The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Game ed. by Elisabeth Wesseling (review)

The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Gamesseeks to understand how the child-savage trope "turned into a foundational schema of Western cultural repositories of childhood" by exploring how images of childhood circulate, transform, and persist across space, media, and time (12). Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, this collection of thirteen chapters includes work by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film, educational leadership and policy, cultural studies, creative arts, children's literature, media, and gender and diversity. The subjects within the volume—which range from novels and broadsheets to films and video games—reflect this disciplinary breadth. Through its in-depth analysis of the child-savage trope, the book deepens understandings of "the contradictory meanings that inhabit the construction of 'the child'" (15).

The book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically. The first, and largest, section—"The Child-Savage in (Neo-)Colonial Discourse"—focuses on the circulation of the trope during the "heyday of imperialism." These chapters consider how the trope was employed to support European colonial projects and assert racial hierarchies, as in Vanessa Rutherford's chapter on how Irish educational discourse sought to highlight European superiority and Luke Springman's study of African Kulturfilmand its promise of redemption for Germans following World War I. The chapters also examine, however, how the child-savage trope could subvert colonial and racial rhetoric, a theme explored in Pascal Lefèvre's chapter on more positive representations of black people in broadsheets and silent films that sometimes even inverted the roles of black and white people, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer's examination of how Dutch children's magazines portrayed cruelties committed by Western colonizers, Ruth Murphy's analysis of the negotiation between the unstable ideology of the child and evolutionary progression in Kipling's Just So Stories, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer's study of the ways Negritude literature transgressed ethnocentric, Eurocentric views.

The second section—"Domestic Savages"—explores how the child-savage trope was transformed during the interwar and postwar periods, focusing on children's media in Britain and the United States. This section, like the previous one, highlights the instability of the idea and how it both idealized and demonized children. While chapters in the first section focused on its racial implications, this section examines its class dimensions in more detail. Wesseling's chapter on the orphan figure in Oliver Twistand the comic strip Little Orphan Annieand Vanessa Joosen's analysis of the figure of the child killer in novels and tabloids demonstrate how the child-savage metaphor traveled across media and time. The other two chapters in this section reflect on the possibilities—but also the discomfort—created by and reflected in new media forms. Kate Lacey's chapter on the BBC's Children's Hourand Joshua Garrison's study of exploitation films in the 1930s and 1940s show how these productions reinforced notions that young people needed to be controlled and surveilled.

Like the second section, the third part—"Postcolonial Playgrounds"—examines how the signifier of the child-savage has been imported into new media forms, in this case during the digital and electronic age. Johnathan Bignell's analysis of nostalgia and constructions of masculinity in Action Man toys, Lincoln Geraghty's chapter on commodification and fan culture surrounding the Transformers, and Isabel Hoving's study of the iterations of feral children figures in children's literature and video games demonstrate the persistence of colonial techniques of domination into the present day and also draw attention to the gendered implications of the child-savage metaphor. Chapters in this section continue to analyze themes that emerge throughout the book, including the subversive potential and inherent contradictions of the child-savage trope.

Each of the chapters is insightful and interesting, and together they enrich understandings about this "root metaphor" of the child-savage as well as the construction of "the...