Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature

Conclusion

Notes to Conclusion on page 251. 225 9 Conclusion I conclude this comparative study of settler society texts with a sense of the subtle, complicated relations of difference and likeness that I have tried to sketch. If I seek to compare cultures and texts, I am reminded of tensions and inconsistencies within particular national literatures ; if I write about one context and its textual production for children, I am drawn to parallels with other literatures. My approach does not lend itself to lists of “good” and “bad” texts, or to a league table of national literatures. Believing that texts evade the intentions of their producers and that they are produced as much by cultural discourses as by authors, I read them to identify the discursive formations and the ideologies that inform them. In particular , I read them as postcolonial texts, looking to their rhetorics, fantasies, implications , and ideologies. The fact that draws together the diverse body of texts I have considered is that of colonialism—specifically, the practices and regimes of colonization carried out in the name of British imperialism. As Patricia Seed notes (see chapter 7), the British conceived imperialism primarily in terms of the conquest of property, so that discourses of place and of identity interpenetrate each other in this body of settler culture texts. I began by anticipating that I would discover in children’s texts evidence of unease and of unsettledness, since these texts position readers as citizens of nations marked by the violence of colonization. To be sure, many of the texts I have discussed exhibit various degrees and styles of postcolonial anxiety. However, the discursive regimes of nations play out differently in literatures for children. Many texts from the … and here I am today. —Edna Tantjingu, Eileen Wani Wingfield, andKunyi June-Anne McInerney, Down the Hole United States—perhaps because of the long interval between British colonization and contemporary textual production, or perhaps because the assault on Native American populations was so successful—bear out Ghassan Hage’s description of “the ‘colonial fait accompli’ confidence that permeates the… national culture of the United States”1 and that manifests in imaginings of Indigeneity so shaped by traditions of representation stretching back to colonial times that they are almost impervious to contestation. In both Canada and Australia, Indigenous peoples constitute a rather higher proportion of the overall population than in the United States, and political and public discourses allude more regularly to relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens.2 In Canadian as in New Zealand texts, narratives structured by questions about who owns particular tracts and parcels of land speak to the long histories of treaty negotiations in these cultures . In Australia, in contrast, where the land was, until the landmark Mabo High Court decision of 1992, regarded as terra nullius (nobody’s land) prior to invasion, children’s texts thematizing Indigeneity tend to foreground the possibilities of and the impediments to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. New Zealand children’s literature affords a fascinating contrast with Australian and Canadian literatures, since despite —or perhaps because of—the high proportion of Maori in the population , relatively few texts have involved historicized and politicized treatments of Maori–Pakeha relations or Maori experience, although since the 1970s political action by Maori has been a leitmotif of New Zealand life. It will almost certainly be asserted about this book that I prefer Indigenous to non-Indigenous texts, dealing in more severe terms with the latter than the former. My reading of a large number of Indigenous and non-Indigenous texts leads me to believe that non-Indigenous texts are much more likely than Indigenous texts to recycle the unquestioned assumptions of dominant cultures and their ingrained beliefs and convictions about Indigenous peoples and cultures. In particular, non-Indigenous texts are often oblivious to the historical and symbolic processes that have privileged whiteness as a normative mode of being. I come to this conclusion not because I subscribe to the idea that only members of minority cultures are entitled to write about their cultures, practices, and traditions, but because I see in many non-Indigenous texts from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia the bland assumption that “we” know what “they” are like, and that “they” are, after all, not very difficult to know. While much of this book is taken up with readings of texts, I am much more concerned to produce a theory of postcolonial children’s literature that...