Publishing, Media, and the Identity of Children's Books

The recent surge in picture books depicting the forty-fourth president of the United States, Barack Obama, is certainly intriguing to scholars of children's literature. Not only might one consider the texts analytically through the lens of ethnic studies, or through the long tradition of American presidential children's biography, but scholars also might be drawn to Obama books as further evidence (in a post–Harry Potter era) of children's literature's cultural dominance: Obama texts shape social knowledge and give visual permanence to larger narratives about national identity. It might be unsurprising, then, to notice that Barack Obama children's books have crossed over into the labile field of electronic children's culture. With the March 2010 issue of Celebrating Barack Obama, an iPhone application based on a print children's book, uses of Obama have expanded and shifted. Textual versions might employ print in order to ground Obama in various legitimizing traditions and myths, but the iPhone application promises synergism, as the publisher's Web site asserts, since readers can "interact with photos" while "discovering many 'Fun Facts' about our historic 44th president" (http://stillmotionmedia.com). This movement into electronic culture makes me a bit dizzy, to be honest. But I find the case of Obama children's books to be a fascinating example of the push and pull happening in children's publishing today, where print can be used to concretize ideas while electronic media can make possible reader manipulation of these print representations.

This issue of the Quarterly explores the subject of children's publications from a variety of perspectives. Philip Nel's timely and perceptive essay, "Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. President," explores the construction of race in Obama picture books, placing the texts within a range of cultural contexts. Nel explains that "In children's literature about Obama, we are witnessing the formation of a new national mythology—one that slides neatly into established narratives about the meanings of being American." And while interactive media is not Nel's concern, his conclusions point toward the connection a reader can make with the new mythology; such picture books "participate in what we might call Obamafiction, or the fantasy that Obama's success portends the success of others, and that his ascendance symbolizes a renewal of America's moral purpose." Ann Mulloy Ashmore's groundbreaking essay explores the publishing history of Margret and Hans Rey's Elizabite: The Adventures of a Carnivorous Plant (1942; reissued in 1962). Ashmore employs previously unavailable archival evidence in order to turn our attention toward the role of collaboration in influencing artistic development. According to Ashmore, the Reys' long-standing friendship with Jesse Jackson—African American author of Call Me Charley (1945) and other children's novels—was mutually sustaining: it nourished the creative energies of the novice writer Jackson and enhanced the racial awareness and aesthetic sensitivity of the Reys.

Donnarae MacCann attends to the literary productivity of one writer, Lauren St. John, who has published a popular series of ecological novels set in a variety of African communities. MacCann's essay investigates the compromised depictions of African characters in the books, focusing on St. John's "misrepresentation of African character, culture, and progressive historical change." In offering a sustained critique of St. John's work, MacCann challenges us to consider the way in which legacies of colonialism still inform children's publishing. Our last full-length essay offers an especially provocative perspective on authorship. Barbara Tannert-Smith's "'Like Falling Up Into a Storybook': Trauma and Intertextual Repetition in Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak" extends the very possibilities of trauma theory, arguing that the young adult trauma novel is generically inclined to embody the unconscious struggles of the author. Tannert-Smith explains, "My speculation is that the genre of young adult trauma fiction, when tackling the issue of trauma as theme and thereafter of necessity employing a narrative strategy suitable for its representation, becomes vulnerable to other forms of compulsive repetition, and such incidental recoveries may, in due course, come to striate the young adult trauma novel in...