The Uses of Children's Literature in Political Contexts: Bridging the Pedagogical/Aesthetic Divide

As we write this introduction, COVID-19 is spreading across the globe. In addition, we find ourselves in a limbo of political transition after the US election, waiting for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be installed. Harris is not only a politician, she is also the author of a picture book, Superheroes Can Be Everywhere, illustrated by Mechal Renee Roe, which was launched in January 2019 and has been widely distributed on social media since the US election. By reading Harris's life story, child readers are encouraged to find their own superheroes and to do what they can to change the world. The message is clear. The power for change resides in the child. Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, is another leader who has made use of children's books to strengthen his political mission. His Exam Warriors was published in February 2018, one year before the general election in India in 2019, in order to reach and inspire the next generation to work hard in their studies and take their individual responsibility seriously. This educational book, intended for students to read when taking exams, consists of specific words of advice for the young readers of India as well as for all those others "across the world" (back cover). It contains illustrations, instructional content, and yoga exercises. In separate contexts, these two books by influential politicians demonstrate the trust placed in children's literature as an important tool for educating the young. They have missions.

The following forum essays explore the uses of children's literature in political contexts. In discussing the political uses of literature, we want to focus on the interrelationship between context and aesthetics. This implies that we place ourselves outside the tradition of pure aestheticism in which art needs no justification, no need to serve any political, didactic, or other ends. In children's literature the political is often a pedagogical and aesthetical venture.The conflict between aesthetic value on the one hand and pedagogical convention on the other permeates the history of children's literature at least since the age of Romanticism (Kümmerling-Meibauer; Mickenberg, "Radical Children's Literature"). The aesthetic-pedagogic divide is so strong and central to children's literature criticism that it has come to obscure the relationship between aesthetic form and pedagogical content, concealing aesthetical dimensions of the pedagogical or political meaning, residing in the historical situations where literature is produced, used, and read. For centuries, the main purpose of children's literature was to offer the reader religious instruction and moral guidance, and its ability to improve or assist the child reader is still seen as one of its most distinguishing traits (Myers; Cross). Many critics, however, understand the dominant characteristic of children's literature to be its presumed capacity to speak to the reading child through enjoyment and aesthetic appeal rather than through primarily didactic messages, which are simply labeled as being too instructive, intrusive, or boring to the child. Furthermore, as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein observes, this liberation from didacticism is frequently seen by critics as proof of the literary quality of a children's book.

The essays included in this forum emanate from a conviction that it is important to further investigate the dynamic entanglement between the ideological dimensions of a text or film and its aesthetic and contextual significations. Ideology is in the text but also in the historical contexts. As cultural studies and reception studies compellingly indicate, aesthetic objects may attain very different meanings in different contexts since the transactions between texts and readers are extraordinarily varied, complex, and unpredictable in kind (Felski). That being the case, it is important to pay close attention to the actual uses of children's literature in different places, bearing in mind that political meanings are not to be found entirely in narrative patterns. Focusing on literature for children published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as well as on the incentives and disincentives for writing, publishing, and distributing this literature, Julia Mickenberg...