Voices of the Other: Children's Literature and the Postcolonial Context (Children’s Literature and Culture 10) 081533284X, 9780815332848, 9780203357682

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VOICES OF THE OTHER

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND CULTURE VOLUME 10 GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES VOLUME 2126

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND CULTURE JACK ZIPES, SERIES EDITOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

RETELLING STORIES, FRAMING

COMES OF AGE

CULTURES

Toward a New Aesthetic by Maria Nikolajeva

Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children's Literature by John Stephens and Robyn McCallum

REDISCOVERIES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

by Suzanne Rahn THE CASE OF PETER RABBIT REGENDERING THE SCHOOL STORY

Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys by Beverly Lyon Clark

Changing Conditions of Literafllre for Children by Margaret Mackey LITTLE WOMEN AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

WHITE SUPREMACY IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Characterizations ofAfrican Americans, 1830-1900 by Donnarae MacCann VOICES OF THE OTHER

Children's Literafllre and the Postcolonial Context edited by Roderick McGillis

Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays edited by Janice M. Alberghene and Beverly Lyon Clark

V OleES

OF THE OTHER

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT

EDITED BY

RODERICK McGILLIS

I~ ~~o~J~;~~;up NEW YORK AND LONDON

Published in 2000 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

© 2000 by Roderick McGillis Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Transferred to Digital Printing 2008 International Standard Book Number-lO: 0-815-33284-X (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-815-33284-8 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Catalog record is available from the Library of Congress

informa Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of Informa pic.

Visit tbe Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and tbe Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

For Vic and Ruby Your house shows the marks offriendship

Contents

General Editor's Forward Preface Contributors Introduction: by Roderick McGillis Section 1: Theory o Chapter I: Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as an Unfinished Project ShaoboXie o Chapter 2: "We Are the World, We Are the Children": The Semiotics of Seduction in International Children's Relief Eff0l1s Nancy Ellen Batty o Chapter 3: The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children's Literature Peter Hullt and Karen Sands o Chapter 4: Continuity, Fissure, or Dysfunction: From Settler Society to Multicultural Society in Australian Fiction John Stephens o Chapter 5: Text, Culture, and Postcolonial Children's Literature: A Comparative Perspective Jean Webb

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Section 2: Colonialism Saved by the Word: Textuality and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Australian Texts for Children Clare Bradford o Chapter 7: Making Princesses, Re-making A Little Princess Mavis Reimer o Chapter 8: Colonial Canada's Young Adult Short Adventure Fiction: The Hunting Tale Jean Stringam o Chapter 9: Lies My Children's Books Taught Me: History Meets Popular Culture in "The American Girls" Books Daniel Hade Section 3: Postcolonialism & Neocolonialism Chapter 10: Bedtime Stories: Canadian Multiculturalism and Children's Literature Louise Saldanha Chapter II: Multiculturalism in Canadian Children's Books: The Embarrassments of History Dieter Petzold Chapter 12: "Initiation for the Nation": NgugI wa Thiong' o's Writing for Children Oliver Lovesey Chapter 13: Wrestling with the Past: The Young Adult Novels of Buchi Emecheta Alida Allison Chapter 14: "And the Celt Knew the Indian": Knowingness, Postcolonialism, Children's Literature Roderick McGillis Chapter 15: Reviving or Revising Helen Bannerman's The StOl}' of Little Black Sambo: Postcolonial Hero or Signifying Monkey? Jan Susina OAfterword: The Merits and Demerits of the Postcolonial Approach to Writings in English Victor J. Ramraj

o Chapter 6:

Index

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153

165

177

193

211

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253 269

General Editor's Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children's literature and culture, the Children's Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children's literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children's literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through late adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children's literature, this Garland series is particularly concerned with transformations in children's culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children's literature, all types of studies that deal with children's radio, film, television, and art are included'in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children's culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children's culture in the last fifty years, but there have been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children's Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

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The best laid schemes, we know, often go awry. And so you may approach this book looking awry. You will find coherence but not comprehensiveness here. The coherence manifests itself in the desire apparent in these essays to take seriously children and their literature as postcolonial sUbjects. All essays are original, with the exception of portions of the Introduction, which appeared in Swedish in the journal Halva Varldens litteratUl: The writers of these essays come from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some write as observers of cultures other than their own; others write from positions of emergence inside the cultural situation they describe. All respect the importance of clearing space for others, of providing a quietness for others to fill with their voices. This book is about the politics of recognition. This preface must also be about recognition. First, I must recognize that the book contains gaps. I began this project after having co-edited with Meena Khorana a special edition of the journal ARIEL: A Review of Illfernatiollal English Literatllre (January 1997). Although that edition of ARIEL is strong in its presentation of postcolonialism and its relation to children's literature, it does not cover all aspects of the subject. So I decided to put together a book that more completely represents postcolonialism in children's books. But as I went about gathering contributors and thinking about what kind of a book I wanted, I realized that any book on postcolonialism that did not confront the colonial past and admit neocolonialism's intricate connection to postcolonialism in our present would not effectively deal with issues attaching to postcolonial ism. And so I decided to give the book a

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three-pat1 structure: theory, colonialism, postcolonialism and neocolonialism. Things go awry. Suddenly, related but separate themes infiltrated the project: the study of diasporic writing, multiculturalism as fact and policy, critical race theory, postindependence as well as postcolonial situations. In short, this project, too, can serve only as another beginning to important issues relating to children and literature in a truly comprehensive way. As a beginning, I hope the essays here act as a primer, especially as a theoretical primer. We need the theory of connectedness to allow us to read and reread the productions the culture industry keeps before us. We need to recognize how we are being shaped and why. We need to do this for children as well as for professional academic readers. The paradox is that this book is, after all is said and done, more for children than for adults, and yet children are unlikely to read it. We find ourselves in the awkward position of writing about the voices of the other-especially children as "other"-about the importance of hearing these voices, and in the very act of writing, we create an over-voice that makes hearing children's voices difficult. Our gestures can only be meaningful if they result in calling attention to voices other than our own. We need to recognize when it is time to stop speaking for others, even to stop speaking at all for a time. I'll stop, but not before I recognize those who have made this volume possible. First, all the contributors here have written essays especially for this book. Without them, no book. Thanks to everyone who appears in our list of contributors. I'll also acknowledge those who began the project with us, but for one reason or another departed before the volume's completion. I sincerely hope we see those absent essays in some other place (I am referring to essays on Caribbean children's literature, on errors in colonialist children's literature, on the Australian picture book, on Satyajit Ray, on Monica Hughes, and on Ethel Turner). Mentioning what is not here may seem odd, but this is what acknowledgments are all about. Jack Zipes is not here, and yet of course he is. Without him, once again, we would have no book. 1 want to recognize Jack as an exemplary editor, and as an advocate of children and their culture. Also at Garland, 1 wish to acknowledge the guiding hand of Mary Ellen Larcada, Kristi Long, James Morgan, Alexis Skinner, and Chuck Bartelt. Meena Khorana was instrumental in getting me going on postcolonialism, and 1 missed her involvement here. Colleagues who helped in ways they are unlikely to remember include: Sandra Beckett, Jean Perrot, Maria Nikolajeva, Heather Scutter, Thomas van der Wait, Jon Stott,

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Jill May, PelTY Nodelman, Sandy West, Claude Romney, Carole Scott, Rhonda Bunbury, and both Pat and Henry Srebrnik. Vic Ramraj was with this project from the beginning when he invited me to put together the issue of ARIEL on children's and young adult literature. Kyla and Kate find their place here, too. And no acknowledgment is complete without an assertion that nothing I do is possihle without Frances Batycki: if her name does not appear on a dedication page, this is simply because any book I may do is hers.

Contributors

ALIDA ALLISON is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. Her most recent books are Isaac Baslzevis Singer: Children's St01ies and Childhood Memoirs (1996) and The Grad Student's Guide To Getting Published (1992). She is also the editor of Russell Hoban/Forty Years: Essays on His Writings for Children (1999) and the Director of SDSU's Children's Literature Circle and Web Site: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/deptlenglish/childlit/index.html NANCY ELLEN BATTY has published articles on Salman Rushdie, Toni Mon·ison, and William Faulkner. She also publishes in the area of popular media and cultural studies. CLARE BRADFORD is an associate professor at Deakin University, in Melbourne, where she teaches children's literature and literary studies to undergraduate and postgraduate students. She has published numerous articles on children's literature, and her research interests are mainly in picture books and colonial and postcolonial literatures for children. Her most recent book is a collection of essays on Australian children's literature, Writing the Australian Child. Clare is the editor of the journal Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature. PETER HUNT is the first (full) professor of English in a British University to be a specialist in children's literature. He has lectured at nearly a hundred universities and colleges worldwide and has published six books for Xl'

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children. Among his eleven books on children's literature are Understanding Children's Literature (Routledge 1998) and Children's Literature: an Illustrated History (Oxford 1996). OLIVER LOVESEY has written a number of essays on Ngugi wa Thiong' 0, which have appeared in, for example, World Literature Written in English and Research in African Literatures. A book-length study of Ngugi is forthcoming from Twayne. His most recent essays on other subjects have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Studies in the Novel. He teaches at Okanagan University College in Kelowna, B.C. RODERICK MCGILLIS is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. DIETER PETZOLD teaches English literature (including, occasionally, children's books) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Among his publications are books (in German) on nineteenth-century nonsense literature, nineteenth-century literary fairy tales, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robinson Crusoe, plus many articles (in both German and English) on various topics in children's literature and nonmimetic fiction. VICTOR J. RAM RAJ is professor of English at the University of Calgary and Editor of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. His publications include Mordecai RichieI' (1983), Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World W1iting in English (1995), and numerous articles on the new literatures in English. He was Guyana's Playwright-of-the-Year in 1966. MAVIS REIMER is an assistant professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, where she teaches children's literature and Victorian studies. LOUISE SALDANHA is a faculty member at Grande Prairie Regional College in Alberta, Canada, where she teaches English Literature. She is completing her doctorate in English from the University of Calgary. Her research interests include critical theories in race, pedagogy, postcoloniality, gender, and children's literature. Her recent publications appear in ARIEL, RUllgh, Canadian Children's Literature, English Studies ill Canada, and Discourse.

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KAREN SANDS, the recipient of the 1997 IRSCL Research Award, now teaches Children's Literature at Buffalo State College in New York. She is coauthor of the book Back ill the Spaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fiction Series After 1945, and her major interests include the role of women and girls in fantastic children's literature and nationalism in children's literature. JOHN STEPHENS teaches in the School of English and Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Language and Ideology in Children's Fictioll (1992) and, most recently, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture (co-authored with Rohyn McCallum, 1998). He is president of the International Research Society for Children's Literature. JEAN STRINGAM is an assistant professor at Mesa State College in Colorado specializing in Young Adult and Children's Literature. She is a 1998 graduate of the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alhelta, Canada), where her dissertation topic involved a comparative study of the Canadian Young Adult content of eight periodicals for youths published in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain between 1847 and 1914. JAN SUSINA is an associate professor of English at IIIlinois State University, where he teaches courses in children's and adolescent literature. JEAN WEBB was a primary teacher for seventeen years before joining the English Department at University College Worcester in 1989. She is now Director of the Primary English and Children's Literature Research Centre. SHAOBO XIE teaches Literary Theory and English Literature at the University of Calgary. He has published on deconstruction, postcolonialism, and cultural studies. He is currently working on a hook-length study dealing with Cultural Studies.

Introduction RODERICK McGILLIS

"Westem in yu arse, boy, Westem in yu arser and Joe was recreating the climax with a lively pantomime: "'ey boy, forty-million 0' them against the star-boy and the rest 0' them ridin com in and then he bullets run-out. ... " "An' then the other guys reach, an' then, 01' -man, thell yu jus' see Red-Indian fallindong all over the place-ha-da-da-da-dapretty, boy, pretty!" mused Krishna. -MERLE HODGE, CRICK CRACK, MONKEY [8]

The cavalry callie riding over the hill again, and just as they got to where the Indians were waiting in the rivel; they disappeared. The Indians charged Ollt of the rh'er and massacred John Wayne and Richard Widmark. -THOMAS KING, GREEN GRASS. RUNNING WATER [330]

For much of the last century, young boys in NOlth America and around the world leamed to cheer the cowboy hero, first in popular fiction dubbed "dime novels," and later in Hollywood films. Films, especially, brought this figure to audiences in far-flung places. and in doing so perpetuated the activity of the cowboy whom they depicted. Both the films and the cowboys they celebrate participated in a colonial enterprise; they represent a xix

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continuing desire on the part of a white Eurocentric people to claim superiority and space throughout the globe. In the two passages I begin with, we have versions of the familiar white man (cowboy) versus native ("RedIndian"), but in both cases we experience a jolt, a revision of what came to be taken as a natural encounter of the superior white colonist bringing civilization to a savage land and to a savage people, and in doing so defeating the native forces of primitivism, mystery, and violence. These two passages invoke a powerful image of colonialist activity in order to cast this image in a revisionary light. Despite the apparent difference in presentation, both passages ask us to rethink a familiar, even stereotypical plot. In the passage from Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey (1970), young Trinidadian boys who go by names such as Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, and Rock Hudson are re-enacting scenes from the films they see, films depicting the slaughter of "forty-million" Native Americans by their cowboy heroes. We know these boys idolize the cowboy stars because they assume the names of prominent actors who often play cowboys on screen. The success of American culture amounts to a colonizing activity that these boys appear to accept readily and unquestioningly. What gives us pause is that we see these boys from the point of view of the young narrator, Tee, and from this vantage point the boys' play is juvenile. She recounts how their play moves easily into fighting when a girl happens by. And we know that the narrative moves out to an implied author whose silence marks an ambiguous-maybe even an ambivalentacceptance of the boys' assumption of cowboy actions. In this early novel about adolescent girlhood in the Caribbean, we can detect a desire to fling off the colonial influence of Hollywood films. The term "Red Indian," here nicely attributed to the boy, Krishna, reminds us that native American's are not "Indians." So much depends on a name, and here the boys' desire to name themselves after Hollywood stars indicates their immaturity. Red Indians are not Indians, and Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, and Rock Hudson are not actors at all. Instead, Indians are a colonized people, pushed to the edge of extinction; and Audie, Gary, and Rock are Caribbean boys in danger of losing their cultural heritage by abandoning it to another from away. But I exaggerate. The passage is more subtle than I have indicated. These boys are not so easily abandoning their culture and replacing it with another. How could they, when the language they speak is distinctly their own? The manner in which these boys speak marks their speech as "other," at least other to those readers outside the cultural milieu in which these boys live. The way they talk indicates that they are neither

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cowboys nor "Red Indians." They incorporate the culture of the American cowboy into their own lingo, and in doing so claim it as their own. Something similar takes place in the Jamaican film, The Harder They Come (1972; directed by Perry Henzell), only here the ironies multiply because the young hero, played by Jimmy Cliff, emulates a cowboy hero who hails, not from America, but from Italy. The Italian western Django, stan·ing Franco Nero, is what motivates Cliff's character to act, to become the desperado who stands up to corrupt record producers and hypocritical churchmen. What we see is an appropriation of American culture, not a simple acquiescence to it. The passage from Thomas King's Green Grass, RUflning Water (1993) is more direct in its revisioning of the American western. Throughout the novel, a film stan·ing John Wayne and Richard Widmark plays continually on a TV set in a small-town furniture store. For most of the film, the same familiar scene of Wayne and Widmark killing faceless savages in a riverside shoot-out plays repeatedly. Then, near the end of the novel, something surprising happens: an arrow pierces John Wayne's thigh and then two bullets "ripped through his chest and out the back of his jacket"; Widmark finds an arrow in his throat and he collapses "face down in the sand" (322). The cavalry does not appear in the nick of time; the two cowboy heroes bite the dust--or in this case, the sand. The reversal announces changing times: the Indians are taking charge. In King's novel, the Native people have taken back, reclaimed, their sense of identity, and their colonialist "civilizers" diminish in importance. In both of these passages, we hear the voice of the other, the people more written about than writing, more spoken about than speaking, these past so many decades. What these passages speak is a desire for recognition on the part of people who have been either invisible or unfairly constructed or both. The connection with children and women seems inevitable. The culturally invisible or diminished have something in common with women and children in that they, too, have been powerless to take pmt in the conversations of cultural and other forms of political activity. Now that we are beginning to hear voices of the other, however, we begin to realize that we have not heard these voices before, not because they were silent, but rather because our own ears were closed to all but that which we wished to hear. And by "we," I refer to those of us conditioned by the Eurocentric heritage of the colonizers of NOIth America. But habits are difficult to change, and the fact that I set out to introduce a set of essays on the opening of ears to voices not often enough heard in the past contains its own irony. Is this another colonialist gesture? Do we

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steal the voices of others in the very act of providing a medium for those voices? These are difficult questions that I hope this volume raises. This book consists of a series of essays that enact a postcolonial criticism. This kind of criticism is an activity rather than a method. Critical methods refer to the various ways we can approach the interpretation of a text; interpretation can take a formal or a histOl;cal or an ethical or a psychoanalytical or a feminist focus (this is not an exhaustive list), all of which mayor may not be postcolonial in impetus. The postcolonial critic directs his or her attention to resisting "colonialist perspectives" (Boehmer 3). I'll turn to Simon During for clarification: "post-colonialism is regarded as the need, in nations or groups which have been the victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images" (125). The activity I have in mind, then, is deeply committed to hearing the voices of those who have been silenced by various forces in our culture. Postcolonialism as an activity of mind is quite simply intent on both acknowledging the history of oppression and liberating the study of literature from traditional and Eurocentric ways of seeing. Postcolonial may refer either to primary works of literature or to commentary on that literature. In other words, we can have a postcolonial literature and a postcolonial criticism. The former derives from writers who are members of groups or nation states that once suffered under the mantle of colonialist control, whereas the latter may be the product of anyone sensitive to the need for recognition on the part of all peoples. First a word about terms: colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism, multiculturalism, diasporic writing, and the literature of postindependence. Colonialism is, of course, the term we use for an activity among peoples that involves one group assuming priority and authority over another group. Often the word accompanies the notion of imperial expansion, and refers most obviously to the expansion into far-flung areas of the globe of such European countries as Belgium, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and pre-eminently England, especially as these countries established colonies in the nineteenth century. Colonialism is not only a political and economic activity, but it also affects cultures and it assumes a certain mind-set: a colonial mentality. The colonial mentality assumes that the colonizer represents a more advanced state of civilization than the colonized does, and therefore that the colonizer has a right to assume a position of dominance. In terms of English-language literature, the colonialist mentality manifests itself in works that portray expansion "by way of myth and metaphor while at the same time masking

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suffering" (Boehmer 21). As Elleke Boehmer goes on to say: "Colonial writing is important for revealing the ways in which that world system could represent the degradation of other human beings as natural, an innate pat1 of their degenerate or barbarian state" (21). In English children's literature, the best-known colonialist writers include Rudyard Kipling, G. A. Henty, R. M. Ballantyne, Captain Man'yat, Bessie Marchant, and Hugh Lofting. Some critics argue, however, that the colonialist mind-set continues to manifest itself well into the twentieth century in seemingly innocent works such as the Babar books or the Curious George series (see Cummins, Kohl). Postcolonialism in literature refers to a self-consciousness on the pm1 of emerging peoples of a history, a culture, and an identity separate from and just as imp0l1ant as those of the imperial "masters." The literature of the past twenty years or so in countries such as Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, the islands in the Caribbean, and so on reveals an interest in national identity and pride separate from an attachment to England. The literature "critically scrutinizes the colonial relationship. It is writing that sets out in one way or another to resist colonialist pel'spectives" (Boehmer 3). The postcolonial writer desires to take his or her place as a historical subject. Some important postcolonial writers of children's literature include: Mordecai Richler, Barbara Smucker, Brian Doyle, Monica Hughes, James Houston (Canada); Patricia Wrightson, Gary Crews, Caroline Macdonald, Nadia Wheatley, John Marsden (Australia); Marguerite Poland, Jenny Seed, Lesley Beake, Diane Hofmyr (South Africa); Ruskin Bond, Satyajit Ray, Jamila Gavin (India); James Berry, Michael Anthony (Jamaica), Sam Selvon, Merle Hodge, F10ella Benjamin (Trinidad). Issues of national identity are often at the forefront of the themes such writers take up. What complicates things is that within some national borders postcolonial positioning is itself conflicted. The postcolonial writer confronts directly the forces of cultural domination and racial intolerance. In a country such as Canada, for example, the writers I mentioned above often maintain a Eurocentric sense of things even as they try to m1iculate something distinctly Canadian. At the same time, others within the country write from positions of subalternity: First Nations writers such as Thomas King or C. J. Taylor resist the dominance of Eurocentric literary patterns, as do other writers (in their own way) from ditTering cultural and racial backgrounds. I think of Afua Cooper, Himani Bannclji, Lillian Allen, Nazneen Sadiq, Vinita Srivastava, and Ramabai Espinet. The issues dealt with by writers such as the ones I have listed bring questions of race and culture sharply into focus. Since these issues are

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sensitive and easily threaten some of those who occupy the center or the dominant culture and race in multicultural and multiracial societies, we might expect some reaction. And in fact, it is necessary to report that a neocolonial sensibility does appear in many books for the young. Neocolonialism is simply a renewed drive on the prut of the dominant social and cultural forces to maintain their positions of privilege. We might see the global activities of such American corporations as Disney or McDonaIds as examples of neocolonialism in action. Popular culture is an important site for neocolonial activity. Whereas earlier colonialist activity had a political and territorial bias, neocolonialism is more deeply economic and cultural. In books for children, neocolonialism manifests itself as both a depiction of minority cultures as inveterately other and inferior in some ways to the dominant European or Eurocentric culture, or as an appropriation of other cultures-that is, an assimilation of minority cultures into the mainstream way of thinking. The first of these-the depiction of the subaltern as inherently inferior-is examined in a recent book by Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann, AflicanImages in Juvenile Literature (1996). Maddy and MacCann demonstrate how "imperialism still flourishes in the 1990s" (137). They examine, for example, the awardwinning book by Nancy Farmer, Do You Know Me (1993), and conclude that her depiction of people in Mozambique and Zimbabwe shows "only derision and the misunderstanding of a people's culture" (60). The assimilation of cultural difference is strikingly evident in a book such as Susan Jeffers's Brother Eagle, Sister Sky (1991). As Jon Stott notes: "no matter how well-intentioned Susan Jeffers is, no matter how great her respect for traditional and contemporru'y Native Americans, her book is another example of the creation of a 'white man's Indian,' a constmct which reflects not realities but a view of what a white author, painter, motion picture director, actor, politician, missionary, activist, or conservationist believes Native peoples to be, wants them to become, or wishes they already were" (18). Stott carefully examines the en'ors and manipulations both in text and illustration that Jeffers perpetrates in order to present a view of the world "more in accord with the author's own (worthwhile) views on gender equality and the environment." Jeffers creates a portrait of the Native American "to reinforce her own agenda" (22).1 Both the postcolonial and neocolonial enterprises are, in prut, a reaction to what we now refer to as multicultural societies. Countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and England are now in the late twentieth century fully multicultural in their social makeup. This fact of national demographics based on cultural and racial origins

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has resulted in books that deal directly with the relationship between people from differing cultural backgrounds. For example, the work of Paul Yee takes up both the history of the Chinese in Canada and the interaction between the Chinese community and the non{:hinese community, especially on Canada's west coast. The final chapter of Elwyn Jenkins's Children of the Sun (1993) deals with race relations and reconciliation as depicted in books for children in South Africa. In essence, multiculturalism in books for the young surfaces in books that try to deal sensitively and accurately with cultures other than the dominant AngloEuropean culture that has until recently assumed unquestioned priority over much of the English-speaking world. The contemporary promotion of multiculturalism gives rise to what Charles Taylor calls a "politics of recognition" (25), a desire evident in individual groups of people to be recognized as different from other groups, but at the same time equal to other groups. This is the impetus behind such works as Srivastava's A Giant Named Azalea (1991) or Bannelji 's Coloured Pictures (1991 ). Two other terms deserve consideration: diaspora and postindependence. Some of the writers I have referred to above do not live in their country ofbil1h. Indeed, in the current multicultural situation many writers write from what used to be thought of as positions of exile. Exile is perhaps not the most efficient word because or its sense of enforced departure from home. Diaspora is the more accurate term here. According to Victor J. Ramraj: there are two bodies of writing that could be designated as diasporic. The first comes from the descendants of peoples uprooted from their homelands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and transported thJOl one region of the globe to another to serve British economic needs: Af,;cans as slaves to the West Indies, and Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese as indentured labourers to such far-flung comers of the Empire as the West Indies, Fiji, and Mauriturius. The second is by those from English-speaking regions of the Indian subcontinent, Asia, Africa, and the diasporic communities of the West Indies and Fiji, who for economic, political, cultural, and familial or personal reasons left their homelands for London, England, which many, as citizens of the Empire, considered their capital, and for North America and Australia, continents that long had provided living space for peoples from over-crowded Europe. (214)

Ramraj goes on to explain that "the term diasporic writing has come to be associated with works produced by globally dispersed minority communities that have common ancestral homelands" (214).

