff Sanders (bio)
The Child Savage, 1890-2010: From Comics to Games. Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2016.

In thirteen chapters and an introduction, contributors from Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States explore a pervasive metaphor of Western culture with extraordinary depth. The metaphor in question is what Elisabeth Wesseling, the volume's highly accomplished editor, refers to as "the child-savage analogy." Wesseling explains the trope as conflating "the identity markers of age and race, casting children as members of an exotic, uncivilized tribe and non-European peoples as children" (5). At times, texts across history have used the metaphor either to condemn or idealize such peoples, and at other times, the texts have done both simultaneously; similarly, the connection with "savagery" has sometimes rendered children as good, perhaps through their connection with nature, and sometimes as bad, as though children had not yet progressed enough to leave behind their native, evil state. The introduction gives an excellent, detailed history of the metaphor and its consequences, [End Page 350] with special attention to the role that the metaphor played in colonial and postcolonial imaginings.

Perhaps the greatest strength in this book full of strong essays is its focus on one theme, something that, frankly, I generally don't think collections ought to do. The sustained attention to that metaphor in this volume, though, yields a depth that is rare-unto-unique in edited collections. The collection "emerged," as the acknowledgments page notes, from "the inaugural workshop of the collaborative research group Platform for a Cultural History of Children's Media," a note that initially gave me cause for alarm. Edited collections resulting from conferences, I have long felt, typically suffer from two faults. First, they are uneven, with a few excellent discussions scattered among too many entries that found publication simply by virtue of having adhered to the conference theme. Second, the essays in such collections tend to feel badly padded, as authors who have successfully explored an idea in a conference paper are not always prepared to expand their treatment of that idea to chapter length.

This collection, however, was a happy surprise. Not one of the essays has the feel of a chapter included on the strength of its connection to the theme rather than its argumentative merits. In the opening chapter, Vanessa Rutherford examines "language politics and racial subjectivities" in late nineteenth-century Ireland, cogently arguing that British colonial policies and Irish nationalism privileged whiteness and purity, resulting in a crisis over educational policies that put children in the contested middle. Pascal Lefèvre, one of the top comics scholars in the world, later examines how gag comics of the Belle Époque contributed to and then recuperated a vision of mischievous and racialized childhood that was more complicated than we have previously thought. Elsewhere, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer demonstrates how the Négritude movement neither inverted nor rejected the child-savage metaphor that, in general, has worked to marginalize black people, but instead revised it in a way that was fundamentally anticolonialist. As these few examples suggest, the focus on this one theme has produced not a cobbled-together group of uneven essays but a depth of exploration uncommon in edited collections.

The subtitle, I should note, undersells the usefulness of this book: this is not a collection about the metaphor as expressed in comics, games, and whatever lies between the two. Although articles such as Joshua Garrison's essay on exploitation films between 1930 and 1945—an exceptionally strong chapter that would be immediately useful to students and scholars studying the emergence of the concept of adolescence—might be said to fit between comics and games, others would not. Vanessa Joosen's study of portrayals of children and murder focuses at times on popular tabloid representations (which don't feel quite at home between comics and games) and at others on novels by Anne Cassidy and Philip Pullman (which don't feel at all at home there). Similarly, Ruth Murphy's analysis of Kipling's Just-So Stories as historically [End Page 351] appropriate...

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