West Indians and the Empire

Children's literature works to explain to its readers what their society was, is, will, can, or should be, so in the British context it is logical that the fact of empire generally and the British appropriation of the West Indies particularly has haunted the genre. The tensions between the ideals of imperialism and the facts of the political economy of slavery make for an obvious, albeit troubling, nexus of the cultural work of children's literature as a socializing and acculturating force. What is surprising is the fact that Karen Sands-O'Connor's Soon Come Home to This Island is the first sustained critical exploration of this haunting; published under the auspices of Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series, it offers a genealogy of representations of the West Indies within British children's literature. I mention Routledge specifically here, as one problem that will strike any reader of the volume is the publisher's failure to include captions for the numerous illustrations included within it; instead, a separately stapled list of the captions is provided with but not affixed to the book. I assume that this is disappointing to no one more so than the author, so I will not pursue this issue except to note that it is also disappointing for the reader.

The book is arranged chronologically, and in moving from the late eighteenth century through to the early twenty-first, Sands-O'Connor details the ways in which images of West Indian subjects were offered up to young (presumed to be white) British readers in order to variously naturalize, affirm, and—unfortunately, infrequently—contest the legitimacy of the British imperial enterprise, as well as the slave trade upon which it rested and in which it invested in the so-called West Indies. What she charts, then, is a specific history of colonization; in doing so, she interrogates both its meaning and its authority by working, in Bhabha's terms, to reveal "the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of 'the people' or 'the nation' and make them the immanent subjects of a range of social and literary narratives" (Bhabha 201).

Soon Come Home to This Island's great strength is the range of primary materials discussed, which includes magazines, journals, novels, picturebooks, and more. Sands-O'Connor clearly has done a great deal of archival and historical research, and her efforts are of benefit to a scholarly community seeking a more diverse understanding of the history of children's literature than those which focus primarily on the literatures of Great Britain and the United States. The book makes space for discussions of canonical literature such as Robinson Crusoe and the papers of the Anthropological Society of London alongside consideration of texts produced for children; the latter also range from the canonical, such as Day's History of Sandford and Merton, to the less-known, including serializations in popular periodicals such as The Boy's Own Paper. The book's later chapters cover a wide range of recent texts—particularly usefully in a chapter entitled, "Happy Families? British Picture Books After 1970"—and a variety of genres, including the often overlooked area of poetry for children.

The analyses are mostly compelling, although at times I wanted more close-textual analysis of extended quotations, rather than their being circulated as affirmations of pre-existing conclusions. Certainly, some quotations speak for themselves, but when a 1935 narrative ends with a character stating, "we are all British, but some are white and some are black" (qtd. 81), I (who am unfamiliar with this text beyond Sands-O'Connor's account of it) was not entirely convinced that this leaves an "impression . . . of a childish people trying, just by saying so, to 'make' themselves British" (82). Rather, I would be interested in a reading which considered the extent to which much of identity, national or otherwise, is indeed a product of "just saying so"—albeit within a range...