x.,'Cvi

Introduction

Writers of the diaspora write from positions of emergence-an emergence from a culture and place left behind that forms a crucial aspect of their identity, and from the culture and place in which they now live that inevitably must affect the identity they once located in their place of origin. In effect, diasporic writing does not set out to preserve cultural identity so much as it works to negotiate that identity (see Chow 25). Negotiation differs from an assimilation into the new culture; it resists acceptance of universal patterns of behavior and thinking. The pressure to universalize experience-what Chow calls the "rhetoric of universals"-"ensures the ghettoized existence of the other, be it in the form of a different culture, religion, race, or sex" (lot). Truly diasporic writing sets out to bring people together not by homogenizing experience or history, but rather by focusing on "historical forces in their indivisible or irreducible relations with one another" (Chow 97; italics in original). A novel such as Bette Bao Lord's In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (1984) is a case in point. The protagonist, young Shirley Temple Wong, learns to cherish her heritage and embrace her new country and its customs. As the title of the novel and the protagonist's name indicate, this book's interest is in drawing differing cultures into conjunction without erasing one or the other. Another example is Paul Yee's The Curses of Third Uncle (1986) in which Yee combines both the history of the Chinese community in Canada with the struggle of fOUlteenyear-old Lillian to come to terms with her diasporic identity. Finally, we have the term "postindependence." Meena Khorana, in a recent article, reflects on the difference between the terms "postcolonial" and "postindependence." The first of these terms carries with it the sense of an ongoing struggle against the forces of colonialism-the "post" does not indicate a struggle over and done with. On the other hand, postindependence clearly refers to a time when a nation has achieved its freedom from a colonialist power. The postcolonial writer is preoccupied, Khorana indicates, "with a hybrid identity" (19). Writers from "newly independent nations" (e.g., Sri Lanka, India) "are developing national identities, free of the ambivalences of the colonial period" (19). This may be true of a country such as India, but for other countries such as Canada or Australia independence did not bring and end to "the ambivalences of the colonial period." Indeed, the intricacies of colonialism and postcolonialsm are such that it is difficult to see these as truly separate from each other. Ultimately, then, we have two related notions: colonialism and postcolonialism. In terms of primary creative vision, writers who give us visions of expansion in which a dominant group appears superior morally,

i1lflVduction

xx"ii

intellectually, and socially to an other group are colonialist writers. Perhaps the best known of these writers in English is Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe (1719) set the pattern for colonialist fiction. The nineteenth century especially saw a whole spate of "Robinsonades" that perpetuated the myth of European superiority over natives in many parts of the world. But the kind of thing these books expressed finds renewed expression in contemporary works that continue to suggest a version of human interaction in which the white person is somehow privileged. A prime example is the 1991 Newbery Medal-winning book by Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee (1990). In this novel, young Jetrrey Lionel Magee runs into the stuff of myth; he becomes a hero. Along the way, he lives with a black family and brings to the life of African-Americans a sense of the rightness of things. Invested in this boy's goodness is the whiteness of things good. Writers who self-consciously interrogate the enforced diminishment of indigenous peoples or minorities of any sOl1 write from positions of postcoloniality. The postcolonial creative writer need not focus exclusively on political matters, but her interest in emerging identity and selfdetermination inevitably brings to her work political concerns. Take, for example, Jamaica Kincaid's Lllcy (1990) or Jamila Gavin's The Wheel of Sw:va (1992). Both of these novels deal with young people coming to terms with displacement. Lucy leaves the West Indies for North America where she strives to find a place for herself and make an independent living. Marvinder and Jaspal, in The Wheel of SlIrya, leave India for England where they, too, strive to find stability. Both book~ implicitly question a social, economic, and political system that places barriers against immigrants of such obviously minority and racially "other" backgrounds. Lucy remains in her new land determined to find accommodation there, even if this involves discomfOlt; Jaspal expresses his desire to return to India at the end of The Wheel of SUlJa, and in the sequels to this novel, we see that he does. But what of the postcolonial critic? The position of the critic in postcolonial studies differs somewhat from the position of the creative writer in that the critic can bring a postcolonial perspective to works that themselves are not postcolonial. In other words, postcolonialism provides the 0ppOltunity for revisionary readings of canonical texts. For example, we have readings of writers such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and George MacDonald that are frankly postcolonial. Obviously, Burnett's evocation of India in both The Secret Garden and A Little Princess has a colonialist aspect that has remained unnoticed until recently. We can now see how the appropriation of the garden in the first of these books mimics the

xxviii

Introduction

colonialist enterpJise as first articulated in Defoe, and the depiction of Ram Dass in the second book perpetuates stereotypes of the person from India that can only continue misunderstanding rather than lead to acceptance through sensitivity to other cultures and peoples. The postcolonial critic, then, has a responsibility to read works of literature for their stated and unstated assumptions about the other. To put this another way, the activity of the postcolonial critic is political; he or she intervenes in the ways cultures construct persons. But before I can close this survey of postcolonial activities, I must acknowledge an irony in what I write. If postcolonalism denotes a Iiberatory activity through recognition of uniqueness, then children themselves as postcolonial subjects are in an odd situation. They neither write the books they read, nor write critical commentary on those books. As Jacqueline Rose and others have noted, children are colonial subjects. Adults are the colonizers; children the colonized. Writers, critics, none of us, as Perry Nodelman has argued, can escape the role of colonizer. Speaking of his own "imperial tendencies," Nodelman admits: "in order to combat colonialism, I am recommending a benevolently helpful colonising attitude towards children" (34). I think, however, the patronizing of children here is unnecessary. What postcolonial activities on the part of adult writers and critics offer is not merely a discourse for gathering in children and forming them in the image adults desire; it is also a discourse that allows for a greater variety in versions of history and social and cultural constructions than was available to earlier generations of children. The young reader has the opportunity to choose between natTatives that force questions and choices upon him or her. Postcolonial narratives-whether fictional or critical-open space for the reader to see and hear peoples from a variety of backgrounds and cultural practices. This can only open possibility, not close it. The closing of the American (or Canadian or Australian or Indian, etc.) mind is the enterprise of colonialist and neocolonialist writers, but postcolonial activity seeks to open that mind. Tolerance and understanding are, in fact, the aim of postcolonial writing; tolerance and understanding can only come through opposition to prevailing conventions of belief and behavior. Opposition in this sense does not mean thoughtless refusal to accede to convention, but rather a critical examination of convention. As I have said elsewhere: "children and their literature are always postcolonial, if by postcolonial we mean that which stands outside and in opposition to tradition and power" (8). Respect for children and their right to inherit a world in which the possibilities for being are open is the mark of the postcolonial writer.

Intmduction

xxix

POSl'COLONIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS This book has three sections: theory, colonialism, and posicolonialism and neocolonialism. This structure is a bit artificial as the majority of the essays in this book are postcolonial in impetus. And yet the division is useful, especially for readers who are relatively new to postcolonial studies. I do not intend to precis each essay, but I do think it will be useful for readers who read this introduction first to know what lies ahead. The essays in Section 1 are largely theoretical in nature, and they move from Shaobo Xie's meditation on otherness and the postcolonial project to free otherness from diminishment, to Jean Webb's attempt to set the stage for a comparative look at postcolonialism in England, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. Xie argues convincingly that the postcolonial enterprise is an ongoing struggle to forge what he terms a "globalized postcoloniality," a recognition and acceptance of all peoples in all places. This essay serves as a clear introduction to postcolonial thought. Webb's essay takes up Xie's call for acceptance and tolerance in its examination of emerging identities, as manifested in children's books, in several postcolonial situations. In between, we have Ellen Batty's intensely felt and argued critique of various relief organizations' appropriation of the figure of the child as a neocolonialist feint, John Stephens's examination of the emerging multiculture in Australia, and Peter Hunt and Karen Sands's cautionary tale of postcolonialism's failings. This last essay is pm1icularly chilling in its suggestion that in post-1945 animal fantasies in Britain, "you might be forgiven for not noticing that the empire has disappeared." This essay clearly indicates how urgent a discussion of this book's subject is; it also nicely illustrates the intractable set of the colonial mind. Section 2 takes for its focus colonialism itself. Here the essays by Clare Bradford, Mavis Reimer, and Jean Stringam take up some aspect of British colonial influence in the late nineteenth century. Bradford shows how deeply coded were the assumptions of British superiority to indigenous Australians, but she also shows how the language of empire has its own "gaps, tensions, and inconsistencies." As for Reimer. she gives a remarkably close reading of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess in its several versions, including the 1995 Hollywood film. She, too, looks not only for colonialist markings of privilege and its reproduction in time, but she also raises the question as to whether a notion of imagination, so strong in Burnett's book and so compelling for the reader, is not only a means of ensuring privilege, but also a means of interrogating it. Jean Stringam's study of late-nineteenth-century hunting

xxx

Introduction

stories focuses on the manner in which these stories of adventure code imperial thinking. Empire, adventure, and colonial discourse is her theme. Finally in this section, we have Dan Hade's study of the "American Girls" books. This essay shows how stubborn the colonial ambition is. These books are contemporary; colonialism is still with us. And Hade also shows us how intricately connected to the marketplace colonialist forces are. Innocence, all of these essays imply, is a disguise assumed by those with designs upon the unsuspecting. The final section takes up a number of postcolonial texts in Canada, Kenya, and Nigeria. The first two essays, those by Saldanha and Petzold, take up the political issue of multiculturalism in Canada, something that does, however, have ramifications for the situations in countries such as South Africa, Australia, and England and the United States. Petzold's interests are deeply historical, and he argues that a look at the past in both its pleasant and its unpleasant aspects is essential for any future improvement in societies formed by cultural diversity. Saldanha, on the other hand, more eagerly addresses the contemporary insistence of the dominant society to perpetuate its position of privilege at the expense of minority peoples. Focusing on several women writers in Canada who write from diaspOlic positions (especially writers with South Asian backgrounds), she locates a truly postcolonial body of work for young people in Canada, a body of work often overlooked or slighted in reviews of children's books. The next two essays by Lovesey and Allison look at major writing from Africa. Lovesey discusses the children's books of Ngiigi wa Thiong'o and Allison gives her conclusions concerning the pedagogical usefulness of books by Buchi Emecheta. As I write this, a discussion occurs on the Internet listserve called Child_lit concerning children and guns in Palestinian children's literature; this discussion nicely dovetails with Lovesey's concluding assessment that Ngiigi's children's stories "are distressing in their strident political rhetoric" and "in their celebration of children and guns." The content of Ngiigi's work for children is a challenge to our old certainties about the nature of books for children. So, too, is the content of Emecheta's books for the young. Here are books that mix the formal elements familiar to Western readers of narrative with cultural content quite different from what we know. As Allison concludes, Emecheta writes books that can assist young readers on this continent to "develop into interrogators of their own society, as well as Emecheta's." The final two essays nicely reHect each other; they are mirror images, one reversing the perspective of the other. My own meditation on

Introduction

xxxi

knowingness takes a critical look at two recent books for young children-one American and the other Canadian-from the perspective of cultural appropriation. My interest is in how well-meaning books can work against the very tolerance of cultural difference they ostensibly set out to foster. Jan Susina, on the other hand, examines the case of Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) to chronicle its reappropriation in the work of such writers and illustrators as Julius Lester, JelTY Pinkney, and Fred Marcellino. But in conclusion, Susina comes round to a position similar to mine in the previous essay when he notes that despite the apparent reclaiming of Bannerman's story for a postcolonial and postmodern audience, our contemporary retellers of this story cannot avoid "lingering elements of Bannerman's colonialism." This final chapter nicely rounds to the beginning of the volume by reminding us, as Xie does at the outset, that the postcolonial project is an ongoing one demanding constant vigilance and careful scrutiny of the myriad ways humans have of maneuvering into positions of power and authority. The volume closes with an Afterword by Victor J. Ramraj. Readers will want to read this in conjunction with Xie's opening chapter since these two essays neatly set out both the imp0l1ance of the postcolonial enterprise and arguments against an insistence upon postcolonialism's privileging of otherness. The debate focuses on the notion of universality and its essentializing force. What the implicit exchange between Ramraj and Xie points out is just how unfinished a project this book and its subjects really are. NOTE I Jeffers's BlVther Eagle. Sister St.. .y has received much criticism of the kind Stott brings to his discussion. For an approach to the book from the Native American perspective and for a review of Stott's book, readers should check the following site on the World Wide Web: http://indy4.fdl.cc.mn.us/-isk/books/baddies/ badmenu.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bannerji. Himanni. Colol/red Pictures. Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1991. Boehmer, Elleke. Colollial & Postcolollial Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Chow, Rey. Writillg Diaspora: 1i:lctics of Illferl'ellfioll ill Contemporary Cull/lral Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Cummins, June. "The Resisting Monkey: 'Curious George,' Slave Captivity Narratives, and the Postcolonial Condition," ARIEL 28 (January 1997): 69-83.

xxxii

Introduction

During, Simon. "Postmodemism or Post-Colonialism Today," The Post-Colollial Studies Reade/: Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 125-129. Farmer, Nancy. Do You Kllow Me. IIIus. by Shelley Jackson. New York: Orchard Books, 1993. Gavin, Jamila. The Wheel of Surya. London: Methuen, 1992. Hodge, Merle. Crick Crack, Monkey. London: Heinemann, 1981. Jeffers, Susan. Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle. New York: Dial Books, 1991. Jenkins, Elwyn. Children of the Sun: Selected W,.ite,.s and Themes in South African Children's Literature. Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993. Khorana, Meena. "Postcolonial or Postindependence?" ARIEL 28 (January 1997): 16-20. King, Thomas. G,.een Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Kohl, Herbert. Should We Bum Babar? Essays on Child,.ell's Literature and the Power of Sto,.ies. New York: The New Press, 1995. Lord, Bette Bao. In the Yea,. of the Boa,. and Jackie Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Maddy, Yulisa Amadu, and Donnarae MacCann. Af,.ican Images ill Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,1996. McGillis, Roderick. "Postcolonialism, Children, and their Literature," ARIEL, 28 (January 1997): 7-15. Nodelman, Perry. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature," ChLA Quarterly 17 (1992): 29-35. Ramraj, Victor J. "Diasporas and Multiculturalism," New Literatures ill English. Ed. Bruce King. Oxford: OUP, 1996.214-229. Spinelli, Jerry. Maniac Magee. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Srivastava, Vinita. A Giant Named Azalea. IIIus. by Kyo Maclear. Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1991. Stott, Jon C. Native Americans ill Child,.en's Literatu,.e. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1995. Taylor, Charles. Muiticllituralism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Yee, Paul. The Curses of Third Uncle. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1986.

CHAPTER I

Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as an Unfinished Project SHAOBOXIE

Every time consciousness breaks with its past. it renews itself through identifying with an "other's" thought. To speak from an other's thought is to redefine and renarrativize the world. The critical mind's recent turn to postcolonialism aims to rethink, recuperate, and reconstruct racial, ethnic, and cultural others that have been repressed, misrepresented, omitted, stereotyped, and violated by the imperial West with all its institutions and strategies for dominating the non-Western. Indeed, the world over the last four hundred years has been dominated by an asymmetry of power relations between West and non-West. Only recently have those other peoples and cultures begun to make their voices heard. Following the postmodern dissolution of the West, postcolonial narratives or counternalTatives have emerged in large numbers, interrogating and investigating the history of encounters between metropolis and periphery, colonizer and colonized, and dismantling imperial structures of knowledge and feeling in the realm of culture. Like all other counterhegemonic projects, postcolonialism recuperatively celebrates and theorizes the experience of otherness as a matrix of counterhegemonic agency. The emergence of postcolonial narratives dialectically marks a complex historical moment. On the one hand, it testifies to a changed world characterized by increased tolerance and understanding of racial and cultural difference; on the other, it unmistakably min'ors a world saturated with imperialist ideas, stereotypes, and narratives. In this view, postcolonialism as a powerful, systematic critique of the Eurocentric "Grand Narrative" of history is best assessed as a mere beginning. Indeed, it will take a protracted. arduous neo-Gramscian J

2

Voices of the Other

project to educate a world burdened with four hundred years of coloniality. Instead of having completely emancipated itself from imperialism, the world remains caught up in neocolonialism or the "hegemonic phase" of imperialism (JanMohamed 62). This is why, as I have argued elsewhere, the postcolonial "does not signify the demise or pastness of coloniality; rather, it points to a colonial past that remains to be inten'ogated and critiqued"; the postcolonial project as such is "more formal and symbolic yet more thorough and subversive in addressing colonialism than anticolonialism has been" (Xie 15). Underwriting all postcolonial counterhegemonic projects is the urgent need to redefine and reconstruct the identity of the (neo)colonial other, to "force a radical rethinking and reformulation of forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and western domination" (Prakash 8). The reformulated identity of social and cultural otherness has radically altered our conceptual knowledge of the world. When Julia Kristeva asserts the Freudian unconscious as the recalcitrant facet of the self, she teaches us how the "foreigner is within us. And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious" (191). More recently, in reconceiving our true identity as self-otherness, Roderick McGillis convincingly rehabilitates otherness as part of the self. "[T]o enter the world of another," he said, "we ourselves must become 'Other' than we are. We are always faced with the 'Other.' We cannot escape otherness." To read, to live in language and society, is to "share a oneness with others" ("Self' 223). When Homi Bhabha relaunches the colonial sign or subject as diffCrance, recuperating the emancipatory counterhegemonic potential from the ambivalence of the cultural subject, he describes the identity of both self and other as hybrid. Indeed, cultural hybridity, postcolonial, diasporic, and migrant in nature, is perhaps the most damaging of all threats to the hierarchical syntax of Western imperialism. In reasserting Derridean difJerance on postcolonial terrain, Bhabha offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the hitherto marginalized grey, ambiguous space of culture, redefining the colonial subject and the colonial discourse in terms of the in-between, and more importantly, mobilizing indeterminacy of colonial discourse into agency of counterhegemonic resistance. All these new conceptions of otherness shock us into a renewed perspective on the relationship of self and other. They point to the complexity and multipositionality of identity, reformulating the issue of identity as a matter of difference, hence challenging us to move beyond reductive binary structures of knowledge. For all these enabling reconstructions of

Rethinking the [demit)'

~fCultural

Otherness

3

social and cultural spaces, however, the counterhegmonic project of otherness politicized as racial/ethnic difference is far from fulfilling itself. For there stiII remain attempts to subjugate otherness to the imperialism of sameness, and the hegemonic West stiII tries to reduce radical cultural/racial difference to manageable proportions. In his recent book Literar)' TheOl:v alld the Claims ofHistOl)~ for example, Satya P. Mohanty questions whether it is useful or necessary "to conceive the Other as a radically separable and separate entity in order for it to command our respect" (] 21). He is opposed to poststructuralist cultural relativism that celebrates "discontinuity;' "difference and heterogeneity," and "plurality as opposed to reductive unities." For "to radicalize the idea of difference" (120), to advocate "the plurality of criteria of judgment and rationality" (129), would deny common ground between different cultures. Mohanty refutes the idea that "individual elements of a given culture must be interpreted primarily in terms of that culture, relative, that is, to its own unique system of meanings and values" (122). In his view, the commonality between different cultures and peoples derives from their "capacity to act purposefully" and from the fact that "the human being is in principle capable of agency and basic rationality" (139). The binding universal humanity between us and them is, Mohanty argues, that "we possess the capacity for a cel1ain kind of second degree thought, that is, not merely the capacity to act purposefully but also to reflect on our actions, to evaluate actions and purposes in terms of larger ideas we might hold about, say, our political and moral world or our sense of beauty or form" (139). As is well known, Western modernism rests on two assumptions-universal rationality and objective truth-in its endeavor to repress internal and external others. Mohanty's conception of cultural otherness threatens to homogenize differential otherness. Although his speculative circumspection seems to intend to reconstruct and rehabilitate indigenous otherness into cultural discourse, his reiteration of cultural commonality and universal rationality tends to subsume cultural marginalities into the imperialism of the same. Mohanty's overemphasis on commonality between different cultures prioritizes identity over ditJerence. There are no doubt cel1ain universal traits shared among separate cultures, and difference always presupposes sameness between disparate entities. But what constitute their distinct, peculiar character and their differential relationship are differences instead of commonalities. Mohanty's position on binding universal humanity recalls Northrop Frye's privileging of primary over

4

Voices of the Other

ideological concerns. Frye abstracts a universal desire from disparate cultural texts to prove the continuity between the historical past and the present, and between different individuals and social classes. His utopian vision of history insists on universal values and the collective unity of society. In Frye's terms, the utopian privileges the primary concerns of human life while the ideological foregrounds its secondary concerns. Frye considers primary concerns in terms of universal and eternal needs, and secondary concerns as "patriotic and other attachments of loyalty, religious beliefs, and class conditioned attitudes and behaviour" (Frye 42). But Frye's nalTative framework proves insufficient to analyze historical specificity and conflicted relationship between times and cultures. The same can be said of Mohanty's theory of universal commonality. Mohanty's rhetoric is suspiciously informed by a nostalgia for the imperialism of the same, or for what Derrida terms "white mythology." In Den'ida's view, the Europeans take their own mythology, their own logos, the mythos of their idiom, for the universal form of what they must call reason (Margins 213). Mohanty's incorporating of the indigenous into identity discourse through the entrance of neutralized or diminished difference threatens to coerce racial/cultural others into "a hierarchically organized (my italics) relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns 'its' other" (Cixous and Clement 70). In the following, I will argue that the postcolonial discourse of difference must be conceived as an unfinished project, for only through celebrating and legitimizing difference can the uncanny, alien otherness be recognized, accepted, and appreciated. It is well arguable that difference must be posited as the grounding reality of the world at the present moment of history. In order for cultural difference to be truly rehabilitated, we must demonstrate how it has been violated and reduced to the status of marginality, and what discursive mechanics Western imperialism has deployed in keeping the other under control. Finally, I will demonstrate that if difference has been used as the reason for Western empires' conquering of the indigenous, then we must now turn difference into a fountainhead of counterhegemonic agency. Let's first take a look at the hierarchical structure of West and nonWest as encountered in Conrad's Heart of Darklless. Marlow tells his audience that he and his crew penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness .... We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. ... The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to

Rethinking the Identity ojCllltllral Othemess

5

us, welcoming us-who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse ... we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign-and no memories. (51)

Here, Western man is confronted with an uncanny, disturbing, impenetrable, prehistoric, primitive, eviJ other whom he has no terms for comprehending and categorizing. One may have to agree with Fredric Jameson that the indigenous African is feared "because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar" (Political Unconsciolls 115). Such dismaying otherness causes an existential fear of the unknown, of what Heidegger terms the "recalcitrant earth," which is formless, undecided, measureless, and impenetrable. This amorphous earth is demonic, degraded, chaotic, irrational, and evil. In Western philosophy, culture or civilization is always opposed to nature or primitivity. Culture refers to norm, canon, and modernity; nature designates whatever is unwholesome, irrational, coarse, uncultivated, remote, anthropologically unfamiliar. This culture/nature opposition was redeployed in the confrontation between European metropolis and non-European peripheral countries in the nineteenth century, the latter heing assigned to the side of underdeveloped, demonic nature. Just as culture is to conquer nature. so Enlightenment Reason is to conquer barbarity. This is how Western modernity justifies its supremacy over indigenes in the world. Such violent hierarchy of imperialism becomes reproduced in E. M. Forster's A Passage to 11ldia. in which Fielding, the school principal who displays genuine sympathy and friendship for Indians, sees the buildings of Venice stand in the right place, whereas in poor India everything was placed wrong. He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be form? Form stammered here and there in a mosque, became rigid through nervousness even, but oh, these Italian churches! ... the harmony between works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form .... 11w Mediterranean is the human norm. (278; my own italics)

This passage portrays an exemplary moment of aesthetic imperialism: there is no thought and beauty of form in Indian culture. Actually what

6

Voices of the Other

Fielding is lamenting is not so much the absence of form in Indian landscape and architecture, as the absence of the familiar, Western kind of landscape and architecture. What shocks me is that this otherwise amiable, gentle, understanding, compassionate schoolmaster should so guiltlessly reproduce such blatant imperialist gestures. The most striking feature of the Forster novel is the pervasive ubiquitous mood, an enveloping, symbolic atmosphere of uncanny feeling, mysterious landscape, and impenetrable meaning. The landscape of India can be read as the personification of the Indian mind. As lanMohamed has pointed out, "[Forster] characterizes India as a land of pathos, of an ontological homesickness, a land that knows 'the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth'" (75); and the "pathos is embodied in the Marabru· Hills and Caves and is characterized by their eternal ambiguity ... Forster takes some pains to establish, through the discussion about the mounds and a snake, that the Indian mind is steeped in and thrives on ambiguity" (75). Forster describes the Marabar caves in these terms: "And if several people talk at once an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently" (159). It is impossible to "romanticize the Marabar, because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind" (161). What the caves represent is the prehistoric, mysterious, impenetrable, and the unrepresentable, formless, and meaningless. The Eurocentrist notion of nonWestern others as degraded, uncanny, and prehistorical is both the cause and the result of Western historicism. The West names the non-Western other as prehistoric and formless because the latter falls outside the orbit of Western historicism, and because its aesthetic tastes and principles are repulsively different. The Eurocentric construction of knowledge, Robett Young writes, "operates through forms of expropriation and incorporation of the other," reproducing "at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West" (3). In this sense, Western "philosophy reduplicates Western foreign policy" (14). What Western imperialism deals with is its own projections and fantasies about the indigenes instead of the indigenous truth. If the indigenous other is deprived of his historically formed difference and forced into the straitjacket of universal reason, then the other, "in manifesting himself as a being, loses his alterity" (Levinas 346). For Western knowledge or theory to master the alien, intransigent, uncanny other, the latter has to be castrated of its virile difference to become "prut of the same" (Young 13).

Rethinking the Identit), of Cultural Otherness

7

Such power relations between West and non-West have been perpetuated until recently when critics like Foucault called upon the world to break out of the imperialist logic of modernism. It has "to be asked of the West," Foucault suggested, "what entitles its culture, its science, its social organization, and finally its rationality itself, to be able to claim universal validity: was this not a mirage associated with economic domination and political hegemony?" (qtd. in Young 9). Indeed, Western imperialism managed to subjugate non-Western others to its historicist metanarratives because of its military and technological superiority brought about by the emergence of capitalism. I What Simon During says in discussing Lyotard's conception of modernity is helpful here: "the modern is marked by the mergence of instrumental reason. In modernity, criteria of what [Lyotardl calls 'performaticity' overcome appeals to tradition or metaphysical truth. What counts is not why an act is done or why a thought is thought, but how efficiently and to what immediate end. Applied science is the home of instrumental reason, which (as research) gradually comes to be the standard against which all knowledge is measured" (455). The institution of instrumental reason "has discursive consequences: cognitive utterances which can be verified and permit control over nature are privileged over those which cannot" (455). According to European instrumental reason all those colonized countries that lack the competing technologies for controlling nature are secondary, peripheral, undeveloped, uncivilized, no matter how highly sophisticated their culture and social organization. What enabled Western empires to conquer the indigenous, obviously, was not their moral, intellectual, or even social superiority, but their warships and cannons. As lanMohamed points out, "the indigenous peoples are subjugated by colonialist material practices (population transfers, and so forth), the efficacy of which finally depends on the technological superiority of European military forces" (62). Indeed, the Western "perception of racial difference" is informed by Western empires' "economic motives" (JanMohamed 61), and reinforced and reproduced by their technological and military hegemony. The emergence of instrumental reason and the capitalist mode of production urged Western empires to seek colonies and exploit their "natural resources thoroughly and ruthlessly through the various imperialist material practices"; these economic and territorial ambitions were a1ticulated in cultural, intellectual, and moral terms as philanthropic desires to "civilize" the savage, to introduce him to "all the benefits of Western cultures" (lanMohamed 62).2 Western imperialism deploys values of universal rationality and

8

Voices of the Other

objective truth propagated since the Enlightenment as the rationale for imposing its own moral norms, intellectual standards, cultural canons, and sociopolitical institutions upon those indigenous peoples whose histories had developed different from and parallel to Western history. The hegemony of Western modernism has obscured the fact that there is "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries" (Borges 435). In order to colonize indigenous natives, Western imperialism has to represent otherness as evil; and in order to secure domination over the world, it has to totalize cultural/racial difference into the uniform logic of capitalism. Such historical experience of cultural otherness calls for an enabling reconception of radical difference. If difference has been violated and marginalized as inferior, then now it must be reinstated and recuperated as a counterhegemonic strategy, a way of mobilizing, activating discursive agency or energy. Every critique of the homogenizing total system has to pose itself as a certain other in relation to that system before it can produce some true knowledge of difference about a situation that is not available to others-what Jameson calls group "standpoint knowledge" ("History and Class Consciousness" 70). Difference has to be seen as both victim and victor. It is repressed and recalcitrant for the same reason. Every new discourse that pushes institutionalized knowledge to crisis emerges as a figure of radical difference. This is what has always happened in history-otherwise there would have been no epistemological ruptures, or, in Derrida's terms, there would have been no "substitutions of center for center" in the history of thought ("Structure, Sign and Play" 1117). Difference became narrativized and politicized with Marx; it was celebrated with Nietzsche; it became radicalized and theorized in the postmodern moment. Jameson is correct in saying that a politics of difference is also frequently called the politics of identity (Seeds of Time 18), and that "It is on the basis of [... ] Identity alone that Difference can be productively transformed into a political program" (Seeds 66). For difference is, after all, a mode of existence of identity. The postcolonial project celebrates radical difference as an undeniable social or cultural existence, turning its marginalization into situational knowledge. It is politically incOITect, and socially or culturally violent, to overemphasize commonality to undercut the significance of politics of difference. It goes without saying that there must be a certain or essential degree of commonality between cultures, social individuals, or classes for those conflicted forces to

Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness

9

engage each other in sociopolitical dialogues, but such commonalit.y must not be exaggerated as a license for eliminating cultural or social specificity. I am not trying to ahsolutize difference: difference and sameness always are mutually constitutive. What I want to do is perceive the world and its history from the perspective of difference. The politics of difference must, therefore, be conceived as an unfinished project: the imperialism of the same has reigned for over two thousand years; it provides the dominant discourse or social group with power to dominate and control difference, be it ethnic, social, political, gender, or racial, as alien, insane, debased. For all kinds of people who are socially, politically, and ethnically marginalized to claim legitimacy and sovereignty, they have to asselt themselves as unassimilable and unsubsumable. They owe their discursive power to critiquing, intell'ogating, and unsettling the repressive imperial total system of social life. This is, for example, true of contemporary feminism in which difference takes on rigorous political power: In the beginning are our differences. The new love dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention. The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she is everywhere, she exchanges, she is the desire-thatgives ... She finds not her sum but her differences .... Heterogeneous, yes ... the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous. (Cixous 260)

This is an exemplary moment of celebrating and radicalizing difference. In insisting on difference, the marginalized others can turn the tables on the dominant. Difference needs to adopt the catachrestic strategy of "reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding" (Spivak 69). Cixous' "erotogeneity of the heterogeneous" echoes Kristeva's conception of the semiotic feminine other, which, as the disruptive and irrational in character, writes outside and threatens to subvert the rational, imperial order of discourse. Equally radicalized is the cultural/ethnic di/Terence that is being celebrated in postcolonial work, which pushes the uncanny, violated, disturbing form of otherness to the extreme. This can be best seen through the lens of Jam. Ismail's "From Sacred Text." This poem is written in English, yet the numerous alien names of people and plants and animals tend to defamiliarize the colonizing English. It plays with the English language, breaks up its words and grammatical rules, redeploying the post modern strategy of linguistic play for the reinscription of the diasporic subject.

10

Voices of the Other

One major feature of Ismail's poem is its syntactic fragmentation. The whole poem reads fragmented, sporadic, discontinuous, featuring iITegular spaces, gaps, encased text, no capitalization, ruptured syntax, musical notes and split words. What first grips the readers' attention is not the configuration and signification of the cOlTelated words and lines, but the gapped, missing, and ruptured spaces: 4.

mean pause said

menopause said: him. men pause. said : me 110 pause! (Ismail 124)

This stanza begins with the concluding word of the preceding stanza, hence the coherence between the two stanzas. However, at the beginning of Stanza 4, Section A, is a dangling period, which cuts the stanza off from what goes before. Further, readers may find themselves lost in the gaps between the irregularly spaced punctuation marks and words and in the lacunae of the repeated "said" in each line which rings like a voice without a head-the violation of the English syntax. Fragmentation does not stop at the syntactic level; even words become split and maimed as shown in the following stanza of Section 0: 3.

bassoon transmllfe s analects 9. XXX with the helpofa 11I0rningglory ill kathmandu

flow

ardent wh it e glo

er, of the mil k morning throa t, ry hI 00 111

sweet art ? smaller than the Ptfl7Jle how i've not . missed you (Ismail 131)

What renders the stanza uncanny is not merely the juxtaposing of the encased text on the left side and the irregularly spaced punctuation marks and words outside it, but also the splitting of words themselves. The fragmented words impede the readers' attention, violating their reading habits, and forcing them to confront the implications of the mutilated words and gaping spaces. The writerly text seems to renew protocols between English and its readers. It is no longer merely a matter of challenging poetic conventions,

11

Rethinking the Identity afCultural Otherness

but rupturing the English language. It is English that one reads here, but it is an alienated, estranged form of the language. The split, ambivalent writing subject alternates between two cultures, two languages, and two worlds. It seems to have found its best mode of existence in the fragmented, split fOlms of writing. The uncanny play with English words discussed above can only come from those who live both inside and outside the language, and who are therefore more apt to make sense of spacing. In Stanza 4, the passage from "mean pause" to "men pause" to "me no pause" is made possible in Chinese Pidgin English. A more politically consequent gesture of rupturing the master's language occurs in stanza 7 of Section B; 7. staring at the typo 'accllmiliate' made by a chinese from ;:;lIIbarbwe, bosan grilllllled:yeah, acclllllulate + humiliate another time someone refilmed jlvm paris said: the agh de ,rillm[.

we saw

it often happed to bomn this wa\,: new word one day, twinning another.

accumiliate:

ag/r! de 'riIl11l/ (Ismail. 128)

"Accumiliate" is a variation of "accumulation," and the poet turns this difference into a locus of negotiation and reinscription. He magically metamorphoses this word into a combination of "accumulate" and "humiliate"; Isn't accumulated humiliation the collective experience of difference in the world? After the spelling out of this accumulated history of humiliation, the author turns the Arc de Triomphe into "agh de triumf," hence "agh, de triumr'-"Agh, the triumph." This is the moment marking the author's sense of triumph over the Master. Ismail's textual practice precisely recalls what Gayatri Spivak terms the catachrestic strategy of "reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding" (69). His writing also recalls what Mary Louis Pratt terms "code-switching.") By code switching, Ismail plays with English "fluidly and strategically," refusing to be owned by the dominant language. His fragmented, discontinuous text performs a double job of reproducing the historical scenes of the marginalized subjects' "mouthless anger" and languageless fragmentation, and at the same time decolonizing the dominant syntax of culture. This uncanny poem is a Bmthesian moment of transgression beyond the imperial syntax of sentence that is intended to collapse all linguistics,

12

Voices of the Other

linguistics that holds on to grammar, syntax, and logic. It is also a moment of the subject breaking away from the "enlightened" order of discourse into an indeterminate space of twilight, where he or she surrenders to a chaotic total How of words, images, voices, memories outside of the boundaries of the sentence, a How of sedimented forms of meaning and repressed unconscious set free. According to Barthes, "The sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions" (50). The sentence as such provides Ismail with a conceptual frame for investigating the subject of cultural difference. The hegemonic discourse of modemity tends to subjugate all its subjects to its historicist syntax of narrative, molding their consciousness, structuring their feelings and sensory data accordingly. However, the subject of cultural otherness threatens to subvert the hierarchical syntax of modernity. For the diasporic, migrant subject to dwell in the colonizing space of modernity is to be subject to its grammar of communication, its modes of cultural signification, but never totally contained by the space; instead, it is always positioned on the boundary of modernity, at once in and outside of the syntax of Western imperialism. The Ismail poem is a radical figuration of the subaltern subvelting the imperialism of syntax and the syntax of imperialism at the same time. By writing outside the syntax of imperialism, the violated and repressed others can force the world to confront their historical experience, and can prove their own intellectual, cultural, and moral excellence or equivalence. In this sense, radical difference is indeed the cultural others' best form of political imagination. It constitutes a powerful strategy of counterhegemonic negotiation. As long as the world still suffers from imperialism, and as long as culture remains laden with unquestioned imperial structures of knowledge and feeling, the ethnic/racial otherness has to insist on the status of radical difference. Today, Western values and ideas are, once again, penetrating all corners of the globe, except that they make their way into those areas through multinational instead of monopolized capital. This is another critical moment of confrontation between West and non-West-the moment of neocolonialism. Although nation states have emerged in large numbers since 1950s, those peripheral countries are "increasingly dragged into the orbit of a postmodern West without, for good or ill, having fully undergone a European-style modernity themselves" (Eagleton 205). In this view, the postcolonial redeployment of difference stands opposed to both old and new imperialism, for it is aimed to deconstruct the idea of the West as "the exemplar of modern civilization" (Hourani 343-

Rethinking the Identity of Cultural Otherness

13

344). Perhaps the most politically consequent apology for standing outside and being different from Western (post)modernism is voiced by Kumkum Sangari when he points out, "the postmociern preoccupation with the crisis of meaning is not everyone's crisis" and different peoples have different "modes of de··essentialisation" (184). To rethink the identity of cultural otherness as radical difference. is not, however, to asselt the politics of difference as the end of history. Rather, it is to stlive towards a utopian future of unity that ditTerence has to be celebrated and radicalized in the moment now. The ultimate purpose of relaunching radicalized difference as the identity of otherness is to realize cultural multiplicity and tolerance, to move beyond West-centered historicism, beyond imperial binary structures of self/other, center/periphery, and metropolis!country. The counterhegemonic project of politicized otherness as such owes its existence to the fact that Westerners, after their withdrawal from these countries, "continue to rule [there] morally and intellectually" (Said, ClIlture 25), and that to most Westerners "the source of the world's significant action and life is in the West," and "the outlying regions of the world have no life, history, or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West" (Said, Culture xix). If this is the truth of the post modern moment, then children are perhaps the most victimized and most urgently need to be postcolonized,4 not so much because they are the most colonized as because they are most violently subjected to colonialist ideas of racialethnic Otherness at the most formative years of their life. If children's literature and the criticism of children's literature take upon themselves to decolonize the world, they will prove the most effective postcolonial project in the long run, for the world always ultimately belongs to children. If today's children grow up with postcolonial educat.ion, and if they are encouraged to understand and appreciate racial/ethnic difference, that would tremendously expedite the progress towards a globalized postcoloniality.

NOTES J Ethnocentrism that informs all forms of imperialism is nothing peculiar to Europeans; it is "a closet monster in every ethnic individual and community" (Xie 17-18). China, for example, regarded itself as the center of the world for two thousand years; this fact is even reflected in the country's name "Zhongguo," which means the central country of the world. However, China did not have the economic motives to establish colonies, nor did it have the technological superi-

14

Voices of the Other

orily to impose Sinocentrism upon the world. Although as early as the fourteenth century China was already able to build huge ocean ships, a fact verified by the voyages led by Zheng He (1371-1435) to the east coast of Africa and the Red Sea, feudalism was too strong to allow capitalism to grow to fuel ambitions in the Chinese for territorial expansion. It is arguable that the emergence of capitalism is the cause of colonialism. 2 The Western imperial mind believes, Richard Waswo notes, "That civilization comes from elsewhere; that it consists in dominating the land, planting fields and skyscrapers upon it, and extracting profit from it; that any nondominating human identification with uncultivated land is ipso facto primitive and savage; and that, therefore, the displacement and/or destruction of such savages in the name of all the foregoing, which is progress, is morally justified" (557). 3 According to Mary Louis Pratt, "code-switching" enables the speakers to "switch spontaneously and fluidly between two languages ... code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language. Aesthetically, code-switching can be a source of great verbal subtlety and grace as speech dances fluidly and strategically back and forth between two languages and two cultural systems. Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word, play, and games of rhythm and rhyme" (177). 4 McGillis remarks that "children remain the most colonized persons on the globe" and they are often brutally silenced ("Postcolonialism" 7). Indeed, children and indigenous natives share much in common, and they have been frequently compared with each other. For a most stimulating comparison of children and indigenes in terms of their structural positions in the totalizing system of modernism, see Perry Nodelman, "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature" (ChIA Quarterly 17 [1992]: 29-35). Catherine Hall also mentions that westerners' zeal to improve the "savage" aboriginal was "rooted in an understanding of those peoples as 'children'" (The Postcolonial Question. Ed. lain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996). Said writes in Orientalism that the indigenous have been perceived as "irrational," and "childlike" (40).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Noonday, 1975. Bhabha, Homi. the location of culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The garden of Forking Paths." Norton Illfroduction to Fiction. Ed. Jeromy Beaty. New York: Norton, 1991. 429-437. Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of Medusa." New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981. 263-64.

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Cixous, Heltme, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Bom Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Ross Murfin. Boston: Bedford, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Margins-of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982. - - - . "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science." Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Admas. Forth Worth: Harcourt, 1992. 1117-1126. During, Simon. "Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today." Post/1/odemis/I/: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.448-62. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P, 1996. Forster, E. M. A Passage fo India. London: Penguin, 1985. Frye, Northrop. Words with Power. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990. Hall, Catherine. "Histories, Empires and the Post-Colonial Moment." The Postcolonial Question. Ed. Jain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996.65-77. Hourani, Albert. A History of tIle Arab Peoples. New York: Warner, 1991. Ismail. Jam. "From Sacred Text." Many-MoUlhed Birds. Ed. Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu. Vancouver: Douglas & Mcintyre, 1991. 124-35. Jameson, Fredric. "History and Class Consciollsness as an "Unfinished Project?" Rethinking Man:ism 1.1 (Spring 1988): 49-72. - - - . The Political Unconsciolls. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. - - - . Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Jan Mohamed, Abdul. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature." Critical Inquil:r 12 (1985): 59-87. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York. Columbia UP, 1991. Levinas, Emmanuel. ''The Trace of the Other." DeCoflstmction in Colltext. Ed. Mark Taylor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 345-359. McGillis, Roderick. "Postcolonialism, Children, and their Literature." ARIEL 28.1 (January 1997): 7-15. - - - . "Self, Other, and Other Self: Recognizing the Other in Children's Literature." The Lion and the Unicol"11 21 (1997): 215-229. Mohanty, Satya P. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Nodelman, Perry. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature." ChlA Quarterly 17 (1992): 239-235. Prakash, Gyan. "Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography." Social Text 31/32 (1992): 8.

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Pratt, Mary Louis. "'Yo soy la Malinche.''' Twentieth Celltury Poetry: From Text to Context. Ed. Peter Verdonk. London: Routledge, 1993. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. - - - . Orientalislll. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sangari, Kumkum. "The Politics of the Possible," Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 157-187. Spivak, Gayatri Charkravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. Waswo, Richard. "The History that Literature Makes." New Literary History 19.3 (1988): 541-564. Xie, Shaobo. "Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism." New Literary Histo/)'28.1 (1997): 7-19. Young, Robert. White Mythologies. London: Routledge, 1990.

CHAPTER 2

"We Are the World, We Are the Children": The Semiotics of Seduction in International Children's Relief Efforts NANCY ELLEN BATTY

There comes a time wilen we heed a cn1ain call When the world /lllIst come together as olle There are people dying And it's time to lend a hand to life The greatest gift of all. -JACKSON AND RITCHIE, "WE ARE THE WORLD"

HistOl), will decide wizen Canada lost faith in its milital)', but the night of /6 March /993 presents itself. Soldiers of the Canadian Airhome Regiment in Somalia caught a Somali teen-agel; Shidane AlVne, who they said had infiltrated their compound. They beat him and photographed his battered body. Whel/ he died three hOlll:f later, so did an era ofpublic trust in the militl11)'. -LOOMIS 1998

There are I/O [children J in the Third World. -PARAPHRASE OF SULERI 1989 [20J

Eve,)' gift has a personaWv-that of its give,; Oil evelJ sack of rice donated by aforeign government to a starving people in Africa, the characteristics and mentality of the d01/OI; name and cowlt1)', are stamped 011 its ribs. -FARAH [195]

17

18

Voices of the Other

Perhaps one of the darkest and most compelling children's stories of the mid- to late-twentieth century is the media record of the recurring nightmare of child famine and morbidity in the Third World. I Each one of us has seen these very graphic, haunting scenes of human suffering: the eerily reflective eyes and bulging stomach of a starving infant, a skeletal mother cradling a listless dying child in her arms, flies settling upon scabbed faces, crawling around the comer of a gaping mouth. The crises that these images pOltray are real enough, hOI1'ific enough, as are the reasons for their publication in print and electronic media by groups such as Save the Children, World Vision, UNICEF, OXFAM, and so forth. I do not intend either to disparage the work of these organizations or to diminish the tragedy of famine victims. I do, however, question the way that the image and idea of the starving child have been manipulated by the media to create a natTative that perpetuates a colonialist mindset and (mis)informs the perception of the Third World in North America. More importantly, perhaps, the appeal stlictly to the viewers' emotions and Imaginary2 identifications in these images oversimplifies the causes of suffering and occludes the West's relationship to and investment in Third World politics and economies. I am not the first to label these images obscene, representing as clearly as they do the obscenity of starvation in a global economy that is, arguably, capable of feeding many more children and adults than it does. However, I suggest that their obscenity lies also in the way that these images solicit our gaze in order to engage us in an immediate and paternalistic relationship with the famine victim (almost always a child) that displaces not only the Third World parent as a figure of competence and efficacy, but also the very possibility of a future for the Third World. As a perpetually recycled image, firmly ingrained in popular culture, the figure of the stat'ving child performs a relentless, ahistoric narrative of Third World failure and helplessness that, through both decontextualization and desensitization, grossly misrepresents suffering and the possibilities for its alleviation. The obscenity of this figure, I argue, lies precisely in the distance between the U.S.A. for Africa campaign (for which the song "We Are the World" became an anthem) in response to famine in Ethiopia, and the image of a brutally bludgeoned sixteen-year-old, tortured and murdered by peacekeepers for allegedly attempting to steal food from a Canadian forces compound in Somalia. Ironically, as postcolonial critical theory has largely ignored both the child in international literature and international literature written for children, the popular media have made the Third World child, and particularly the image of the starving African child, the focus of most of their

"We Are the World, We Are the Children"

/9

attention. 3 While a limited numher of children's hooks depicting more positive and hopeful images of the Third World are available to N0I1h American children, they can scarcely compete with the pervasive media images depicting starvation, malnutrition, and exploitation of children in Asia, Africa, and South America. What I hope to do in this paper, then, is first provide a context for our reading of these images-a context that might open a dialogue about how and why we respond to them as eagerly as we do. Second, I suggest what this response says about NOl1h America's "desire" vis-a-vis the future of the Third World and offer a reading of Ama Ata Aidoo's "No Sweetness Here" that discovers in it an allegory of the Western world's investment in the idea of the Third World child. Finally, I suggest what might be done in children's literature to counter the media image of the starving child as representative of the so-called "developing nations." To provide some focus for this discussion, I intend to limit the historical range of my paper to the North American (and to a celtain extent European) response to relatively recent humanitarian emergencies in Africa, patticularly Ethiopia, Somalia, and, most recently, the Sudan. I will also limit my exploration of children's literature to the work of one author, Tololwa Mollel, a Tanzanian-Canadian writer of books for children, which might offer some alternatives to the West's Imaginary investment in the figure of the starving African child. Given the serious and potentially controversial nature of this topic, I feel that it is just as important for me to declare what this paper will not address as it is for me to announce what it will. First, I cannot and will not presume to advise my reader about how to respond to appeals for help from international relief organizations. My criticism of the way that the image of the starving child has been used hy NOlth American media should not be read either as an argument for boycotting humanitarian agencies or for refusing aid to those who require it. Second, the scope of this paper and the obvious limitations of its author, who is a literary critic and not a sociologist, do not allow for a full discussion of the many issues and questions that sun·ound humanitarian gestures toward Third World countries: these issues are extremely complex and have heen discussed at length in a number of the books and essays listed in my Works Cited.

"DO THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS?" (BOB GELDOF AND MIDGE URE) The historical framework for this paper hegins with the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and ends with the ongoing famine in the Sudan because, it seems

Voices a/the Other

20

to me, the 1984 crisis marked a pruticular turning point in the popular Imaginary vis-a-vis humanitarian response to events in Africa, the effects of which remain with us today. The famine in Ethiopia, while perhaps not the most devastating in Africa's history, was one of the most widely publicized human disasters of the latter palt of this century, mostly because of the effOlts of media figures such as Bob Geldof and, later, Michael Jackson. Responding quickly to an October 1984 BBC documentary depicting famine victims, British rock musician Geldof coIIaborated with another musical rutist, Midge Ure, to write the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" The song was subsequently recorded by forty British rock attists (an assortment that was perhaps too aptly named "Band-Aid") with funds from sales of the record donated to charities involved in Ethiopian famine relief. Thus was ushered in a new era of high-profile humanitat'ian fundraising. The U.S.A. for Africa campaign, featuring Jackson and Ritchie's song "We Are the World," foIIowed in 1985, as did the massive Live Aid rock concert, to which hundreds of musicians donated their talents and through which was raised over one hundred million dolIars (the lat'gest amount ever raised for charity by a single event). Humanitarian fund-raising, it seemed, had become not just noble, but sexy: it had, with these events, truly entered the era of the media sound-bite. While no subsequent global emergency has sparked stich zeal on the part of celebrity ftlnd-raisers,4 the stakes had celtainly been raised by the response to the Ethiopian famine-and so too, perhaps, the public, Imaginat·y relationship between Western donors and African "victims" had been heightened. Two of the most popular songs in their respective years of release, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We are the World," established celtain powerful claims for the donor-victim relationship. Certainly, linking humanitarian concerns with the birth of the child-savior (and the holiday for giving to children) was a calculated and successful move on the patt of Bob Geldof. The song's chorus, "Feed the world," echoes its command to "Throw your arms around the world at Christmastime." But the song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie more truly invokes the listener's strong emotional identification with the starving in Ethiopia, and particularly with starving children. The song's chorus, repeated eleven times before the song is over, reminds the listener: We are the world, we are the children We're the ones who make a better day So let's start givin' There's a choice we're making

"We Are the World, We Are the Children"

21

We're saving ollr own lil'es It's true we' flmake a better day Jllst yO/l alld me.

It is perhaps not coincidental that this song was co-written by the man who refuses to grow up, who occupies, physically and emotionally, his own Neverland-North America's Peter Pan, Michael Jackson. But in appealing to the global child inside of each and every listener-"we are the world, we are the children"-Jackson and Ritchie were merely tapping into, if magnifying and popularizing. an established tenet of humanitarian fund-raising: the image of the starving child is indispensable to relief agencies because it "prompts immediate action" (Hammock and Charny 116). Why is it, then, that this image-and this idea of the child within us-provokes such overwhelming humanitarian response?

"THE SUFFERING CHILD IS PARADIGMATICALLY VULNERABLE AND INNOCENT." (HUGH LAFOLLETTE AND LARRY MAY)

The question I address here is not the moral responsibility of NOl1h American citizens to respond generously to humanitarian causes in the Third World: rather, I wish to question the dubious morality of arguments that support using images of starving children to elicit such response. While the reasons for such a tactic on the pat1 of aid agencies may seem obvious or natural to anyone reading this paper (as they may have seemed obvious and natural to Geldof and Jackson), it is precisely this naturalness, which by definition marks such use and such response as ideological, that we need to expose and interrogate. Like the category "woman," which has been the subject of intense scrutiny by feminists, the category "child" is undoubtedly an ideologically charged one. As Jacqueline Rose argues, Childhood ... serves as a term of universal social reference which conceals all the historical divisions and difficulties of which children, no less than ourselves, form a part. There is no child behind the category "children's fiction", other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes. (10)

Equally, I would argue, although not without risking some controversy, there is no child behind the category "children's relief." So, for the purposes

22

Voices of the Other

of the nan'ative of humanitarian fund-raising, what do we, as potential NOlth American donors, need to believe about this category we caIl "children?" According to Hugh LaFollette and Larry May, whose argument for the use of the starving child by humanitarian aid agencies I take to be representative of such discourse, the image of the child is "naturaIly" pelfect for this purpose: Since people have a natural sympathetic response to the cry of children, the best way to cultivate this connection is to keep people focussed on children as the real victims of starvation and malnutrition. If we keep this fact firmly in the fore of our minds, we are more likely, individually and collectively, to feel and act upon this sense of shared responsibility.

Presumably, LaFollette and May are arguing here for a natural, almost biologically rooted, efficacy of the image (and voice) of the child as lure: "the best way to cultivate this connection [the moral responsibility to provide aid] is to keep people focussed on children as the real victims of starvation and malnutrition." But the writers denaturalize this category for us when they explain, in a way that allows the ideological underpinnings of the argument to begin to emerge much more clearly, why the child is so "naturally" evocative of our sympathies and why we are morally bound to easing the child's suffering. Having first claimed the uniqueness of children's plight in that they are essentially helpless to provide food for themselves and palticularly vulnerable to disease (attributes, we should remind ourselves, that are not at all unique to children, but are shared by the invalid and the very elderly), Lafollette and May go on to argue that: Our initial sense of responsibility to the starving and malnourished children of the world is intricately tied to their being paradigmatically vulnerable and innocent. They are paradigmatically vulnerable because they do not have the wherewithal to care for themselves; they must rely on others to care for them. All children are directly dependent on their parents or guardians, while children whose parents cannot provide them food-either because of famine or economic arrangements-are also indirectly dependent on others: relief agencies or (their own or foreign) governments. Children are paradigmatically innocent since they are neither causally nor morally responsible for their plight. They did not cause drought, parched land, soil erosion, and

"We Are the World. We Are the Children"

23

over-population; nor are they responsible for social. political. and economic arrangements which make it more difficult for their parents to obtain food. If anyone were ever an innocent victim, the children who suffer and die from hunger are.

In essence, there appear to be two levels of dependency, and therefore of concern, in relief scenarios: one primary (children),5 the other secondary (adults). Children are the primary dependents because, or so LaFollette and May argue, "they are neither causally nor morally responsible for their plight." In a very different way than that first described above, then, LaFollette and May base their argument in the second citation not in the capacity of the child to capture humanitarian attentionthe child as lure or bait-or even in the innate helplessness of the child, but in its unique innocence and, therefore, deservedness. LaFollette and May's argument for the use of the child to attract humanitarian attention is grounded not simply in the idea of the child as having significant value as a lure for economic aid, but in the idea of the child as possessing a higher moral claim on the developed world's sympathy: put bluntly, adults, not children, are responsible for "political and economic arrangements which make it more difficult for their parents to afford food"; moreover, if we are to follow the logic here, by exclusion it is adults, not children, who are responsible for "drought, parched land, soil erosion, and over-population." While LaFollette and May do not distinguish which adults might be responsible for such things as drought, or soil erosion, or political and economic arrangements, they effectively exclude them from having a primary claim upon our sympathies, while making that claim for all children. With this argument. these writers reveal a bias toward children that is neither logical nor, I might add, ethical, but that informs, nonetheless, a pervasive view in North America. According to this logic, the idea of the innocence of the child. as well as the concomitant idea of the corruption of adulthood, is unassailable. What is most interesting about this argument is the way that it suggests the categorical opposition between child and adult, an opposition that has a number of ramifications in terms of North American attitudes toward the Third World and Third World relief efforts. First, this opposition suggests that childhood is a fixed, rather than a relative or culturally constructed category. The child is identifiably, categorically different and separate from the adult. 6 As such, children and adults can be separated along the division of light and darkness, innocence and corruption, in a way that allows the Third World child to

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escape the economy of the manichean allegory that, Abdul R. JanMoharned argues, pits colonizer against colonized in an antagonistic relationship: "too young to challenge colonialism, [the child] can be depicted in a benign manner" (JanMohamed 68). Thus, the starving African child solicits Western generosity insofar as he or she is seen to be dissociated from the "corruption" of the Third World, associated instead with the idea of a universal child who, in lacking specificity, is also removed from culture, geography, and politics. The child is a child, any child, our child, the child inside ourselves whom we have irrevocably, regretfully, left behind through the passage of years-we are the children. Defined as such, the child is, paradoxically, both pure fulfillment and, more importantly for my argument, pure potential: Childhood is not an object, any more than the unconscious .... The idea that childhood is something separate which can be scrutinised and assessed is the other side of the illusion which makes of childhood something which we have simply ceased to be.... Children are no threat to our identity because they are, so to speak, "on their way" (the journey metaphor is a recurrent one). Their difference stands purely as the sign of just how far we have progressed. (Rose 12-13)

What should be emerging from this picture is the way that a focus on the Third World child as primary recipient of both our sympathy and our assistance repeats and reinforces colonialist ideas about hierarchical divisions between so-called developed and developing nations and peoples. The term "developing" itself suggests that these nations are "on their way" to something, and that "[t]heir difference stands purely as the sign of just how far we have progressed." By this logic, the Third World child comes to symbolize for the West the very possibility that, with the right guidance and assistance, the "developing" world will come more closely to resemble the world (or, more precisely, the nostalgic ideal that this world imagines itself to embody) that has reached out to assist it. "We are the world," but, once that world is developed, all of the people in it are going to be a lot more like us (N0l1h Americans). In a passionately argued essay, Lee Edelman suggests that the use of the image and idea of the child is always profoundly conservative and political, "not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way; political insofar as the universalized fantasy subtending the image of the child coer-

"We Are the World, We Are the Childrell"

25

cively shapes the structures within which the 'political' itself can be thought": For politics, however radical the means by which some of its practioners [sic] seek to effect a more desirable social order, is conservative insofar as it necessarily works to affirm a social order, defining various strategies aimed at actualizing social reality and transmitting it into the future it aims to bequeath to its inner child. What, in that case, would it signify not to be "fighting for the children"? How, then, to take the otller "side" when to take a side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political framework that compulsively returns to the child as the privileged ensign of the future it intends? (19)

Arguing that the "pervasive trope of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity" (19) also paradoxically reveals that futurity as "an imaginary past"' (20), Edelman scandalously exposes the hypocrisy that "enshrine[s]" (21) the child as a repository, not, ultimately, of radical possibilities, but of the most conservative social and moral order. Returning to Rose's suggestion that children offer "no threat to our identity," we can see how the idea of relieving the suffering Third World child, rather than the suffering adult, offers the donor at least some hope for a Third World future that more closely resemhles the (Imaginary) "order" of the First World past. Such a contentious claim requires further support. I turn to LaFollette and May's argument that adults have a diminished claim on our humanitarian instincts. By implicitly suggesting that the relief assistance that adults receive should he considered a secondary effect of the humanitarian gesture intended to relieve children's suffering, LaFollette and May inadveltently reinforce stereotypical notions of Third World helplessness and corruption. Moreover, they ultimately imply that, while humanitarian aid is focused on a better future for Third World peoples, that future will, of necessity, be discontinuous with its past-past actions that created the problem in the first place and, more importantly, past actors, including the parents of suffering children, who are at least in some way responsible, according to LaFollette and May's logic, for everything from drought to overpopulation. Such a representation is misleading not just because it holds adults accountable for natural phenomena over which they have little or no control; it is also misleading in that it so utterly ignores neocolonialist and globalist factors that continue to have an impact on "independent" nations in the Third World.

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Voices a/the Other

For example, U.S.-Soviet intervention in the sovereignty of certain African nations during the Cold War and subsequent withdrawal from that sphere have contributed in large measure to a number of recent emergencies. Shiras argues that "It is no coincidence that Liberia, Zaire, the Sudan, and Somalia, all countries mired in conflict [and in need of humanitarian reliefJ, were major recipients during the Cold War of U.S. foreign aid because they supported its geopolitical objectives, even though they were highly repressive" (98). Neil Larsen locates the source of many of the problems in the Third World in "now abandoned strategies of capitalist modernization" that have led to "civil and ethnic wars" and left large indigenous popUlations bereft of resources: Ripped from their traditional village or tribal social-economies and herded into the new, gargantuan urban slums of the third worldwhere they were to have become the new, global proletariat-an enormous mass, IiteraIly billions of human beings find themselves in the limbo of ... "monetary subjects, but without money." (Paragraph 17)

While it is far beyond the scope of this paper to determine the causes of social breakdown in particular regions of the world, what Larsen and Shiras point out is the incredible complexity of determining causal factors for such breakdown, and the sheer folly of labeling various actors (including adult recipients of humanitarian aid) either gUilty or innocent. So, while LaFollette and May's intention may be noble-to focus attention on the child's immediate suffering and need by divorcing that suffeling from causal, historical circumstances that most often predate its existence-such vast oversimplification reinforces misconceptions about the source of problems facing victims of disaster in the Third World and about the potential efficacy of parents to meet their children's needs. It is also no coincidence that, in many of the images of suffering used by humanitarian agencies, the starving child is often pictured alone or in the company of relief workers. As Hammock and Charny argue, "The image of the starving child prompts immediate action. The problem then becomes a logistical one: we (usually from the N0I1h, white, wealthy, charitable) have the goods-the food, medicine, shelter, water supply[,] equipment, or clothing" (117). By default, manipulated by this image, humanitarian donors in N0I1h America and Europe feel compelled to assume the role of in locus parentis, once again placing ourselves, however compassionate our motives, in a paternalistic relationship with the Third World that, in effect, displaces biological parents, many of whom may be

"We Are the World, We Are the Children"

27

living despite their notable absence tj'om the images we see. The solitary child appears to us as a de facto orphan, most notably in advertisements that solicit "foster" parents for Third World children. The dissociation between Third World adult and child that I have argued is characteristic of media manipulation of the idea and image of the dependent child is exacerbated by the discontinuous, yet relentless, nature of the media assault on our senses as disaster succeeds disaster in the nightly news and in humanitarian media campaigns. The overreliance of the media and aid agencies on the image of the suffering child, instead of promoting the idea of a positive or even possible future for Third World peoples, may even have the opposite effect: "compassion fatigue," to the extent that it exists, is a rational response of the public [a the constant repetition of the same story in the same places. Hope-generated from real understanding of the tough issues the poor of the global South are facing and the solutions required to confront these issues-is a more slIstainable motive for giving than pity. (Hammock and Charny 124)

Hammock and Charny go on to cite a specific instance of irresponsible use of images in a humanitarian cause: Throughout 1994, Save the Children, one of the oldest and most respected of the development and relief agencies in the United States, ran a print ad campaign that featured, in succession, a Sudanese child menaced by a vulture, two dead Somali children, and a tight closeup of a starving child. While such images are powerful, and certainly tug on the heartstrings, they fail utterly to reflect the strength and dignity of the beneficiaries. fndeed, such images abuse the agencies' privileged access to other peoples' suffering. Save the Children's campaign addecl insult to injury in that the photos used in the campaign were stock photos from news organizations that bore no direct relationship to the actual people or communities with which the organization was working. (130; emphasis added)

However much money the shock value of these advertisements may elicit from viewers, such obscene images, patiicularly that of two dead Somali children, reveal a scandalous prurience at the heati of relief campaigns that supply for Western consumption a virtual pornography of suffering. More recently, Save the Children has at least paid lip-service

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Voices of the Other

to the idea that there has been an "over-dependency on the 'starving baby' image when communicating emergency messages," that the "stereotyped image has come to represent a whole continent, when it is in fact only a small part of the story," and that "[I]ts over-use has offended Africans in particular" ("Save the Children: Focus on Images"). But does this self-consciousness about the problem really have an effect on the way that the media or humanitarian agencies operate? Perhaps the web of dependency that has ensnared the humanitarian agency, the media, and the public is too complex and intractable: A symbiotic relationship exists between Western media, largely U.S., which rely on what has been referred to as "disaster pornography" to boost ratings and readership, and many relief agencies, which rely on journalists to stimulate donations .... As a BBC correspondent covering the Somalia famine remarked, "Relief agencies depend upon us for pictures and we need them to tell us where the stories are. There's an unspoken understanding between us, a sort of code. We try not to ask the question too bluntly, 'Where will we find the most starving babies?' And they never answer explicitly. We get the pictures all the same." (Weiss and Collins 189) Paradoxically, the discontinuous and decontextualized narrative of media images merges, through the use of stock images and a vit1ual template for disaster coverage, into a master narrative of suffering and hopelessness. Isn't this a story we've seen before, we ask ourselves. Aren't these the same children, or at least the children of those other children we helped before? Hammock and Charny label the media portrayals of emergency efforts a "morality play," in which "disaster follows disaster, each following the same script." The public, they argue, "loses its capacity to distinguish one disaster from another and one agency from another" and "'Compassion fatigue' blames the victim and numbs individuals who want to care" (116). The result: what Rotberg and Weiss call "'popular ambivalence' about the utility of assisting what is frequently portrayed ... as a con·upt and hopeless Third World" ("Coping" 181). The apathetic response to the ongoing famine and political crisis in the Sudan, while there may be a number of reasons for it,7 might be attributed at least in part to such fatigue and ambivalence. It may also, of course, be attributed to media coverage of events in Somalia, which saw highly publicized attacks on humanitarian relief workers and peacekeepers, in particular, the bombing raid that killed eighteen U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu. The tragic death of the sixteen-year-old Somali Shidane Arone at the

"We Are the World, We Are the Children"

29

hands of Canadian peacekeepers speaks most graphically both to the rarely acknowledged complexity of humanitarian intervention (and local response to it) and to this ambivalence. On the cusp between childhood and adulthood, as we have come to define these terms, Arone and the manner of his death, even though this was, admittedly, an isolated event, should nonetheless challenge received notions about our "benevolent"' intentions vis-a-vis the Third World and our desires for that world's future. I have argued that the use of the idea and image of the suffering Third World child, however natural its appeal seems to be, is ideologically motivated, and that our response to that image is equally grounded in ideology. I have also argued that this ideology prompts us to privilege the Third World child as the innocent and deserving object of our compassion and charity, while it implicitly reinforces our suspicion that the nations of the Third World and their adult populations are "COITUpt and hopeless." Ultimately, a humanitarian discourse that relies heavily upon the image of the suffering, dependent Third World child reproduces and reinforces the discourse of colonialism itself. As critics such as Homi Bhabha and Robel1 Young, most recently, have pointed out, this discourse, always ambivalent, is also always inflected with the desire of the colonizer. In terms of my argument here, the nan'ative of the suffering Third World child is ambivalent because, while it apparently seeks to promote a futurity free of suffering, it is obviously incapable of communicating to the general public a vision of that futurity that corresponds to specific, local contexts. Even in posing the rhetorical question, with its ambiguous third person reference, "Do they know it's Christmas?," Geldof presents us with a future for the Third World that can only be imagined in terms of (our own) Christian revelation and celebration. And as the song "We Are the World" so clearly demonstrates, children, as potential converts to a new and better way of life, are not just ours, they are ourselves; implicitly, the geopolitical landscape they occupy and the adults who occupy it are other, having crossed into a COiTupt or fallen world beyond the projection of our nostalgic desire for the withered possibilities within ourselves. Given this context, it is significant that a number of anticolonialist literary works portray the devastating effects of colonialism in this rupture between past and present, parent and child.

"THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN" (AYI KWEI ARMAH) To abandon the gods of one's father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination.

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Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye's steps and abandon their ancestors? (Chinua Achebe 103) ... how was she to know that by the time her children grew up the values of her country, her people and her tribe would have changed so drastically, to the extent where a woman with many children could face a lonely old age, and maybe a miserable death all alone, just like a barren woman? (Buchi Emecheta 219) Ghana? Justa Tiny piece of beautiful territory in Africa-had Greatness thrust upon her Ollce. Bm she had eyes that saw notThat was a 10llg time ago . .. Now she picks tiny bits of Undigestedfoodftvm the Offal of the industrial world . .. o Ghana. (Am a Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy 53)

While Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and 111e Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta come immediately to mind when I think about how postcolonial writers inscribe their deep anxiety about an African futurity almost totally severed from its past by the colonialist rupture, it is Ama Ata Aidoo's "No Sweetness Here" that I wish to focus on in this section of my paper. Aidoo's short story is deceptively simple. It is the first-person tale of a young woman who is called Chicha by the villagers in Bamso because she has come from outside the community to teach their children. While Chicha is herself African, she claims "I went the white man's ways" (15). Chicha is drawn to a young pupil named K wesi whose beauty prompts her to tell the boy's mother that, if Chicha were ever transferred from the community, "I will kidnap him" (14). Kwesi's mother, Maami Ama, is at once flattered by the praise for her son's beauty and terrified that Chicha will follow through on her threat to steal him away from her. But Chicha's desire for the boy, it turns out, is not the only thing that threatens the mother's hold on her son. In suing for a divorce from the boy's father, who ignores both wife and son, Maami Ama risks losing her only child to his father's family. While the boy's fate is

"We Are the World. We Are the Children"

31

being decided, Chicha abandons her charges to attend the public hearing and, playing unsupervised on the football field, Kwesi is bitten by a poisonous snake. He later dies and his mother, who has earlier had to accept the verdict of the tribunal that the boy should live with his father, is inconsolable. The triple threats to Kwesi's existence-Chicha's desire to steal him away from the village, his father's desire to repossess him as punishment for a humiliating divorce, and, finally, the deus ex mochina of the snake which, Solomon-like, decides Kwesi's fate once and for all-combine to overdetermine this story in a way that makes it easy to miss one of its central points. After Kwesi's death, the nan'ator Chicha contemplates Maami Ama's response to her loss: "J would have taken him away with me in spite of his mother's protests." She was just being absurd. "The child is a boy, and sooner or later, she must learn to live without him. The highest class here is Primary Six and when J am going away, J will take him. J will give him a grammar education. Perhaps, who knows, one day, he may win a scholarship to the university." ... He would visit Britain, America and all those countries we have heard so much ahout. ... "Maami shall be happy in the end," J had told myself, "People will flock to see the mother of such an ilIustrious man. Although she has not had many children, she will be surrounded by her grandchildren. Of course, away from the village." (27)

In this passage, Aidoo elliptically alludes to and criticizes the "brain drain" from Africa to Europe-the exodus of the brightest, most privileged young people that she describes in Ollr Sister Kil(joy. But both the overdetermination and the symbolism of the story allow us to read it also as a lament for the rupture between generations that results from a failure to imagine a future for the Third World (in this case for Ghana) that links it to its past. That in this story it is the Ghanian narrator, and not a European or a North American, whose vision of the future falters, should only alelt us to the neocolonialist legacy of imperialism that all of Aidoo's work seeks to explore and counteract. What Aidoo's story most clearly shows us, however, is the powerful attraction that the idea of the child as tabula rasa has for our Western or Westernized imagination (remember that Chicha admits that she "went the white man's ways"). Throughout the story, we learn little about Kwesi, about his personality, about his achievement.s. The only words he

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Voices of the Other

speaks in the story-"Mama, here I am" and "I am hungry"-are hardly enough to gauge his intellect, and in fact only serve to cancel each other out. The announcement of immanence ("here I am") is immediately negated by a statement of vacuity and need ("I am hungry"). Aidoo's narrator admits frequently to knowing little about the child, giving voice uncertainly to any but physical observations about him: "No doubt he was a happy child" (22), she ventures. In fact, Kwesi is almost entirely a projection of the desires of all of those around him. He is a kind of everychild, special only for his paradoxically innocent and "indecent" beauty and the adult passions it arouses. His death is seen to be inevitable, even predictable, from the moment that we learn of his beauty and the desires that it elicits. Aidoo foreshadows his fate in Chicha's description of him: At the time of this story, he had just turned ten years old. He was in Primary Class Four and quite tall for his age. His skin was as smooth as shea-butter and as dark as charcoal. His black hair was as soft as his mother's. His eyes were of the kind that always remind one of a long dream on a hot afternoon. It is indecent to dwell on a boy's physical appearance, but then Kwesi's beauty was indecent. (15)

The child is all appearance, all illusion and, as such, is not sustainable. He has no future because Aidoo's narrator cannot imagine one for him that both develops his (unfathomed) inner potential and continues to situate him within a Ghanian historical and cultural context. The paradoxical image of Maami Ama's "being surrounded by her grandchildren" but "away from the village" most clearly expresses this failure of the imagination, which, I repeat hastily, is not Aidoo's failure, but that of her narrator, the internally colonized teacher. It is difficult to resist reading the story as an allegory and seeing in it also the failure of the Western imagination that is fed by the media image of the solitary, suffering, "indecently" beautiful Third World child. No less than Chicha, we must examine how our own desires to assist that child too often fail to encompass the specificity of the child and the larger and more complex needs of its community. Can there be a powerful public antidote to the perpetuation of the idea of Third World hopelessness and corruption that the recurring image of the starving child seeks, but ultimately fails, to disavow? Hammock and Charny argue persuasively that breaking "stereotypes that reinforce patterns of domination and dependence" will require that the media

"We Are the World, We Are the Children"

33

break "bad habits built up over a period of time" and change the way they "cover emergencies" (134). Moreover, it will require a much more complex and, in the end, much more compassionate response to these emergencies on the patt of the consumers of these media images, one that fully acknowledges and supports the potential efficacy and self-sufficiency of those peoples who receive aid. But at its most basic level, a change in our response to the suffering Third World child will require a radical, perhaps even impossible, reassessment of the way we view childhood itself. Since European and NOIth American children are themselves one of the most impOltant targets of humanitarian aid appeals, 8 children's literature can perhaps point the way to such a shift in attitude. The work of Tololwa M. Mollel, a Tanzanian-born Canadian children's writer and story teller, offers a refreshing perspective on some of the issues raised in this paper. Mollel has published numerous picture books (each illustrated by a different artist) that reinterpret traditional African tales for an English-speaking audience. Drawing on lore from diverse parts of Africa-Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania-Mollel always acknowledges the specific cultural and geographical origins of his tales and frequently appends notes to his narratives that explain their origins and significance and that sometimes provide additional cultural background. While the size of the print, the diction, and the colorful drawings indicate that the books are meant to appeal to a very young audience, Mollel appears to have taken great care to provide a context for each of his tales. So while the stories themselves are mostly playful and fantastic and frequently feature animals as their main characters, Mollel manages to situate them in such a way that his audience never loses sight of the specificity of culture and geography.9 What I find most interesting about Mollel's work in terms of the subject of my paper is that drought is mentioned or used as a plot device in at least three of his books-The Princess Who Lost Her Hail; Anaf1se's Feast, and The Orphan Boy. Reasons for and resolutions to such crises as drought tend to partake of the realm of fantasy or legend in these hooks, and therefore, at first glance, they may appear to oversimplify and/or romanticize the plight of those who suffer them. But Mollel's introduction of this topic may provide parents with an oPPOltunity to initiate a discussion of these issues with their children that can be related to issues of humanitat·ianism. Mollel provides such an opportunity himself in a note at the end of The Princess Who Lost Her Hail: In this appendix, Mollel moves beyond the fantastical elements of the story's plot, in which a

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Voices of the Other

young princess's hubris draws calamity upon her kingdom, to provide a different explanation of the factors that contribute to drought: The Akamba people of East Africa live on a high plateau near the equator. If the "long rains" of March to June or the "short rains" of October to December fail to come, crops and animals suffer. So do the people. To people whose lives depend upon the land, weather is very important. They sing and dance about it, and they also write stories about it. ...

While even this description oversimplifies the complex factors that contribute to food shortages, it at least suggests that one should situate such crises in specific geographic, social, and cultural contexts. But it is the last of Mollel's books mentioned above-The Orphan Boy-which provides me with the clearest example of how we can encourage our children, at least, to be more thoughtful in their response to humanitarian emergencies. Based on a Maasai legend, The 01phan Boy (re}tells the tale of an old man who receives and welcomes into his life a mysterious visitor, a boy who claims to be an orphan. But Mollel reverses our expectations that the man will come to care for the young boy; rather, the boy, Kileken, immediately begins to care for the old man, bringing him his favorite breakfast and, unbidden, taking over most of the man's arduous chores, including the grazing of his cattle. When drought threatens the old man's cattle herd with starvation, the boy miraculously brings fattened cows home from pasture each night, but refuses to tell the old man how he accomplishes this feat. Buming with curiosity about the boy's miraculous powers, the old man literally obeys his shadow and follows Kileken and the herd of cows to a drought-stricken landscape that the boy, conjuring the power of the sun, transforms into verdant fields. When Kileken discovers the old man's deception, the boy is swept up into the sky to resume his former place in the heavens as the planet Venus, the land revelts to dry scrub, and "Thin, scraggly cows wandered about the parched countryside waiting for the rain that should come soon." The bleak ending of this story-the old man foolishly loses his beloved companion and benefactor-is meant to be redeemed by the symbol of the star (or planet) that continues to watch over the old man and his cattle, and also by the promise that the rain "should come soon." But what is most striking and, from the point of view of my thesis most positive and promising, about this story is the way that it causes us to rethink dependency relationships. The orphan boy should, almost by definition, have the greatest claim on our sympathy; however, not only does

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35

the boy Kileken demonstrate his self-sufficiency in the story, through his actions he encourages us to believe in the intrinsic value of the old man. By assisting and essentially adopting the old man, by becoming his benefactor, Kileken, albeit through the use of some very powerful magic, challenges us to rethink our deeply embedded notions about the helplessness of the child. More importantly, the tale emphasizes the value of connection between the child and the adult-Kilekcn, however powerful, is still the orphan boy, dependent on the old man not for physical sustenance, but for his very survival as a human being on earth. Both the text and the illustrations (by Paul Morin) in The Olphall Boy convey the idea of this mutual dependency between the childless old Maasai man and the young boy who introduces himself by saying "I am an orphan and I've travelled countless miles in search of a home." In one of these illustrations, Kileken stands above the old man, who is seated on the ground. Kileken's hand rests affectionately on the old man's knee, while the old man looks up at him. Which one of them is the adult, which one the child? The very composition of this picture challenges us to draw a connection between these two figures that does not lapse into the binaries of innocence and experience, dependency and self-sufficiency, child and adult. It, and the book itself, challenge us to contemplate instead the interdependency of all human beings and the value of all lives, young and old. By ending my paper with this admittedly sentimental image of intergenerational harmony depicted in Mollel's book, I run the risk of being accused of a different kind of naivete than that I would claim to have exposed in the pervasive image of the starving Third World Child. If, however, I have succeeded at least in suggesting that our grounds for responding to humanitarian crises in the Third World must be radically shifted from a focus on the child in crisis to a focus on the people in crisis, with all of the messy and complex issues that accompany such a shift, the risk will have been wOlth taking. If now, when we look into the eyes of children we see in humanitarian appeals (as the cliche in these adveltisements so often admonishes us to do), we demand a context that allows us to respond to the man or woman inside of the child instead of to the child inside ourselves, we are at least in a position to challenge ourselves to respond out of hope, rather than pity, out of knowledge, rather than fear and ignorance.

NOTES I J use the term Third World throughout this paper with some caution and even more self-consciousness. Most recently, the term has been reclaimed for

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postcolonial discourse by some feminist critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, while it has been contested by others, notably KumKum Sangari. (For an informed discussion of the history and use of the term, see the Emory postcolonial site hosted by Deepika Bahri.) The term is useful to me in this paper, even though my focus is on the image of the African child, because it effectively describes the media's manipulation of the Imaginary opposition of donor and recipient worlds in which differences among the recipients are conveniently flattened. 2 I am using the word Imaginary in the Lacanian sense. Lacan's Imaginary register describes the relationship between the ego and its images, the register of mecol1naissance or misrecognition. 3 According to journalist Fred Cate, "Although not a primary feature of the developing world, famine is one of the topics from the developing world most widely reported by Western media" (22). 4 Celebrity involvement in humanitarian fund-raising, while on a much smaller scale, has not been limited to rock stars, nor was it entirely a new phenomenon. Celebrities such as Audrey Hepburn, Sally Struthers, and more recently, Roma Downey (of "Touched by an Angel" fame) have promoted various children's humanitarian causes. 5 LaFollette and May's argument here echoes article 5 of the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child: "The Child must be the first to receive relief in time of distress." 6 Perry Nodelman notes that this idea of childhood as a stable category and the idea that the child is radically other mark the way in which our discourse about children is Orientalist (in Said's terms). 7 See Livingston for a comparison of the response to famine in Somalia and in the Sudan. 8 One such fund-raising campaign geared specifically toward children is U.N.I.C.E.F.'s annual Hallowe'en fund-raising event in which young trick-ortreaters go door to door to collect pennies for humanitarian causes. In what I consider to be a pointed irony, the pennies collected this year (1998) by Hallowe'eners will go toward combating child labor. 9 Mollel is so careful about this specificity that in his Author's Note at the end of Anansi's Feast he explains that he has taken "artistic license in adapting [an] East African expression for this West African story."

BIBLIOGRAPHY Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Aidoo, Ama Ata. "No Sweetness Here." Collected in Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English. Ed. Victor J. Ramraj. Peterborough: Broadview, 1995. 14-28.

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- - - . Ol/r Sister Killjoy: Or Reflections Jrom a Black-Eyed Squint. London: Longman, 1977. Armah, Ayi K wei. The BeautyJul Ones Alt? Not Yet Bam. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969. Cate, Fred H. "Communications, Policy-Making, and Humanitarian Crises." Rotberg and Weiss. 15-44. Edelman, Lee. "The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive." Narrative 6.1 (1998): 18-30. Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys oj Motherhood. London: Heinemann, 1979. Farah, Nurmdin. Gifts. London: Serif, 1993. Hammock, John c., and Joel R. Charny. "Emergency Response as Morality Play: The Media, the Relief Agencies, and the Need for Capacity BUilding." Rotberg and Weiss. 115-135. JanMohamed, Abdul R. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 59-87. LaFollette, Hugh, and Larry May. "Suffer the Little Children." World Hunger and Morality. Ed. William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1996. On-line version. http://www.etsu-tn.edu/philoslfacuJty/hugh/suffer.htm. Accessed Sept. 19, 1998. Larsen, Neil. "Poverties of Nation: 711e Ends oj the Earth, "Monetary Subjects without Money," and Postcolonial Theory." Cultllral Logic 1.1 (Fall 1997). On-line version. Accessed July 30. 1998. Livingston, Steven. "Suffering in Silence: Media Coverage of War and Famine in the Sudan." Rotberg and Weiss. 68-89. Loomis, Dan G. The Somalia Affair: Reflections on Peacekeeping and Peacemaking. http://www.unified.on.calrealtime/dgl_pub/intro.htm Accessed July 19,1998. Mollel, Tololwa M., and Paul Morin. The Orphan Boy. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. - - - , and Andrew Glass. Analise '05 Feast. New York: Clarion Books, 1997. - - - , and Charles Reasoner. The Princess Who Lost Her Hail: Mahwah, New Jersey: Troll Associates, 1993. Nodelman, Perry. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's literature." Children's Literatl/lt? AssociatiOll Quarterly 17 (Spring 1992): 29-35. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case oj Peter Pan or The Impossibility oj Children's Fiction. London: Macmillan 1984. Rotberg, Robert I., and Thomas G. Weiss, eds. From Massaclt?s to Genocide: 711e Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises. Washington, DC: The World Peace Foundation, 1996. - - - . "Coping with the New World Disorder: The Media. Humanitarians, and Policy-Makers." Rotberg and Weiss. 179-189.

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"Save the Children: Focus on rmages." Save the Children Web-Page Shiras, Peter. "Big Problems, Small Print: A Guide to the Complexity of Humanitarian Emergencies and the Media." Rotberg and Weiss. 93-114. Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Weiss, Thomas G., and Cindy Collins. Humallitariall Challenges alld Inten1elllioll: World Politics alld the Dilemma of Help. Oxford: Westview Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 3

The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children's Literature PETER HUNT AND KAREN SANDS

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither . .. they go ashore to rob alld plunder; they see a hannless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the COlllltl)' a new name, they takefol7nal possession of it for the King . ... Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title of divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity, the natives are driven out or destroyed . .. a free licence is given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convel1 and civilise an idolatrous and barbalVus people. -JONATHAN SWIFT, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, 1726

Take up the White Man's burdellHave done with childish days . .. -RUDYARD KIPLING 1898

There is Ilothing so bad or so good that you willnotfmd Englishmen doing it; but you will neverfind all Englishman ill the wlVng. He does evel:vthillg on principle. He fights

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Voices of the Other you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you Oil imperial principles . .. -GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,

THE MAN OF DESTINY, 1896

Gayatri Spivak observed that "it should not be possible to read nineteenthcentury BJitish literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English." The fact that it continues to be possible, she went on, demonstrates the "continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modem forms" (146). Characteristically, for those ostensibly and ostentatiously concerned with the marginalized and silenced, she was not talking about one of the most influential bodies of literature of the colonial period: children's literature. But colonialism and postcolonialism in British children's literature is undeltheorized not only because it is invisible to the new academic cultural imperialists: there are two other reasons, one specific to children's literature, and one to this area of criticism. The first is that the historical and cultural impOltance of the Empire to British (rather than Spivak's "English") children's literature is taken as a truism by children's literature historians. Just as the concept of "empire" saturated British culture, so virtually all (English-language) histories of children's literature agree that children's books, always fundamentally involved in reflecting and transmitting culture, were the witting or unwitting agents of the empire-builders. This was true of all writing, not merely the stories designed for the boys who were to be the empire-builders; it affected girls' stories, school stories, religious stories, fairy stories. None of this is in dispute: the extent and nature value of that affect, however, has not been examined, precisely because it is so apparently obvious. Secondly, colonial/post-colonial studies seem to have followed the pattern of "gender" studies, which have been dominated by the "other", the hitherto excluded, and for all practical purposes might seem to the sceptic to be "feminist gender studies" and, to a lesser extent "gay gender studies." However intellectually (or at least linguistically) intricate postcolonial theory is, it seems to be predicated (explicitly or not) on the repression, suppression, and exploitation of the colonised. Thus it becomes an implicitly cOlTective theory and practice: as Christopher Gittings puts it, post-colonialist cJiticism is "dedicated to addressing the types of cul-

British Empire and Post-Empire Children's Literature

41

tural marginalisation propagated by imperialism" (3). The effect has been to silence the putative villain of the piece, the coloniser, and to replicate (perhaps in revenge) the conditions of colonising: brave is the British (white, male) who passes an opinion about those his forefathers exploited. Thus when Roderick McGillis (a Canadian) notes that the "Eurocentric vision of things ... can no longer smugly assume primacy of value in the human community" (15) two things should be pointed out. The first is that in so far as this vision has been conscious, it has never been homogenous, and, at least since 1881, scarcely smug; the second, paradoxically, perhaps, is that "smugness" suggests consciousness, and imperialism goes far deeper than that. The centre, the imperialist coloniser, has not been extensively considered in this context. For (characteristic) example, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (Benson and Conolly 1994) has essays on postcolonial children's literature in Australia, Canada, The Caribbean, East Africa, India, New Zealand, The Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, the South Pacific, and West Africa-hut nothing on Britain-as if the "owning" and "loss" of empire had less impact than the gaining of independence. Matters are complicated for children's literature by the view that it is the site, metaphorically and romantically. of the colonization of childhood by imperialist adulthood, with all that that implies in terms of social and sexual control and exploitation (sce, for example, Lesnik-Oberstein, Rose); children, like women, have heen silenced (Nodelman). This view has been tacitly opposed by those who regard the relationship between adults and children as naturally benign-a parallel to those critics who acknowledge the fact of colonialism, but not its implications. As Ursula Le Guin observed, "the magic of a really good spell is that you don't know it's working. It just 'is', the way things 'are'" (15). In this article, we demonstrate just how pervasive the idea of empire (and its loss) was and is to British children's literature. We have chosen to use the term "empire" rather than "colonization" or "imperialism:' because although the empire as an organization is gone. it is far from clear how far "post" can be attached to the other nouns. As Anne McLintock observes, fn a world where women do two-thirds of the world's work. earn 10 percent of the world's income and own less than I percent of the world's property, the promise of 'postcolonialism' has been a history of hopes postponed. (13)

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Voices of the Other

Colonialism has been replaced by neo-colonialism; today, as Palmowski observes, "most African countries remain crucially dependent on the interference and goodwill of the developed countries through their large-scale debt, political instability and economic weakness" (282). Equally, the cultural and governmental structures of countries such as India and Australia-the latter only now moving towards the status of a republic-are deeply marked by their ex-colonial status. As we have seen, what is not often considered is how all this is reflected in the literature produced at the (ex-) center. Children's books are sometimes seen as essentially (or potentially) subversive. One implication of theorizing British children's literature of the empire and since may be to see that a cultural imperative such as colonialism may override, or provide a superstructure to, any "lower-level" concepts of conformity or subversion. Children's books may subvert elements of the codes within colonization, but not subvert the thing itself. In discussing Alan Garner's Strandlopel" (an adult novel by a writer famous for his children's books) Heather Scutter observes that "all of us need to be wary of the imperial centrality of the ideological claims in such a work." She suggests that "as writers, critics and teachers, we have not been sufficiently alert to the implications of myth-bOlTowing, mythologising and mythicising" ("Hit and Myth"). The "we" (especially, but far from exclusively) at the old imperial center, writers and ctitics, do not know how blind we are. While this is true, the question remains how far we can legitimately include some of the characteristic moves of colonization under the banner of colonialism itself. Anne McLintock, for example, felt that "sexuality as a trope for other power relations was cettainly an abiding aspect of imperial power" (14); Arthur Ransome's apparently retreatist, quietist novels, might be seen to have colonizing undettones; is The Hobbit a colonialist text? (see Hunt, Introduction 62-71); Peter Bishop, considering an English children's novel of the 1950s, links the idea of little England to Britain's global pretensions (28-29). Is colonialism now an ineradicable virus in the British psyche, or was, for example, the adventure story of exploration a mode predating and appropriated by empire, which can re-emerge unscathed from its shadow? The first approach to this unanswerable question is to establish the relationships between colonialism and children's literature in Britain.

THE EMPIRE AND THE CHILDREN'S BOOK Between 1815 and 1914, the British Empire expanded at a rate of about 100,000 square miles each year (Eldridge 11). At its greatest extent, after

British Empire and Post-Empire Children's Literature

43

the acquisition of German and Turkish territories in 1918, this "collective improvisation" based on very little formal governmental control (Richards, Imperial Archive 3) nominally ruled 600,000,000 people, or about 30 percent of the world's population. Its principles became part of the nation's mode of thought. Emigration to the Empire was seen as a social safety valve: and latterly as equivalent to rural ism. In 1920, Leo Amery in the House of Commons deprecated the use of the word "emigration": "Change of residence to another pm1 of the empire, is ... more appropriately described by some such term as 'oversea settlement''' (Williams 25). Children were central: between 1618 and 1967, when the last group of orphans was sent abroad by the Dr. Barnardo organization, an estimated 150,000 children had been dispatched to all corners of the empire (Bean and Melville). Gillian Wagner quotes the Ragged School Union Magazine (1857), which voiced the practical (and ideological) principles: To seek/or emp/oymellf Where work can be /ound To meet with enjoyment On less crowded ground We cross the broad ocean With gladness and glee . .. () 8)

But "empire" was not a homogenous concept. J. S. Bratton notes the "Victorian modulation from evangelical Christianity to the work ethic and expansionism, eventually leading to a quasi-religious belief in the British Empire" (Impact 115), and cites W. H. G. Kingston's books of "visionary colonisation and naval heroic" (129) as examples of the latter. Martin Green points out the difference between Captain Man·yat's Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), which "reflected the early Victorian mood, full of the vigour of English Puritanism, but at odds with the imperial situation" (216), and the imperialist confidence of Charles Kingsley ("a central figure in the Victorian propagandas for empire and adventure") in Westward Ho! (1855) (217-218). At its peak, imperialism affected every type of literature, from hymns to children's magazines, and every class in society. "Boys of England had boasted the patronage of Prince AI1hur and the Prince Imperial; the ... [Boy's Own Paper] claimed the allegiance not only of Prince AI1hur but of Prince George (later King George V)" (Turner 97). G. A. Henty, the most popular writer for boys of his day (between 1871 and 1906 he sold an estimated twenty-five million copies) could write with confidence in 1885: "the courage of our forefathers has created the greatest empire in the world

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Voices of the Other

around a small and in itself insignificant island; if this empire is ever lost, it will be by the cowardice of their descendants" (Arnold 63). Racism seems to have been an inherent element of such arrogance. The state of affairs in "Hayti," Henty noted at the end of A Roving Commission, or Thmugh the Black Insurrection of Hayti (1900), is "proof of the utter incapacity of the Negro race to evolve, or even maintain, civilisation, without the example and the curb of a white population among them" (Arnold 79). English racial superiority was closely allied to the concept of the "manly boy" that infiltrated even the work of the mystic Richard Jefferies in Bevis (1882), and was one of a complex of ideological features which were the driving force behind the public schools and the public school story (see Bristow; Mangan 53-92). Even Rudyard Kipling's scathing attack on both of these institutions in Stalky alld Co. (1899) is predicated on the right of his heroes to go on to rule the empire. (Indeed, for the modern liberal reader, Kipling is perhaps the most difficult of all authors to negotiate.) However, the concepts of empire were emphatically not solely a male concern. The Girl Guide movement was supported by fiction such as Dorothea Moore's Teny The Girl Guide (1912) the imperialism of which was, as Cadogan and Craig observe, "an exhortation to its young readers to work together to maintain the British Empire and to protect the weak" (147-148). Girls in general were schooled in a supportive role, and the endless tales of middle-class benevolence that provided a staple diet for them in the last decades of the nineteenth century can be seen as a direct reflection of colonization. While Charles Peters, the (male) editor of the Girls' Own Paper could write in 1880 that his journal was intended to train girls "in moral and domestic virtues, preparing them for the responsibilities of womanhood and for a heavenly home" (Reynolds 139-140), that equated precisely with the idea of woman as the stable (and essentially passive) center from which men could explore the exotic (and erotic) Empire. Thus "when Mrs Sherwood writes of ... British India, she affirms the colonial bond as a form of voluntary servitude. Little Henry alld his Bearer (1814) and Little Lucy and her Dhaye (1823) dwell on the deep love that English infants, helpless and dependent, inspire in their Indian caretakers" (Trumpener 231 ). But with the faltering of imperial confidence towards the end of the century, there was, as Kimberley Reynolds notes, a shift from casual, expansive images of masculinity [as in Tom Brown's School Days] to a uniform definition which is prescriptive and vigor-

British Empire alld Post-Empire Children's Literature

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ously insisted upon ... in the Empire. Once a source of pride, secure jobs, ready markets, cheap imports, and, above all, a perfect platform on which British soldiers could display their skills, the imperial play was threatening to close. (57)

A similar loss of confidence and change in tone can perhaps be best seen in Kipling's homily of the growth and decay of empire, Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), which couches an imperialist warning within a complex frame. The very beginnings of England (and in this case Kipling means England) and the end of the Roman Empire provide a metaphor that seriously considers the positive role of the other (the Picts and the Jews are instrumental in England's fate), and has at its center the ideal of rural England. The same ideal is seen in Kenneth Grahame's retreatist The Wind in the Willows (1908), which is infused with uncel1ainty, as Victorian values decayed. Even Lewis Carroll was not immune: "At all points CaITO" makes it clear that Wonderland is an absolutist state that has lost its bearings" (Low 54), while Rider Haggard's "advocacy of Romance, his praise of frontier life ... is a reaction against what he saw asfin-desiecie decadence" (Low 264). Children's literature was, of course, the site of some subversion of the principles of empire, although the valorization of home as the repository of values was (as we have seen) in itself a part of the inescapable matrix of imperialism. Abolitionist tales of infant education, from Thomas Day's History of Sandford and Merton (1783) to Barbara Hoole Hofland's Matilda, or the Barbadoes Girl (I818)-and beyond it, to Frances Hodgson Bumett's 1911 Secret Garden-describe the reimportation into Britain not of hardwon self-knowledge gained in the empire, but of the ignorance and corruption endemic to the imperial system .... Optimistic about the chances of personal and thus imperial reform, this children's literature stresses individual transformation over systemic change.... Tn such works [as Sandford and Merton] despite their explicitly abolitionist sentiments, the West Tndies become the kind of "other setting" that Said describes; suppressed from British consciousness and conversation, they nonetheless continue to finance the operation of English culture. (Trumpener 169)

In the new century, and notably in the wake of the traumatic first World War, this ambivalence towards empire increased in children's literature: it both subverted and supported the ideology of empire.

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POST· COLONIALISM AND BRITISH CHILDREN'S FANTASY "By the 1960s," Jeffrey Richards observed, "the Empire had largely ceased to exist and the genres of imperial adventure and public school fiction which had sustained and justified it had undergone a similar eclipse" (Richards Imperialism, 5-6). However, the underlying attitudes of mind remained, embedded in the dominant post-war form, fantasy: as C. C. Eldridge points out, Amazingly, the same old patriotic attitudes, reverence for royalty, belief in empire ... the old school tie and the old boy network, as well as Victorian ideas about race had survived two world wars and the emergence of the two super powers. (180) But at the root of this survival were popular literature and children's literature. Just as Edwardian children's literature dominated the 1920s, so major imperialist writers continued to be read. For example, as Guy Arnold notes, Henty's books "were still to be found on school shelves fifty years after his death [in 1902] and at least some of the racial arrogance which, unhappily, has been so marked a characteristic of British behaviour in what is now termed 'The Third World' can be attributed to his influence" (Arnold 79, 80). In the March 1940 edition of Horizon, George Orwell famously attacked the school stories of the most prolific writer of all time, Charles Hamilton, as being "sodden with the worst illusions of 1910" (qtd. in Hunt 210, and see Cadogan 60--1,199-203); and although Hamilton made short work of Orwell, the fundamental charge has to stand. The handbook for British Boy Scouts (whose "Imperial Headqumters" was in London) was Lord Baden-Powell's Scollting for Boys, "the culmination of imperial ideals of boyhood" (Bristow 171-172). As late as 1956, in its fifth edition and eighteenth printing, it contained a section on "Our Commonwealth and Empire" that maintained a patronizing stance: In addition to the Nations of the Commonwealth there are many other British countries (sic) which do not entirely govern themselves; how far they do so depends on many things-for instance, the stage of education reached by the inhabitants. (175) Although explicit imperialism lived on (w. E. Johns's "Biggles" is often-eIToneously-cited as a major example), after the second World

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War British children's literature was dominated by fantasy, in which the imperial influence is more subtle. If it is, as lo-Ann Wallace suggests, "no accident that the 'golden age' of English children's literature peaked ... during the high noon ... of Empire" (176), then it is equally unsurprising that the period after 1945 produced fantastic fiction that both looked backward as well as outward on the Empire's remains. The Wide World as represented in British animal fantasies has little to recommend it, and characters peer out at it from cages or SCUITY back home as soon as possible. The outsiders are the enemies, foreigners in a world of British rule, creating unconsciously racist and isolationist worlds for the child reader to confront. When the story centers on an outsider coming to England, that character's only hope for acceptance is to forget his or her past life and take on purely English ways. Overall, the animal fantasie~ of this period underscore the value of staying home-and staying English. Ironically, Kenneth Grahame's The Willd and the Willows provides a model for post-I 945 animal fantasy. Christopher Clausen suggests that, "Although several of the characters arc tempted by travel, home is clearly where the characters belong" (142). Deborah Stevenson argues that the adult author's "remembering wistfulness" ahout home and childhood makes Grahame's book a classic ("River Bank Redux," 131); but this emphasis on home also sets up an outsider-insider structure that is riddled with unease. Many of the post-1945 animal fantasies mirror this unease almost as if time had stood still; issues of class and race are treated as if the empire had never disintegrated. One example of the English, or native, animal facing the Wide World can be found in Margery Sharp's "Miss Bianca" stories, the first of which is The Rescuers (1959). Miss Bianca, a white mouse owned by an Ambassador's son, rescues (and patronizes) prisoners, and lives in the palatial Porcelain Pagoda several flights above the other mice. In this vision of the white elite in the palace, Sharp harks back to earlier imperialist writing that includes, as Edward Said puts it, "characters whose capacity for isolating and surrounding themselves in structures ... takes the same form as the coloniser at the centre of an empire he rules" (Culture 197). Miss Bianca's attitudes are provincial (she regards Europeans as only marginally civilized), but in the former colonies she stands completely apart from the natives (see Miss Bianca ill the Orient (1970). The colonies are haphazardly characterized by Sharp as "the Orient," neatly confirming Said's view that the concept of the Orient is "a European invention" ("Orientalism" 87). The implication of these books, that the English know best about what is good for foreigners, is abundantly clear: as Hugh Kenner notes.

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this is typical of the British writer after 1945: "Nostalgia for a fancied largeness of the age of Good Queen Bess seems laid on like the gas in the Blitish psyche" (235). Richard Adams's best-selling neo-imperialist Watership Down (1972) extols a "traditional," way of life, promoting the idea of a dominant culture (male, conservative); Michael Bond's Paddington Bear (from "Darkest Peru"; indeed, Peru remains dark for the reader) and Olga da Polga (a guinea pig, also with Peruvian ancestry) are encouraged to take on English customs and habits as quickly as possible. The narrative structure of Bond's books is designed to advocate the insider position, so that the reader accepts English culture as natural and normal. Bond, like Margery Sharp, portrays the English way of life as the epitome of all that is good, and his characters succeed best when they accept this (see Blount 307). In A Bear Called Paddington (1958), Paddington sacrifices all he knows in order to achieve kinship with England: this includes not only his language, but his name as well. Olga da Polga (from The Tales of Olga da Polga, 1971) is caught between the present world, where she does not fit in, and a past world she does not know; she remains an outsider (literally) caged in an insider world. As Fanon notes, a colonizer turns "to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it" (154). The difference in Bond's nalTatives is that his characters embrace this destruction willingly: they represent an English author's attitude of how a foreigner should integrate him- or herself into British society, and the key word is sacrifice. As Britain in reality grows less and less important in the world, British animal fantasy delights in isolationism, tradition, and monoculturalism. Whether a British national, such as Miss Bianca, rescuing foreigners from the imagined hOlTors of their native land; a colonizer, such as Hazel in Watership Down, recreating a traditional society; or a foreign national such as Paddington or Olga da Polga, attempting to fit in to a new and very English world, the characters in post-1945 British children's animal fantasies learn that the Brits are still on top. In these books you might be forgiven for not noticing that the Empire has disappeared.

RE-EDUCATING THE CRITICS If colonialism survives in the fiction, it could also be argued that colonial blindness is still with us in the criticism of children's literature. Colonialism, once acknowledged as an historical fact, disappears. For example, Fred Inglis's broad, humanist (and ironic) assessment of King Solomon's

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Mines-"as a picture of British Imperial benignity it is far from empty, including as it does a real mutual respect, a decent rule imposed with foreign help, and the withdrawal of raw resources without interest or reinvestment" (l56)-contrasts starkly with Anne McLintock's unironic condemnation of territorial/sexual rape-'The conflicts between male and female generative power and between domesticity and imperialism, were not only the obsessive themes of Haggard's work but also a dominant preoccupation of the time" (234). Similarly, while Margery Fisher could detect "a palticularly unpleasing example of social hypocrisy" in the "extraordinary decadent sensuality" of Rider Haggard's books and their moral and sexual elusiveness" she does not see this in terms of exploitation and colonization (66). In fact, awareness of postcolonialism is rare in children's literature criticism. Unawareness is the norm. For example, Hunt's Children's Literatllre: An Illustrated Hist01), has been roundly attacked as it "still represents England as the imperial and cultural centre," and is based on a model that "must suppress cultural difference and specificity" (Scutter, Hunting, 36). How far such an approach rests in a simple unreconstituted habit of mind or in the tactical necessity of getting a text published whose principal market would be unreconstituted British and Americans might be debated. However strongly critics from outside Britain may lament such Anglocentric unawareness, British critics might argue that rather than failing to expiate the guilt of their forefathers they have merely failed to jump on the bandwagon of a passing critical fashion. Those writing from the ex-colonies will take no comfort from the suggestion that postcolonial theory is currently subject to the wider disillusionment with "high theory" and political forms of literary criticism which is increasingly evident. (Moore-Gilbert 36)

But the postcolonial debate (away from high theory) is a pmticularly impassioned one: awareness or unawareness has direct political consequences, and if children's literature is to maintain its claim to be culturally influential, such awareness at the (old) center is vital. While English remains the dominant world language, and when only a tiny fraction of translation is into English, neocolonialism seems to be inevitable. As Margery Houlihan (an Australian) has pointed out, in the post-colonial world the assumption of Western cultural superiority endures as is evident from the widespread acceptance of the role of

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Voices of the Other the West, and especially of the United States, as international peacekeeper and moral guardian .... The racism, inequality and violence which disfigure American life, the ruthless consumerism and the moral deficiencies of the economic rationalism which drives Western policies are perceived as merely external sores upon an inner purity, the pure superiority which the hero myth inscribes. (31)

Plus fa change, it seems, plus c'est la meme chose.

NOTE: "BRITISH" AND "ENGLISH" The relationship between these terms is complex, and we have attempted to be as accurate as possible in our use of them (although many writers we have cited have not been so meticulous). It is sometimes assumed that the term "British" is merely a way for the English to silence the less economically powerful elements of the Union, the Welsh and Scots, for example. It could, equally, be argued that there was never an English Empire: imperialism emanated from the Union, and all the -elements were equally subsumed by a British ideal. However, it is true that England dominates both the numerical output of literature, and the images carried by it: "England, home, and beauty" is a more commonly found image/concept than, say, "Scotland the brave." Thus it may well seem that English imperialism began at home-and yet "Little England-ism" has been a term of abuse for centuries. The issue is also complicated by the importance of English as a world language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Guy. Held Fast for England. G. A. Henty, Imperialist Boys' Writet: London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980. Baden-Powell, Robert. Scouting for Boys. 5th edition, London: Pearson, 1956. Bean, Philip, and Joy Melville. Lost Children of the Empire. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Benson, Eugene, and L. W. Conolly, eds. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures ill English. London: Routledge, 1994. Bishop, Peter. "Shangri-la Revisited: Imperialism, Landscape and Indentity." Landscape and Identity: Perspectives from Australia. Ed. Wendy Parsons and Robert Goodwin. Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994.21-32. Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children's Fiction. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Bratton, 1. S. "British Imperialism and the Reproduction of Femininity in Girls'

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Fiction, 1900-1930." Imperialism and Juvenile Literature. Ed. Jeffrey Richards, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. 195-215. - - - . The Impact of Victorian Children's Fiction. London: Croom Helm, 1981. Bristow, Joseph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's mJlM. London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991. Cadogan, Mary. Frank Richards. The Chap Behind the ChulIIs. London: Viking, 1988. Cadogan, Mary, and Patricia Craig. You're A Brick. Angela, The Girls' Story J839-J985. London: Gollancz, 1986. Clausen, Christopher. "Home and Away in Children's Fiction." Children '05 Literatllre 10(1982): 141-152. Eldridge, C. C. The Imperial Experience. From Carlyle to Fo/'Ste!: London: Macmillan, 1996. Fanon, Frantz. "National Culture." The Post-Colollial Studies Reade/: Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 153-157. Fisher, Margery. The Bright Face of Dangel: London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. Gittings, Christopher E., ed. Jmperialism and Gender: Constructions of MasClllillity. New Lambton, NSWIHebden Bridge, UK: Dangaroo Press, 1996. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adl'enture, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Houlihan, Ma~iO/·ie. Deconstructing the Hero: Literal:\' 711eory and Children '05 Literature. London: Routledge, 1997. Hunt, Peter. An Introduction to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. - - - . " 'What Would Daddy Have Done?' " Overt and Covert Constructions of Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Children's Literature." IlIlfwrialism alld Gender: Constructions of Masculillity. Ed. Christopher E. Gittings. 62-71. - - - , ed. Children's Literature: An lIIustrated History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Inglis, Fred. The Promise of Happiness. Vallie and Meaning in Children '05 Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Kenner, Hugh. A Sinking Island: The Model'll English Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Kipling, Rudyard. The Times (London). February 4, 1899. Le Guin, Ursula K. Earthsea Revisiolled. Cambridge: Children's Literature New England and Green Bay Publications, 1993. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karfn. Children '05 Literature. Criticism alld the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

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Low, Gail Ching-Liang. White Skins/Black Masks. Representation and Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1996. Mangan, 1. A. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London: Viking, 1985. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. "Crises of Identity? Current Problems and Possibilities in Postcolonial Criticism." The European English Messenger 6.2 (1997): 35-43. McGillis, Roderick. "Postcolonialism, Children, and their Literature." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 28.1 (1997): 7-15. McLintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Comext. New York: Routledge, 1995. Nodelman, Perry. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature." ChLA Quarterly 17 (1992): 29-35. Palmowski, Jan. Dictionary of7Wemieth-Century World History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Reynolds, Kimberley. Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children's Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910. Hemel Hempstead: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1.990. Richards, Jeffrey, ed. Imperialism and Juvenile Literature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan. London: Macmillan, 1984. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993. - - - . "Orientalism." The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995.87-91. Scutter, Heather. "Hit and Myth: Children's Literature and the Culture of Forgetting," Paper Presented at the 13th Biennial Congress of The International Research Society for Children's Literature. (Tn press). - - - . "Hunting for History: Children's Literature Outside, Over There, and Down Under." ARIEL 28.1 (1997): 21-38. Shaw, G. B. The Mall of Destiny. London: Players Press, 1992 (1896). Stevenson, Deborah. "The River Bank Redux? Kenneth Grahame's The Wind ill the Willows and William Horwood's The Willows ill Winter." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 21.3 (1996): 126-132. Spivak, Gayatri C. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." 1986. Postcolonial Criticism Ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, Willy Maley. Harlow: Longman, 1997. 145-165. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 (1726). Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism. The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997. Turner, E. S. Boys Will Be Boys. 3rd edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

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Wagner, Gillian. Children of the Empire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982. Wallace, Jo-Ann. "De-Scribing 171e Water Babies: 'The Child' in Post-Colonial Theory." De-Scribing Empire: Postc%llialism alld 1exfHalify. Ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 1994. 171-184. Williams, Keith. "'A Way Out Of Our Troubles': The Politics of Empire Settlement 1900-1922:' Emigrallfs alld Empire. British Settlement ill the DominiOl1s Between the Wars. Ed. Stephen Constantine. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. 22-44.

CHAPTER 4

Continuity, Fissure, or Dysfunction? From Settler Society to Multicultural Society in Australian Fiction JOHN STEPHENS

We can map Australian children's fiction, during the second half of the twentieth century, onto a trajectory within Australian society from a society imagined as grounded in the values of a settler culture with British origins to an ideology of multiculturalism. In fiction written in the 1950s, place-as a particular tetTitory inhabited by a pat1icular kind of peoplewas central to constructions of an Australian identity. By the I 980s, within little more than a quarter of a century, the relationships between place and identity had been redefined, as fictions embracing a multicultural ideology had emerged as a somewhat privileged form (privileged, that is, by book awards and by the demands of school libraries), so that now a multiplicity of ways of being in the world could be imagined. The society thus depicted reflects a hope that Australia is inexorably becoming multiple and diverse in nature or, in other words, is evolving towards social formations constituted as uncentered networks. The literature of multiculturalism for young readers appears characteristically to present a positive and optimistic orientation towards that process of evolution, and the processes of production, publication, and critical reception surrounding it reinforce that impression. But the development of a multicultural Australia has not been without its tensions and fissures. and it is arguable that what many assume children's fiction presents is a reflection of uninten'ogated "official" ideology, Since the early 1970s, multiculturalism has been enunciated as a policy of governments, and a generation of children has been educated within modern critical versions of Australian history that challenge older concepts of nation based on exclusion of cultural and ethnic otherness. 55

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The representation of cultural diversity, however, poses a special problem for fiction. Mere depictions of diversity will tend to be either inert or intrusive unless articulated as functional plot elements; if cultural diversity is central to plotting in a traditional orientation-complicationresolution structure (that is, the structure of most books for children), outcomes and closure will tend to constitute a new kind of center rather than mUltiple networks. The dilemma is increased by the central preoccupation in children's literature with the nature of selfhood and its relationship to place, in that not only may actual or putative cultural origins be represented as not-Australia, but selfhood may also be shown to depend on a character's recuperation of a "lost" culture. Whereas in the fiction of the 1950s there was an imperative to be Australian in specific ways determined by settler culture ideology ("authentic" Australian subjectivities were rural and Anglo), in the 1980s and 1990s metanatTatives of "authentic" selfhood may require characters to manifest the ethnicity of their forebears. Such factors suggest that it might be appropriate to read the literature of multiculturalism against the grain of official ideology: does it offer uncentered networks envisaged as sites for a freer play of subjectivities nuanced by difference, otherness, ethnicity, and so on, or does it rather produce alienated subjects under the illusion of multicultural intersubjectivity? At the end of the 1980s Australia was experiencing, apparently, a broad liberal consensus about the evolution of a multicultural, diversified society, including an assumption that the erstwhile British culture base was gradually dissipating. A decade later, in the shadow of the return to power of a conservative government with a distinctly less proactive attitude towards the ideal of multiculturalism (economic individualism having little time for cultural pluralism or civic awareness), and the emergence of a far-right nationalist politics explicitly opposed to the idea of a multifarious, multicultural Australia, it has become arguable retrospectively that the transformation from a settler to a multicultural society represented in children's literature was not the smooth continuity imagined in the early 1990s. Rather, the constructivist, humanistic values of fictions espousing multiculturalism cannot be quarantined from the young adult literature of social alienation, in which society is represented as deeply fissured and at times dysfunctional. Optimistic natTatives of inclusion, whereby dispersed or unfocused sUbjectivities are shown to be incorporated within sociality, are as much informed by metanan'atives of alienation as by metanatTatives of benign mUltiplicity. By the mid 1990s the more skeptical view was beginning to inform fiction.

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I will consider that more skeptical possibility by examining changes in representation across four texts in pmticular: Nan Chauncy's Del'il's Hill (1958), a quintessential settler culture nalTative about intense relationships between self and place in an isolated pioneer setting; David Phillips' Delli/'s Hill (1988), a reworking of Chauncy's book as a telemovie and spin-off novel, but now converted into an adventure story in which the significance of place for the construction of identity has been lost and settler culture mentality largely dissipated; Allan Baillie's Secrets of Walden Rising (1996), in which Australian settlement history erupts violently into the life of a modern immigrant; and Matt Zurbo's Idiot Pride (1997), in which use of setting appears as a transformed reprise of the idea of place in Chauncy's Dellil's Hill. Idiot Pride is a prose poem exploring an anxious, subtle blend of the experience of alienation. It pivots on responses to feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, anomie, and selfestrangement-precisely the experiences expunged by relationship with place in Devil's Hill-and a paradoxical sense of place, of a belonging within a small, inner-city area and its pluralistic cultures. Secrets of Walden Rising and Idiot Pride constitute critiques of any ameliorist reading of either settler culture history or the ideology of multiculturalism. The two versions of Del'i/'s Hill-Chauncy's original of 1958, and Phillips' version of I 988-neatly span the transition from settler to multicultural society, though it is a transition marked in the later text by its elisions and silences, reflecting a point in time-coinciding with and focused by the Australian Bicentenary-when Australian nationalism could only be constructed as an ahsence. Chauncy's narrative is almost quintessential in its assumption that authentic Australia exists in places most remote from urban centers, where selfhood is defined against untamed nature. In this simple story ahout the everyday world of pioneer small-holders, place is defined oppositionally. Readers see only one space, the isolated farm inhabited by Badge Lorenny and his parents, and the untamed, largely unexplored bush that surrounds it. Evoked as contrasts are the farm owned by Badge's Uncle Link and Aunt Florrie (from which the Lorennys are distanced by a half-day journey and an unbridged river, and by the propensity of the wilderness to en(Toach upon and obliterate trails) and the still more remote city, where Badge's cousin Sam sometimes goes for holidays. In what has since come to be seen as an inversion of center and periphery, subjectivity becomes less authentic as distance from the Lorennys' hidden valley increases. The novel begins with Badge, aged eleven, reluctantly setting out to attend school for the first time in his life. To do this, he must go and live

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at his uncle's farm. An outbreak of whooping cough delays schooling. When Aunt Florrie goes to hospital in the city the direction is reversed and three of Badge's cousins-Sam, Bron, and Sheppie-are sent to stay in the valley with the Lorennys. The plot catalyst occurs when the Lorrenys' only milk cow is killed by a tree blown down during a gale and Dad decides to replace her by tracking down a heifer which had escaped and "gone bush" previously. So both adults and all four children set out. The successful quest for the half-wild heifer is both a simple form of treasure hunt and a rite of passage for the children. As in most treasure hunts in children's literature, the thematic significance lies not in the finding of the treasure (which, when found, constitutes a general boon), but in the personal growth experienced by the children who seek it. The sense of an essential Australianness is best defined in the character of Sam, who, having been to the city, uses urban customs and artifacts as his criteria of value. What the city implicitly represents in the value frame of the novel, however, is the erosion of cultural authenticity. It is where resourcefulness is stifled and culture is second-hand, with the result that the essential Australian subjectivity, which is always masculine, is feminized. It is only by being co-opted into the journey away from the city and into the wilderness, ending at the boundary between explored and unexplored territory, that Sam can be inducted into Australian masculine subjectivity. In the first half of the book, his harping on the virtues of the city is consistently mocked, either nan'atorially or by the other characters, especially Badge's parents. The primitiveness of the Lorennys' shack-the roof is made of bark, the windows are unglazed, there is no electricity, and water has to be fetched from a creek-is a stimulus for such moments. For example, on the evening the cousins first arrive, Sam is asked to take over toast-making from Bron, who is quickly adapting to the domestic circumstances of the new environment. When Sam takes over, however, he feels compelled to explain how, "where I was in the city ... they had a machine that made the toast on both sides and turned itself off so it couldn't burn," and he promptly burns the toast. The incident is metonymically complex, imbricating Sam's fragmented subjectivity with the misdirection of his desires and the lures of ersatz culture. That the city represents not a gaining of sophistication but a loss of knowledge is emphasized a few pages later, when, having displayed a basic ignorance about Australian fauna, Sam is dismissed by his uncle as "a boy with his head crammed full 0' city nonsense" (68). The motif opposing city and bush sets Sam up as a character in need of a regenerative experience.

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While the journey itself is an impOltant rite of passage, a pivotal symbolic moment occurs on the day the group spend camped in a cavern at Devil's Hill, the outermost point of their journey and the place where their search concludes. Simply, when a heavy mist delays the search. Badge's mother, Liddle-ma, uses the time to cut everybody's hair. For the three cousins this is a transformative process, encapsulating the shearing away of those defects in selfhood which have already begun to be excised by the journey. Sheppie, the youngest, who wears a fringe over her eyes so she can pretend to be an English sheepdog, is ready to leave behind make-believe and enter the world of childhood responsibility. Bron loses her "straggling locks" and comes out "neat and shiny," reflecting her growth in competence and self-confidence. When Liddle-ma proposes cutting Sam's hair, Bron is horrified: "00, 1I0! Mum, she'd have kittens if he lost his curls!" (110). Bron's words inadveltentiy evoke the masculinism of Australian settler culture, whereby to admit anything feminine is to become effete. It now clearly emerges that Sam has been wrongly socialized because of his mother's aspirations for him: by trying to privilege culture over nature, the city over the bush, she is feminizing him and retarding his development towards adult masculinity. Sam, however, has been saved hy his exposure to the mores of pioneer culture, whereby the self is tested and defined in struggle against the virgin, untamed bush and the feminine is expelled. He demands his haircut, and when Liddle-ma asks, "Do I take it all off?", I he responds, "Yeah, all the cissy curls." The removal of the curls releases Sam from immaturity and into masculinity, thereby resolving his inner personality conflicts: Cutting [his curls1off seemed to have altered him-or perhaps this was a Sam they had never happened to meet before. He it was who suggested the new games, asked riddles, taught the latest hits, and made bed-time come long before they were ready. (III)

The lesson Sam has learned, apparently intuitively, which enables his progression from feminization to masculinity is reinforced by his father at the end of the novel. Recognizing the shortened hair as a component of Sam's new masculinity, he comments, "Soots me, but what will his Mum say?" The struggle against the mother, the domestic, the female, will have to be sustained, but presumably with the father as ally. When Dad arrives for his haircut, the disclosure of essentialized (gendered) selves becomes intertwined with the evolution of Australian settler culture through a joke about the Shearers' Union and reference to

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a nineteenth-century Australian bush ballad, "Click go the Shears"-a sheep-shearing song that encapsulates Australia's authentic subjectivity as rural and masculine: 2 Liddle-rna made her usual remark. "I charge for this; I belong to a union"; and Dad bellowed as he always did on hair-cutting days at home: "Snip go the shears, boys-snip-snip-snip!" "But, Unk!" Sam objected. "Dad got that song from a shearing shed and he sings it: 'Clip go the shears ..." "And my gran'father, he got it from England," said Liddle-rna, "and he sang: 'Ring the bell, watchman, ring-ring-ring!'" (Ill)

Liddle-rna's is the final word here, as Badge shifts their attention by asking for another shearer's ballad ("Johnny Cakes"). The three versions of a song are a kind of small social history lesson, although the chronology has been displaced forward by at least half a century. First the colony's settlers appropriate the music from a "mother-country" ballad for a new purpose, and then Dave Lorenny in turn appropriates that version. Of course, all Chauncy is showing here is the camaraderie of the Lorennys, their inventiveness and individualism, and their capacity to make their own entertainment. On the other hand, the incident reflects a pervasive, implicit quality of the novel that Brenda Niall identifies in all Chauncy's work-an "inward-looking, defensive quality: they build family fortresses against a dangerous world" (218). Her suggestion that this makes the novels typical products of the 1950s can be taken beyond the "fortress-Australia" mentality she alludes to and linked with the settlerculture ideology that underpinned it. A final aspect of this ideology that is implicitly, if rather ambiguously, present in Devil's Hill is its reflex misogyny. This is evident not just in the implications about Florrie's influence on Sam, but also in the characterization of Bron, whose fearfulness and susceptibility to panic are coded as female traits. As mentioned above, Bron's trajectory of development is towards competence and self-confidence, so her initial characterization strategically stresses her weaknesses. Not only males are tested by the wilderness in Chauncy's books and, as Niall points out, characters who fail to meet the challenges of the wild are apt to be dismissed. Sam continually stresses Bron's fearfulness, and his view cannot be discounted, because it is reinforced by the narrator's language, which applies such epithets to Bron as "fussing and snivelling" (47), "flustered"

From Settler Society to Multicultural Society ill Australian Fiction

6/

(49), "fearful ... timid" (55), and "terrified" (70). The journey into the wilderness is a severe trial for a girl already apprehensive about "the snakes and things" (45) in the bush around the farm, and aware of "endless things to be afraid about" (55). A braver, more adventurous Bron develops in the bush because of the trust and love she develops for Badge and Liddle-ma, and through that a growth in understanding that helps her overcome unsubstantiated fears. A problem, however, is that the only criteria against which she is measured are male, so she doesn't just have to overcome the contemptuous attitude of her brother (and to a lesser extent her father), but also change the behavior that validates that attitude. She must become physically adventurous and heroic, able to cope with snakes, Tasmanian Devils,3 dark caves, and steep slopes. The gendering of courage is rendered ambiguous because Bron's role models are Liddle-ma, the indomitable bush woman, and gentle, introvetted Badge, but that does not dislodge the (male) presupposition that sellhood is predominantly defined hy acts of courage. Badge himself ties Bron to that paradigm when he explains to her father why she looks different: "Aw, Bron's seen a couple 0' devils in a sort of cave she wanted to look in" (153). Fotty years have passed since the publication of Chauncy's Devil's Hill, and the novel is now virtually unreadable. This is not necessarily because of innate defects in the writing, but because of the social transformation in the contexts of reading, whereby an unexamined, implicit informing ideology that codes Australian sUbjectivity as rural and masculine now appears both ovett and absurd. The language has also dated, especially in the representation of colloquial speech, and this contributes substantially to the impression that the family's rural simplicity is rather more like rural idiocy. Conventional icons of Australianness, especially the typical bush man, appear more ridiculous than admirable, so, for example, the recurring motif of Badge's father scratching his chin with his thumbnail whenever some thought is called for now marks him as a yokel rather than a rough diamond; audiences are thus distanced from the character instead of being aligned with him. The pervading denigration of women, common enough in male discourse of the 1950s, is crass and unacceptable (and falsifies rural female experience anyway). A story about two adults and four children going out into the bush in search of a cow, where the principal interest is in its ordinary everydayness (and hence its rural mythology), has little to engage the attention of contemporary urban children. For all these reasons, the book seems a surprising choice as the basis

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for a film in 1988, when it was reworked as a telemovie produced by the Australian Children's Television Foundation within a series linked to the 1988 bicentennial celebration of British settlement of Australia. The Bicentenary was a celebration often tinged with embarrassment (to put it mildly), because a quasi-originary moment grounded in British colonialism sat awkwardly with an endemically immigrant, supposedly multicultural society, and with the fact that Aboriginal Australians had a prior history of habitation extending back around fifty thousand years. In shOlt, the new context of reception required a very different nan·ative. David Phillips, who wrote both the screen text and the subsequent novelization,4 approached the problem by transforming the genre from a natTative of mundane pioneer/settler experience to a children's adventure story, with its images of rural life now derived not from Chauncy's memories of Tasmanian childhoods, but from Australian historical movies of the early 1980s, such as Breaker Morant or Gallipoli-movies which, as Turner has argued, were patt of "a revival of rural-nationalist mythologies, reclaiming the experience of those in the country towns or on the land as fundamental to our national character" (9). Chauncy's themes of family as community and mutual dependence are still here, but depicted in exaggerated forms by the introduction of a cliche of older children's adventure stories-a separation of children from adults so they can get on with the business of the adventure. Dave Lorenny's role has been reduced to a merely iconic function, so that he appears only at the beginning and end of the film, and there in the role of handsome bushman, rugged but amiable. His struggle to stay on the land is emphasized by a major change in his relationship with his brother, which in this version is deeply conflictual, doubling and anticipating the tensions between Badge and Sam. The pervasive hostility between the families appears to function metonymically for wider social tensions resolvable by personal endeavor and cooperation, but Phillips also develops an implication apparently unregarded in Chauncy's original that the family to which Sam, Bron, and Sheppie belong is endemically dysfunctional. Now, however, the culprit is not just the mother, who seems unfitted both for motherhood and for rural life, but also the father, whose propensity for bullying, ill-temper, and inability to show affection is equally responsible for the shattered subjectivities of their children. In this regard, the film glances at an image of the kind of radically dysfunctional family used to deconstruct rural mythology in Sonya Hattnett's subsequent novel Sleeping Dogs (1995). The teleology of the 1988 film, however, affirms recuperation rather than deconstruction.

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When the plot takes Dave away to look after his brother's farm while the latter takes his ill wife to the city, it is Badge's mother-now, thankfully, renamed Jessie-who takes the children in search of the cow in a desperate quest for the last resource that will enable them to keep their farm. Her desperation then induces her to leave the children camped in the bush while she searches alone, but (of course) in the wrong direction. By these devices the children are freed to embark on their own quest and to bring back not just one cow but an entire lost herd, and in doing so forge new and richer subjectivities for themselves. The dangers of the journey are greatly increased, so that Badge and Sam are nearly drowned crossing a flooded river, and the final scramble up Devil's Hill becomes a frightening climb up a high and dangerous cliff. Badge's fear of heights, which was a minor element in Chauncy, is heavily overstated by vertiginous camera angles and portentous music and becomes his rite of passage to manhood; Bron must overcome her fear of horses, as well as native fauna; and Sam must discard his solipsistic and resentful individualism and learn empathy and respect for others. What has most significance in the 1988 film and novel for the trajectory away from Australian settler culture is the treatment of landscape. Setting in fiction and film constructs for audiences an already interpreted landscape, but now the landscape no longer figures the meanings accessed by Chauncy. The film's establishing shot is of Badge on horseback in the Australian bush, an unfolding panorama of flora and fauna as much reminiscent of a mid-1980s Australian Tourist Commission advertisement as of an early-1980s historical movie. The dangers of the bush-suddenly flooding rivers, venomous snakes, isolation-are part of this configuration. Anne-Marie Willis has pointed out how such images deployed national identity as "PaJt of an international process of commodification in which selective fragments of geographical sites, cultures and peoples get reconfigured as resources for the tourist industry" (25) and were then recycled back to Australia. By 1988, what had been simply assumed by Chauncy had to be self-consciously produced and then subordinated to the adventure genre. Landscape here SUppOlts a dramatic naJTative, but no longer the spiritual narrative implicit in Chauncy's use of setting. A final twist, and the most complete inversion of Chauncy's ideology, is that the film is thematically framed hy Dave's project to build a bridge across the Gordon River. Its completion signifies not just economic security for the farm, but integration of the Lorennys into the wider world. For Chauncy, the survival of what they stand for depends on the river constituting not just a physical boundary hut a mental boundary

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between their secret valley and the wider world. As Niall remarks, Badge represents an endangered species (222). In 1988, the danger of extinction is not because of cultural change but because of the passing of the physical landscape itself. Anachronistic references in the film to contemporary concerns such as pollution of the environment and to long-standing debates in Tasmania about flooding tracts of wilderness to generate hydroelectricity posit a more fundamentally economic shift. In this context, the newly built bridge is a powerful metonym in the landscape; promising immediate survival, it presages cultural shift and the eventually vanishing of the Lorennys' way of life. The fiction of the mid-I 990s suggests that the Badge species is now extinct. Like Devil's Hill, Secrets of Walden Rising is a kind of treasure hunt, though in this case what has been lost turns out to be of no value. The search for a bushranger's hoard, hidden two generations ago in the town of Walden, now drowned after becoming the site of a reservoir, materially yields up only a few trinkets and a wad of decomposed paper, once money. Metonymically, it figures all the other buried and repressed elements of Australia's colonial history that surface throughout the novel, as ideas of an Australian identity are contextualized within historical events and imagined cultural formations. Again like Devil's Hill, the novel explores the connections between subjectivity and place through the relation of two mutually hostile boys who learn to cooperate and finally become mates. Its sole focalizer, Brendan, is a new migrant from England, brought to the remote outback town of lacks Marsh by his father's quest for a typicalized immigrant dream, to be self-employed in one's trade, in this case, as a motor mechanic. Themes encompassed are: migration, racism, the goldfields history, the romance of the bushranger, genocide of indigenous Aboriginal people, the harshness of the land, and mateship. Because Brendan is the only focalizer, Australian history and myth are focalized from the perspective of the excluded other. He doesn't understand the wider significance of landscape until it is finally revealed that his antagonist, Bago, who demonstrates a propensity for bullying similar to Sam in DedI's Hill, has succumbed to acute alienation because of the intolerable stress placed on him by the drought and his parents' failing farm. His passage into despair occurs when he has to help his father shoot their starving sheep. Brendan uses comparisons and contrasts with his English home and memories at first to define his own sense of alienation by defining the physical and social landscape as harsh and inhospitable, and later to try to block out the local meanings emerging with the drowned town of Walden

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which "rises" from the reservoir as the watcr drains away because of the drought. Landscape consistently has metonymic significance for Brendan. Thus, a drawing of a galah made in his sketch book is metonymic of both place and people: ''A shrieking tough bunch in a one-room school at the end of the world. Surrounded by the dry, dry bush where everything has prickles, thorns, barbs and stings" (3). In Devil's Hill, and especially in the 1988 version, the journey as rite of passage brings the three older children to confront their own fears and weaknesses and to overcome these through mutual suppOltiveness and cooperativeness. This theme, and the kind of structure which embodies it, is reproduced in Secrets of Walden Rising, but with a very significant difference: Brendan and Bago, having witnessed a murder, must unite to protect each other from the murderer, and finally unite in killing him. Their journey has been into the healt of darkness, through a revisionist version of Australian history that discloses the hOI1'or behind the mythology. Various characters in the novel attempt to deny or forget the past-the massacre of the local Aboriginal people, the violence against the Chinese diggers on the goldfields-but as Walden emerges from the water the violence erupts out of history into the present, reminding readers that the experiences of early Australian settlement included not only the romance of the frontier-exploration, gold fever, farming a new world, bushrangers, and so on-but also the fissures of violence and racism. Brendan's experience as incomer and other attests that a sense of nation based on exclusion and expressing itself as violence and racism are not only endemic to Australian history (as critics of Ward's The Australian Legend have consistently argued), but can resurface in I 990s Australia in reaction to socioeconomic stress. The novel finally refuses the up-beat teleology of the versions of Devil's Hill. The two boys are safe, but they are not saved. The rain that falls on them in the final chapter, washing their bodies clean, signals that the drought has broken and the reservoir will cover Walden again, but it doesn't signify the descent of grace. It is merely the end of one cycle of return. The novers concluding words, Bago's reflection on the killing, point to a disjuncture in the close between story outcome and thematic outcome: "I thought it would be very hard. But when we had him on the Granite between us, it wasn't hard at all. ... It was easy. Like killing sheep" (168). If Secrets of Walden Rising depicts the mythologies of Australian settler culture as irreparably fissured, Matt Zurbo's Idiot Pride gocs furthcr to suggest that their metanarratives have become moribund and have lost any explanatory force. Set in an inner-city, multicultural suburb (Spotswood) inhabited by a lower socioeconomic populace-dcscribed at

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one point from the perspective of richer, Anglo Australians as "scruffy mongrels from the inner city commission flats"5-the novel depicts young people in the process of inventing modes of being in the world without substantial reference to the mythologies underpinning texts such as Devi/'s Hill. In Idiot Pride these mythologies only surface obliquely as a nexus of class and ethnicity, and are reflected in dialogic moments involving the natTator's community and the cultural domain of celtain British Australians, especially some teachers, students from a wealthy outer suburban school, and university jocks. The novel is a celebration of place, but reconfigures the relationship of place to sociality so that the representation of self is strongly embedded in social relations, and these give meaning to place as much as place nuances the meaning of being in the world. The radical refusal of teleology is expressed structurally through the absence of any coherent plot beyond an occasional chronological connectedness, so that most of the nan·ated segments could have been at1"anged in any order. Fmther, no single coherent subjectivity is attributable to Matt, the text's naITator-focalizer, which might be drawn on by readers to infer some kind of structure for the book. Varied discourses-especially of class, ethnicity, family dysfunction, community, and sport--depict a multilayered interaction of self and world, as subject positions shift and are renegotiated whenever the nan-ator moves between discourses. Diverse intersubjective moments are celebrated, but not as a movement towards or disclosure of an essential selthood as in classic settler culture texts such as Devil's Hill or Lilith Norman's Climb a Lonely Hill (1970), or in the more recent genre of multicultural bildungsroman (see Stephens). Rather, they denote an inhabiting of the everyday as a state of always becoming, a process that is both an experience of alienation and a refusal to be subjected to the will of another, whether this is parent, teacher, enemy, or lover. Thus Matt often spends the night with a female friend, but he is not one of her sexual partners, and both resist the possibility of a relationship predicated on loss of selfhood: Love is strength. Strength and contradictions. Pride and no pride. Throwing away pride so that she can keep me-some stupid, pathetic little secret-going with it because that's what it takes. Keeping pride. Keeping me, myself, my strength_ If I became her I'd become nothing, have, be nothing. (29)

In this representation of selfhood as constituted within paradox and contradiction, within which gender, ethnicity, and class are simultane-

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ously crucially formative and readily eluded, where subjectivity is only guaranteed by intersubjectivity, Idiot Pride represents postmodernity in a way not previously attempted in Australian children's fiction. Just as debates about identity have been at the core of much post modern discourse, so this novel elaborates the idea that selfhood is fluid. As such, older myths of nationhood might seem simply irrelevant, but, as slated earlier, they are evoked through contacts and contrasts between Matt's very diverse community and Anglo traditions and high culture. Thus an ill-considered attempt by a replacement teacher to have the class read Romeo and Juliet aloud-epitomized in, "a wog who has trouble with Aussie tries to read some dumb-arse language that died hundreds of years ago" (103)-culminates in mayhem and mindless violence, but in doing so challenges the relevance of British cultural heritage to the lived experience of modem "mongrel" Australia. The sharpest example, however, appears in the book's title segment (69-76), an incident that involves the greatest icon of masculinity in Australia's southern states, a game of Australian-rules football. This pm1icular match challenges the conventional wisdom that spol1 unifies. As Mackay expresses it, "football is one area where Australians are quick to accept people from diverse ethnic backgrounds as long as they accept the shm·ed values of the game, and a uniquely Australian sense of identity" (165). What the Spotswood team discovers is that in Australia in the 1990s the combination of class and ethnicity produces a volatile solution. Their opponents, from Lilydale High, "were the outer suburban public-school champions. They had creeks and green acres and money and their school had won this final the last four years running" (70). They assume they have a natural superiority on the basis of class and race, and in depicting this Zurbo evokes a central criticism of Australian settler culture identity: it is figured not just as a rationale of inclusiveness-accepting the shared values of the game-but as a rationale for exclusion: "The crowd gave us a good gawking, spat words like 'wog!' at us as though they were insults" (70). As the qualification here indicates, Matt's community can recuperate derogatory racist language, like wag, and use it for self-description instead of ethnic exclusion, but the semantic fissuring of the term across the boundary between Anglo and other points to a limitation in the concept of Australian social diversity. As the football match progresses, inexorably degenerating from a game to an all-out brawl, the contrast between "green acres" and inner-city concrete is more closely specified as contrasts between "one of them" and "Wally, the short, curly-haired

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Lebanese kid," or "his opponent" and "Tom Volkov ... the solid friendly Bulgarian," effectively inverting the "them" and "us" distinction of Anglo culture. The configuration of class and ethnicity in Idiot Pride is extremely complex, because identity is shifting and mUltiple and emerges in the context of multiform interchanges, back and forth, within the matrix of community and place, and these include interchange between feelings of belonging and feelings of profound alienation. Out of this matrix, part of the nation's excluded-excluded on the basis of class or class and ethnicity-forge their own cultural formation. The novel's final sentence, "It's what we are" (125), is thus a simple but sublime gesture to embrace that process. Moments where the novel focuses attention on the attitudes of Anglo Australians critique and invert settler culture assumptions about center and periphery, and while they may seem assimilable to the notion of uncentered networks, the cultural and physical violence that erupts along the lines of contact rather indicates an on-going need for interrogation and change, and a further reimagining of the basis of society. Fictions such as Idiot Pride and Secrets of Walden Rising thus have a considerable capacity to remind readers that the transformation from the settler culture mentality prevalent in Australia in the 1950s to an imagined multiculturalism is still in a process of becoming. They also show readers ways to read against the grain within the emerging genre of multicultural fiction.

NOTES 1 Liddle-rna's question is one that was commonly asked by Australian barbers at the time. The usual affirmative answer produced the then universal "short back and sides" haircut (clipped short to about the top of the ears, a little longer on top, usually parted on one side). 2 For a text of the traditional ballad with illustrations which expressively capture its rural mythology, see Click Go the Shears, illustrated by Robert Ingpen (Sydney: Collins, 1984). The description of the old shearer in the ballad's final line effectively summarizes the masculine rural ethos: "He works hard, he drinks hard, and goes to hell at last!" In a classic exposition of the mythology (as distinct from the actualities) of Australian nationalism, published in the same year as Devil's Hill, Russel Ward (1958) has argued that the nomadic bush-workers of the outback, such as shearers, epitomized the Australian nationalist image. 3 The Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is the largest of Australia's surviving carnivorous mammals. A little less than a meter in length, it is a noctur-

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nal scavenger, common in Tasmania, but probably disappeared from the Australian mainland about six hundred years ago. The children's enccunter with a pair, described as "fiercely alert and black as the gully beneath" (122), constitutes an iconically local experience. 4 While they are useful for reference, the novelizations of ACTF films were generally disappointing, being little more than fleshed-out screen plays, and this one is no exception. Specifically filmic effects, especially visual metonymies and camera work, have not been reimagined. but tend to be rather stolidly represented by narration and description. An intrusive narrator tells his readers what the characters think and feel, and hence characterization is not handled in an appropriately novelistic way (through point of view and focalization, say). A simple example is that in speech reporting tags Badge's parents are always "Dave" and "Jessie," and this designation maintains a narrator's perspective, whereas in Chauncy they are "Dad" and "Liddle-rna," a designation that indicates a child's or child-aligned perspective. The difference has important implications for the subject position implied for readers. 5 The reference in "inner city commission flats" is to low-cost, high-rise public housing built by the Victorian Housing Commission in Melbourne. and made available to people on low incomes. In popular opinion, these ugly buiildings are not only crowded and lacking amenities. but are centers of poverty, violence, broken families, and other social problems.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baillie, Allan. Secrets of Walden Rising. Ringwood: Viking, 1996. Chauncy, Nan. Del'il's Hill. London: Oxford UP, 1958. Dobrez, Livio. ed. Identifying Australia in Postll/odem Times. Canberra: Australian National UP, 1994. Dugan, Michael, and Josef Szwarc. There Goes the Neighbourhood! Australia's Migrant Etperience. Melbourne: Macmillan. 1984. Hartnett, Sonya. Sleeping Dogs. Ringwood: Viking, 1995. Ingpen, Robert iIIus. Click Go the Shears. Sydney: Collins, 1984. Mackay, Hugh. Reinventing Australia: The Mind and Mood of Australia in the 90s. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1993. Niall, Brenda. Australia Through the Looking-Glass. Children's Fiction 18301980. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1984. Norman, Lilith. Climb a Lonely Hill. London: Armada Lion, 1970. Phillips, David. Devil's Hill. Fitzroy: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1988; and screenplay for Devil's Hill, a telemovie made by the Australian Children's Television Foundation.

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Stephens, John. "Multiculturalism in Recent Australian Children's Fiction: (Re)Constructing Selves Through Historical Fiction and Personal Histories." Other Worlds, Other Lives, Vol. 3. Ed. Myrna Machet, Sandra Olen, and Thomas van der Walt. Pretoria: U of South Africa, 1996. Tumer, Graeme. Making It National: Nationalism and Australian Popular eultitre. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legelld. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958. White, Richard. Inventillg Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Willis, Anne-Marie. Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation. Sydney: Hale & fremonger, 1993. Zurbo, Matt. Idiot Pride. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1997.

CHAPTERS

Text, Culture, and Postcolonial Children's Literature: A Comparative Perspective JEAN WEBB

For the past few years I have been thinking about postcolonial children's literature from a comparative perspective, observing emergent patterns in literature for children from England, Australia, America, and Ireland. The comparative nature of the work consists in my matching these patterns against cultural development at particular limes,and seeing certain similarities and differences. Thus the theoretical position underpinning this work is that texts are simultaneously the producers and the product of their culture and time. If we accept this position, then we must shed the notion that writing for children is "innocent" and take instead the position adopted by John Stephens (Language, 1992) that all literature for children is, in some way, ideologically driven. The ideological drive underpinning the literature of the countries I select for this paper is initially that of English imperialism, for American, Australian, and Irish children's literature have all been radically shaped by the colonial power of the British Empire, as has the literature for children in England. Wherever the world map was colored pink on the march of imperialism, so English children's literature appeared. During their early histories the colonies, which also for a considerable time included America, were economically unable to produce their own books for children (see for example, Fosler, Finnis and Nimon 2 and Townsend 35). Reading materials were imported from the home country, the seal of industrial power in the nineteenth century, and therefore the ideological forces derived from imperialist England were also carried along. What interests me are the side effects of "literary imperialism," the reactive literary movement in the colonies. This reaction, I contend, is 71

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particular in each case to the cultural and physical environments and draws into focus those forces that drive onward to separate the colony from, in this case, England. However, although the reactions are patticular, patterns of similarity have also emerged during my comparative studies. The central purpose of this paper is, therefore, to offer a new theoretical perspective on literary development through colonial children's literature by identification of the positions cited in the following patterns of cultural development: 1. Suppressed cultures establish separation and identity by reflecting on landscape and a sense of cultural self. 2. Suppressed cultures force through the dominant culture by constructing and reconstructing myth. 3. Suppressed cultures realize identity by the rewriting of history. The way that I understand these patterns is by thinking of the establishment of identity and cultural self through landscape and the relationship of the narrative to that environmental shaping, which embodies the ideology of the culture, the making of cultural myths out of that interaction. Myth and the reconstruction of myth form a batTier between the suppressed people and the dominant culture, until there is sufficient distancing "bulk" to enable the suppressed culture to rise up from behind its protective banicade, as in the case of Ireland. The rewriting of history follows from both patterns of development. And so to unfold this theoretical nan·ative I have generally taken each country separately, but also interwoven some of the points so that the comparative basis emerges.

ENGLAND English children's literature, broadly, developed from three roots-first, the popular culture of the oral tradition; second, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), a work of fiction which by verisimilitude purports to create the reality of Crusoe conquering nature and Man Friday on his desert island; and third, the didactic, morally driven work of the early nineteenth-century writers for children, who wrote from a strongly Puritan perspective. The oral tradition centered upon folk and fairy tales and was absorbed into print by the producers of chapbooks from the mid-seventeenth century-such tales as Tom Thumb or the stories in The Arabian Nights were published for both adults and children. These and other fantastic tales continued through to the mid-nineteenth century as a subversive stream flowing just beneath the dominant waters of mainstream

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literature, when they were rewritten and sanitized by writers such as E. W. Lane with his version of The Arabian Nights (1838-1840), and George ClUikshank who in the I 850s rewrote popular fairy tales such as Cinderella, which, although clumsily, understandably embodied grave warnings against the evils of drink in a period when gin shops were common on London street corners, and babies were sedated with a mixture of opium and alcohol while their mothers worked. By mid-century the oral tradition was becoming safely subsumed into that which was deemed "suitable" for children, thereby embodying the ideology central to the creation of a dominant culture. However, what is deemed suitable for children is always debatable, and matters were no different in the nineteenth century than they are in ours. Nicholas Tucker, in Suitable for Children? (1976), has documented the central tension of the moral and literary debate between didacticism and imagination, the educational camp versus the literary. The deliberation upon the status and nature of the imagination had, after all, been the driving force behind what later became known as the Romantic movement, and in the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fairy tale and literary theory neatly coincide. Coleridge gives the following engaging account of his childhood reading in a letter to Thomas Poole, dated October 9, 1797: My father's sister kept an everything shop at Crediton, and there J read through all the gilt-covered little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift. Jack the Giantkiller, etc., etc., etc. And J used to lie by the wall and mope, and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly: and in a flood of them J was accustomed to race up and down the churchyard. and act over all J had been reading, on the docks, the nettles and the rank grass. At six years old J remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then J found the Arabian Nights Entertainments. one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (J had read it in the evenings when my mother was mending stockings), that J was haunted by the spectres, whenever J was in the dark: and J distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which J used to watch the window in which the book lay. and whenever the sun lay upon them. J would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burnt them. So J became a dreamer . .. (Richards, The Portable Coleridge, 220)

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Fairy tales not only fed his dreams and stimulated him into actively playing out these interior dramas of the mind, they also enabled his imagination to encompass the wonders of the physical world. Coleridge produces a synthesis of science, fairy tale and imagination in the following extract from another letter to Poole: My Father told me the names of the stars-and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world-and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them-and when I came home, he shewed me how they rolled round and round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c--my mind had been habituated to the Vast . ... (qtd. in Holmes 1)

Coleridge is writing of the liberation of his imagination through fantasy and fairy tale-a liberation that was particularly pertinent in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the period of Coleridge's childhood and youth, the so-called Age of Reason, when imagination was not the most valued attribute of mind. Coleridge and the other Romantic poets did much to shape the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century England, and in doing so they helped to fashion those conditions that enabled the rise of England as a great colonial power-for the nation that believes in itself sufficiently to rule and conquer all is like a giant ego, with the imaginative capacity to create a national identity of self-belief that can then engulf and dominate other cultural identities. The literature of the pel;od becomes an imaginative energy that feeds and is fed by the political and cultural actuality: the literary myth of dominance becomes reality. This is reflected pmticularly in the development of the adventure story for boys emanating from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Defoe bases Crusoe on journals that he had read; by saturating the text with realistic detail, he convinces the reader that the island really existed and the events actually happened. Robinson ClUsoe is the conquering king who rules all. He tames the wild island, subjecting nature to his lUle. He tames Man Friday, the savage native. Man Friday has his language taken from him, for he has to learn English, and is applauded for doing so. He has to denounce his own pagan, and therefore uncivilized, religious practice and become Christian to be acceptable to the English reader. He has to become, as far as he can, a black Englishman, without ever achieving the complete transformation, thereby leaving the dominant position for the white man. The pat-

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tern had been set for the colonial myth of white superiority that nineteenthcentury writers such as R. M. Ballantyne readily adopted. Ballantyne is most well known for the novel, Coral Is/and (1857). This novel reads most convincingly in a realist mode, yet inaccuracies betray the reality. For example, Ballantyne makes an attractive scene of one of the lads piercing a green coconut to drink the milk which was like nature's lemonade; in reality coconuts come inside a large bulky husk that would have to be dealt with first. This and other inaccuracies indicate that Ballantyne's was an island of the imagination only. He had written several books for boys based upon his real life experiences prior to Corai Island, which was his first purely fictional creation concerned with a part of the world to which he had not travelled. His characters in Corai Island are shipwrecked upon an island and then corne to rule with total domination. The island and its natives come under white rule in Crusoe fashion. However, what is pm1icularly interesting is the book Ballantyne wrole just before Corai/siand, Ungava (1857). Ungal'a was the last hook based on his expeliences as a ruler of natives when he worked for the Hudson's Bay Company, trading in furs in the nOJ1hern hemisphere. This novel is notably a tale of colonial defeat set in the "wild and uninhabited regions of NOJ1hAmelica" (Ullgava 13). The adventures ofthe fur traders who set up a station "on the distant, almost unknown shores of Ungava Bay" (14) lead the reader toward expecting a stereotypical tale of white domination: No one ... had ever been there before; no one knew anything about the route, except from the vague report of a few Jndians; and the only thing that was definitely known about the locality at all was, that its inhabitants were a few wandering tribes of Esquimaux, who were at deadly feud with the Jndians, and generally massacred all who came within their reach. (14)

Here is the "virgin" land, set to be conquered, fittingly inhabited by nomadic, aggressive savages. Ballantyne gives here no vestige of Romantic nobility to the Esquimaux, for all such attributes apply to the leaders of the expedition, who are described as follows: George Stanley was nearly six feet high, forty years of age, and endued with a decision of character that. but for his quiet good humour, would have been deemed ohstinacy. He was deliherate in all his movements, and exercised a control over his feelings that quite concealed his naturally enthusiastic disposition .... As for Frank MOlton, he was an inch

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Stanley and Morton have the characteristics of English colonial power: self-control, energy, trustwOlthiness. The passage is couched in the militaristic language of the colonizer; there is a governor and a chain of command, and the intention is to make a civilized settlement in the wilderness of the other, the land of the Indian and the Esquimaux. Here is the act of colonization in the heightened style of sentimental fiction; handsome, patriotic heroism against impossibility equals colonial triumph. Yet in the reality of Ballantyne's experiences this had not happened, and in Ungava he recognizes reality through fiction, for the colonial project has finally to be abandoned. In the closing stages of the novel Ballantyne confesses that "however resolute a man may be, he cannot make furs of hard rocks, nor convert a scene of desolation into a source of wealth. Vigorously he wrought and long he suffered, but at length he was compelled to advise the abandonment of the station" (267). However, in most of the tales of empire by Defoe, Ballantyne, and later G. A. Henty, there are no doubts-the English conquer all in certainty, with God on their side. The models for the boy reader are courageous and to an extent emotional, but in the right places--one fellow in Coral/sland expresses love through cherishing his cat, yet usually the emotions are bound by that which is regarded as manly. Only in Ungava is there a weakness and a wavering-the questioning of imperialism that was to be demonstrated almost fifty years later by Joseph Conrad in his modernist stories that challenge imperialism-Heart of Darkness (1899) and Nost1'011l0 (1904). In Ungava, Ballantyne knows he cannot control this landscape. He cannot conquer the elements, nor the people of the region who resisted colonialism; hence, in literary terms, he must turn his back on reality, for there is no myth to be created here. The truth of history is, for the conqueror, that of failure. The extremely popular works of Henty, however, did not display such doubts. He wrote numerous stories of the conquering power of the English-With Clive in/ndia or The Beginning of an Empire (1884) and

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many others-that parade the unshakable self-belief of imperialism, conquerors riding across the landscape impervious to culture or country. Such was the power and influence of Henty's stories that they were said to have sent the generation of boys who read them up and over the top of the trenches in World War I. Young men threw themselves on the bayonets and bombs of heroism on the battlefields of Flanders, their patriotic fervor engendered by their childhood reading. Their childhood imaginative experiences produced real actions, which went tragically wrong. For them the fantasy of heroism became an awful reality from which they were never to return. However. the point here is that the impelialist writers throughout the nineteenth century produced the cultural myth that became embodied in the imagination of the reader, who would act out the essence of such ideology in real life. Children's literature from both America and Australia also creates the cultural mythology. The mythology this literature creates at the point when these places depart from the dominance of English control is what will occupy me now.

THE UNITED STATES Early American children's literature reflected the religious didacticism of Puritan ideology, which saw the rewards of life in heaven, rather than on eatih. The thrust of the stories was toward moral and reI igious control of the child. Life as a moral trial, a rite of passage, removed the awareness of physical setting: the actuality of landscape was irrelevant to the ideological requirement. This was the general case until the work of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860) who, as the narrator Peter Parley in Tales of Peter Parley About America (1827), described great travels combined with his own version of American history (see Townsend 33). America is a big country open to travel and settlement: therefore it is logical that considerations of landscape and history should feature in the literary consciousness dominating writing for children. The need to write a history is instrumental, for it is a way for authors to document the consciousness, the identity of the culture. Mid-nineteenth century America. now ostensibly freed from being a colonial subject and now a growing industrial power, demonstrates in its literature a confident atiistic identity. England at mid-century experienced the great flowering of high fantasy in the work of Edward Lear, Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, and George MacDonald, writers who variously critiqued and satirized mid-nineteenth-century England through, in many ways, nightmarish fantasy. In America, the central concerns were not so

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clearly defined as fantastic, but they did take up notions of the dreamyoung America, on the first rungs of capitalism, was climbing into the Gilded Age. The dream of rags to riches was embedded in children's literature. A new myth of culture emerged in the stories of Horatio Alger, such as Ragged Dick (1864). This book typifies the belief that any AmeJican could succeed in this land of 0ppOltunity. The energies had variously escalated until, not only in the political sense, but also in the literary, sufficient cultural confidence had been generated for writers to break from the dominant culture. The myth of capitalism speaks through Mr. Whitney, Ragged Dick's mentor: "I hope, my lad," Mr. Whitney said, "you will prosper and rise in the world. You know in this free country poverty is no bar to a man's advancement" (8). For many Americans this fairy tale was reality, and Alger's work contributed to it through realism, a realism with a capitalist base-the imagination dedicated to the realization of monetary and social power.

AUSTRALIA Cultural self-responsibility can only come through the full realization of cultural identity, and in nineteenth-century Australian children's literature, an emergent cultural identity was a central focus and concern. John Foster, Em Finnis, and Maureen Nimon analyze the emergence of the separate identity of the Australian in children's fiction, while John Stephens focuses on contemporary works in his essay "Images of Australian Society." Australian children's literature has, for not far short of a century, worried and played over the notion of "Australianness." Maureen Nimon writes of the emergent Australian voice, which the stifling presence of English children's books for Australians had effectively silenced for much of the early colonial period: English children's literature was read in Australia not only because it could be easily obtained but because it was considered to be the right material for "British" children to read. Children taken to the Australian colonies or born here were indeed Australian and expected to be proud of being so, but the colonies were first and foremost British, and their very existence was owed to their place in the British Empire. Australian settlement was an outcome of British expansion, and the inhabitants of the continent were British citizens. For young Australians immersion in English children's literature was therefore part of their induction into their own culture. By reading

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books written and published in Britain, they learned of "home" and how the history of that country was their own. (Foster, Finnis, and Nimon 2)

Nimon continues by documenting the development of early Australian writing. Between 1841 and the end of the century, a number of juvenile books were published in Australia or written by people living here though published in Britain. Yet most of the novels for children about Australian life, and therefore in one sense, the earliest contribution to "Australian" children's literature, were written by people overseas, many of whom never came here. The bulk of these books were books belonging to genres common in English children's literature, but employing the Australian colonies as their settings. (Foster, Finnis. and Nimon 3)

She also explains the illusion of the importance of Australia. for although many of these nineteenth-century texts had a token Australian setting, the ideological thrust was toward creating the suitable colonist and serving as a practical handbook for new colonists. There was, for example, the generation of emigration literature written to encourage people to leave Britain and seek to improve themselves by pioneering new settlements. One such title with an Australian setting was W. H. G. Kingston's The Gilpins and 711eir Fortunes published in 1864. Kingston's novel is carefully organised as a guide to the emigrant, warning that success will not come easily, but promising that in time "persevering toil and constant exertion of mind and body will bring its rewards." (3)

Not until the fading years of the nineteenth century did Ethel Turner in Seven Little Australians (1894) make "her fearless declaration on page one of the right of Australian children to be themselves"( 15). Without apology, children's literature in Australia began to write through the Australian landscape, rather than offering tokenistic referencing to a place that could. in fact, be anywhere. The Australian bush becomes the place for the construction of and testing of national character. From the early stories of children being lost in the bush, to contemporary narratives of camping exploits and characteristic Australian "mateness," the bush has

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become synonymous with what it means to be an Australian. It is the site of self-discovery and self-awareness. Foster, Finnis, and Nimon (1995), Stephens (1997), and Nimon and Foster (1997) cite a number of examples, not unsurprisingly, since this relationship between self and landscape is central to the Australian experience. Gary Crew and Michael O'Hara's Blue Feather (1997) is a contemporary novel about the bush. The bush is the site of exploration for the three central characters: the adolescent Simon, who is a misfit in his society; Greg, the owner of a bird sanctuary deep in the bush; and Maia, a photographer/joul11alist. Greg and Maia take with them the history of their broken love relationship, while Simon, who has been blinded in one eye as a young boy, must come to terms with himself and his blighted social behavior. He is both physically and mentally running away. Simon, Greg, and Maia are engaged in contests of self-discovery in this adventure, which takes them on a quest for spiritual and mythic nature. They hunt for the giant bird (myth or reality?) that drops the brilliant blue feather, the key to their trail of physical and psychological discovery. Their quest moves them out of the known environs of civilization into the bush where anxieties and fears can be nakedly confronted, where contemporary white social behavior comes into stark contact with Australian!Aboriginal history. The conflict between spirituality and contemporary "civilized" culture is played out in the defining environment of Australia itself. The gigantic blue-feathered bird is the mythical image (or reality?) through which all elements of the nan'ative come together: the trials against environment and self; Aboriginal and white history; the social nature of contemporary society where gender roles are contested. The bird myth is a fusing device, a way of bJinging together disparate elements so that they can share a nan'ative of experience, a reality. In "Images of Australian Society," Stephens discusses the current debate as to what this emergent nation should be and how the question of national identity moves into children's texts. Environmental issues are central, as are questions of multicultural identity. The cultural mUltipersonality in a postmodel11 world also concel11S sexual identity in teenage fiction. In Bron Nicholls's short story, "Only Two Hours By Train," the bush, once the scene of male bonding and struggle against the environment, has become the site for sexual exploration-young people away from the normal constraints of society, isolated in their own world, sharing a tent. Confined physical proximity brings sexual orientation into focus. Nicholls's story is subtle. The characters, Kevin and Theo, are initially positioned as opposites. Volatile Kevin is the adolescent masculine,

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urban Australian, while Theo is the feminized adolescent of Greek origin. Theo has some experience of the bush, having visited the camping place once with his brother. He is described as soft, and slow to lose his temper. The play of oppositions does not fall into a stereotypical switching of places; more subtly, the two boys move closer to a central space of understanding when removed from the enclosure of social behavior engendered by urban society and cultural mores. Stephens raises the central question of cultural mores: What happens, then, when a single story-Nicholls, "Only Two Hours By Train"-interrogates assumptions ahout masculinity by bringing into dialogic relationship discourses pertaining to gender representation, multiculturalism, and sense of place, and further imbricates these with older discourses about men and frontiers and about the city and the bush? The textual product is a complex of images built up by a layering of components, and the outcome remains dialogic: the idea of masculinity is shifted into a state of being in transition. ("Images" 20)

The strength of Nicholls's story, for me, is the state of transition identified by Stephens. Nicholls does not need to push the adolescent boys into the decision-making confrontation of a direct sexual encounter. Adolescence is, ideally, a time of discovery, pondering, exploration. Kevin found himself thinking back over the possibility ofTheo being gay, and, if so, would it make any difference to their friendship? Back in the city-yes. Kev had to admit it: he wouldn't want the other kids to know he had a friend like that. But out here, away from other people's opinions-here with the forest, the fire, the river, the stars ... Kev realised, to his own surprise, that it wouldn't make any difference at all. (111)

A work such as Nicholls's asks the Australian reader to consider how far the love of friendship engendered by the term "mateness" is from homosexual love, and how should this be absorbed, or rejected by the national consciousness? These are fundamental questions to be confronted by a patriarchal society that is particularly proud of its masculine character. Gay issues are discussed at the very site of both the proof of masculinity and the identification of what it is to be Australian, the Australian bush. Such literature (for flllther examples see Nadia Wheatley's Landmarks, 1991, and Mmjorie Lobban and Laurel A. Clyde's Out of tfle

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Closet alld Into the Classroom: Homosexuality in Books for Young People. 1995), constructs a child/adolescent reader capable of thinking through these issues. We might desclibe such reading as intellectual decision-making that results from the conjunction of the imagination with reality. The reader is put, to use Stephens's model, in the center of a dialogic discourse. Such a phenomenon is not confined to the readily identifiable British postcolonial era, for the earlier example of Ballantyne's Ungava also supports such a position, where the reader is given sufficient physical, emotional, and moral information to construct the intellectual model through which to contemplate central problems of humanity. One of the central problems of contemporary publishing is the phasing out of such particular information, the erasure of detail and indigenous specialities that are deemed by the multinational publishing giants not to travel between readers worldwide. This is ironic. for as I briefly discussed above. the dynamics of nineteenth-century capitalism compelled the literary expression in America and England to take diverse directions; now, at the end of the twentieth century, it is as if the circle is closing and capitalist pressures are enclosing the publishing worlds of not only America and England, but also Australia, within the same whirlpool of market demand and creation that threatens to suck literary considerations into an economic void created by the multinational international marketplace. Children's writers in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom have to be economically successful in the world market. The mass culture engendered in this literary world results in, as it were, the "impelialist" domination of the reading space, and therefore, what is and also what is not being published for the multinational market becomes a vital area of consideration. The individuality of landscape vanishes under the broad strokes of everywhere-and-nowhere. Illustrators must not depict cultural patticularity that will not be readily recognized by the supposedly easily confused child. So, for example, English children's book illustrator Heather Buchanan, who specializes in architectural landscaping, was censored when she painted Welsh cottages in her books. Her reaction was. finally, to set up her own publishing company-but this is not an easy option. and very few writers and artists can afford such freedom. So landscape is erased, and with it, on the march of economic hegemony, those texts that are regarded as too culturally specific, outside of a popular and mythic range, are becoming taboo, for it is argued that the reader has to have knowledge of the context to understand the work. To illustrate popular world cultural images, I suggest as a good exam-

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pIe Madta Conlon-McKenna's Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990). an historical novel that deals with the period of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. This novel was marketed in the United Kingdom, for it falls within the stereotypical expectations of "Irishness," whereas Siobhan Parkinson's equally interesting and engaging works, Amelia (1993) and No Peace for Amelia (1994), which surprisingly take the Quakers and Catholics of Dublin and not the Protestants and Catholics, as the central social interaction, has not reached the U.K. distribution outlets. English readers (child and adult) with whom I have shared Parkinson's work have both enjoyed the novels and been very surprised at the lack of availability. Restriction and segregation arise from commercial reasons and threaten to enclose the literary experiences of children and channel their reading into that of a particular cultural knowledge. I am not suggesting that this is a conscious plot, but rather a result of pragmatism. I also suggest that such controls threaten to suffocate cultural difference and development. I now tum to the consideration of suppressed cultures and rewriting through myth and history.

IRELAND The Irish publishing industry today allows Irish writers a perspective on cultural self-consciousness that is unfot1unately often denied to British or American children's authors. The Irish publishing industry centered in Eire, serves both Eire and the Province of Northern Ireland. For example, Mm1in Waddell (he also writes under the name of Catherine Sefton), lives in Belfast and publishes with Poolbeg Press in Dublin. Waddell, among others, regards himself as primarily a writer of books for children in Ireland, rather than either Eire or the Province. Irish children's literature and the surrounding publishing, academic, literary, educational, and social activities. provide an exemplar of a unifying force against social, religious, and political division sadly missing in other areas. The children's publishing industry was stimulated by the Department of Education in Eire in order to encourage "early familiarity with the Irish language" (Valerie Coghlan and Celia Keenan 17). The result has been a rich flowering of children's literature that reflects the variety and diversity of Irish life. It is easy to forget that prior to pal1ition, all Ireland was an English colony. Since the sixteenth century, England has consciously suppressed the Irish. The English as a conquering power engaged in a conscious process of deculturalization, stripping the Irish of their cultural identity.

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The Irish language, literature, and national dress were banned by Henry VIII's Act for the English Order, Habit and Language following England's invasion of Ireland in the early fifteenth century. Further laws employed over the centuries restricted religious practice, ownership of land, educational oppOltunity, the power to vote, and, in fact, variously disempowered every aspect of life except the imagination. The intellectual revolution that led to the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the formulation of the Irish Republic embodied the literary Celtic revival. In short, the literary reconstruction of an Irish consciousness was accomplished by the imagination and the revival of mythic heroic nanatives. The development of Irish children's literature parallels that movement. Some Irish children's writers have adopted the mythic mode of writing, creating worlds untouched by political realities (for example, Cormac MacRois in The Battle Below Giltspur, 1988), while others, such as Joan Lingard in The Twelfth of July (1970), have taken their stories into the contemporary and "real" streets by writing of the conHict suffered for the past twenty years in the ongoing war misnamed "The Troubles." The questions under debate in Irish children's literature concern the tensions between fantasy and reality, and what kind of reality should be reHected in writing for children. There is a gap, however, in the literary continuum between fantasy and reality, and that is the area taken up by the realist historical novel. Fantasy was employed to give a substitute history where politically the Irish were not allowed to own their own cultural inheritance. Siobhan Parkinson, Marita Conlon-McKenna, and Michael Mullen are attempting to fill that gap. Siobhan Parkinson's The Leprechaun Who Wished He Wasn 'f (1993) is an amusing tale that confronts the clash between the fantasy of Irishness, as represented by the leprechaun, and the need for Irish writing to help children mature from the stultifying childhood of the fairy tale to confront problems an adolescent must face. Her editor asked Parkinson to write a book about leprechauns, a request with which she was not particularly happy, for she felt that it was time the domination of fairy tale and fantasy was broken. Hence the title The Leprechaun Who Wished He Wasn't (1994). The leprechaun, named Laurence, "was fed up with being a leprechaun" and he "longed to have a Best Friend" (7). Laurence meets a plump teenage girl named Phoebe who wants to be thin because she is going to be a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding. Phoebe and the Leprechaun both want to be something different from what they are. The story tells how the pair negotiate their problems and help each other. Both think others perceive them to be ridiculous. In an accessible and

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amusing way, the story questions whether the coming generation wants to remain with a traditional mythic history that perpetuates deception, or whether the Irish want to take the construction of their history out of fantasy into reality. Laurence, the leprechaun, uses his special skills with a needle to shape himself a very presentable pair of denim jeans, so that he can hecome the model image of a very modern leprechaun, symbolically clothing himself in the fashion of the present in order to move into the new world of the future with his friend Phoebe. Clothing also plays an important part in one of the book's subplots. An American uncle comes to stay and there is much entertaining play on the stereotypical imaging of the Irish and Phoebe's resistance to this. Finally, Uncle Joe exclaims in disappointed fashion: "I suppose the next thing you')) say is that you have no leprechauns either" (64). The leprechaun then comes into the reality of the present and Uncle Joe offers to take Laurence hack to the United States to become a media star. ''I'd be famous would IT' "Oh, yes, indeed. The country would go wild for you. They might even want to make you president! A real Irish leprechaun. Unbelievable!" Laurence came down to earth with a bang. "Unbelievable? I'd be unbelievable, would IT' "Well, thank you very much, your honour," said Laurence, giving a stiff little bow. "But you know, I can be unbelievable right here in Ireland." (70)

As this witty and succinct story observes, there is a place for fantasy, individuality, and resisting the lure of Anglo-Americanization. For Siobhan Parkinson, the crisis of the leprechaun is past, having securely found his place in the present. Her next two hooks, Amelia (1993) and No Peace for Amelia (1994), also approach history, but from a realist perspective. The shift from fantasy to reality in Irish children's literature mirrors the development in adult Irish literature. The choice between fantasy, realism, and romance is integral to establishing positions about the seriousness ofIrish history and the remembrance of Irish culture. Michael Mullen's The Long March (1990), is a classic realist novel that unstintingly challenges the romantic notions of heroism. The story is a fictionalized account of the hardships suffered hy a thousand-strong band of fo))owers of 0' Sullivan Beare, who in J602 left County Cork, driven out by the English conquerors, to seek refuge in

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the pro-Irish north. After a two-week-long march during which English sympathizers harass the band, only thirty-five people reached their longed-for haven. No miraculous events, no romantic rescues take place; the truth of Irish failure and defeat is recorded and the courage and endurance of the people stressed, while their suffering is not softened. Marita Conlon-McKenna's Under the Hawthom Tree (1990) and the sequel Wildflower Girl (1992), deal with the effects of the Great Famine in Ireland during the 1840s and subsequent emigration to America. Three children, Eily, Michael, and the youngest, Peggy, are of necessity abandoned by their parents during the extreme conditions of the famine. Their father has left to work on the road building, and their mother leaves to seek him in order to find some relief for the children. The parents do not reappear during the novels. As in Michael Mullen's work, no miraculous rescues occur. The children leave the family home rather than be evicted to the horrors of the workhouse. They decide to make a hazardous and tortuous journey to find their relations. The eldest daughter, Eily, is strong, intelligent, and competent, as is, within acceptable limits, the youngest child, Peggy. The children work as a cooperative triad in the best of feminist modes. Conlon-McKenna's use of myth is interesting; the "myth" in question consists of the family stories told to the children by their mother. Initially it seems as though the tales of the village shop owned by the elderly aunts are going to be part of a family folk culture, a sustaining fantasy, a myth of plenty within the austerity of famine; yet subtly fantasy becomes absorbed into the reality of the children, for it is on the vision embodied in these stories that the children make their way to safety, as they journey to and find their lost aunts. The family stories in Under the Hawthom Tree are family history that is orally sustained, and the children are saved by the knowledge handed down to them through story. The realization of a new and positive reality from out of the dream world is important for the image of Irish culture, because it moves away from the Celtic image of the wasteful dreamer so strong in the nineteenth century. C. L. Innes writes of the feminization of the Celt, demonstrating how such a characterization aided English domination. As Lady Gregory asserts in her diary, "Englishmen generally assumed their right as a virile and masculine race to control feminine and childlike races such as Celts and Africans" (qtd in Innes 35). A suppressed culture remains so while it is forced to imagine into fantasy, rather than into the real. English, American, and Australian children's literature demonstrates movement of the imagination into the real,

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the step that then enables a culture to move into a position of declared self-awareness, and an openness that other cultures can read without threat to the subdominant culture. The co\'elt position, where the subculture is threatened, is evident in the use of fairy tales in Russian and Czech children's literature, for example, where the suppressed voice finds a way through by subverting fantasy imposed upon them. Under the Soviet regime, fairy tale proliferated because it is a way of producing common culture through narrative for children (and adults). Revolution through children's literature continues, for how can postcolonial cultures achieve cultural identity for following generations but through the minds of children? The interaction of imagination (fantasy/myth/fairy tale, for example) with the real allows for an emergence of new positions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy. Ed. Rychard Fink. New York: Collier, 1962. Ballantyne, R. M. Ungava. London: Thomas Nelson, 1857. - - - . Coral Island. (1857). Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1990. Coghlan, Valerie, and Celia Keenan, eds. The Big Guide to Irish Children's Books. Dublin: Irish Children's Book Trust. 1996. Conlon-McKenna, Marlta. Under The Hawthom 71'l'e. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1990. - - - . Wildflower Girl. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1992. Crew, Gary, and Michael O'Hara. Blue Feather. Kew, Victoria: Mammoth Australia, 1997. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson C/'llsoe (1719). Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Foster, John, Ern Finnis, and Maureen Nimon. Australian Childl'l'n's Literature: All E1Cploralioll Of Genre And Theme. Wagga Wagga, NSW: LS Press, 1995. Henty, G. A. With Clive In India or The Beginnings of an Empire. London: Blackie & Son, 1884. - - - . With Clive In India or The Beginnings of all Empb'l'. 1884. New York: The Merson Company (nd). Holmes, Richard. Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Innes, C. L. Women and Nation in Irish Literatlll'l' and Society, 1880-1935. Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Lobban, Ma~jorie, and Laurel A. Clyde. (Jut of the Closet and llIfo the Classroom: Homosexuality in Books for Young People. 2nd ed. Port Melbourne, Victoria: ALfA Thorpe, 1996.

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Lucas, Ann Lawson, ed. GUllpowder and Sealillg Wax: Nationhood ill Childrell's Literature. Market Harborough: Troubador, 1997. Mullen, Michael. The Long March. Dublin: Children's Poolbeg, 1990. Nicholls, Bron. "Only Two Hours By Train." Landmarks. Ed. Nadia Wheatley. Victoria Park, Australia: Turton & Chambers, 1991. 96-116. Nimon, Maureen, and John Foster. The AdolesceTlf Novel: Australian Perspectives. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, 1997. Parkinson, Siobhan. The Leprechaun Who Wished He Wasn't. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1993. - - - . Amelia. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1993. - - - . No Peace for Amelia. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1994. Richards, I.A. The Portable Coleridge. New York: Viking Press, 1986. Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. London: Longman, 1992. - - - . "Images of Australian Society," Gunpowder and Sealing Wax. Ed. Ann Lawson Lucas, 15-24. Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1987. Tucker, Nicholas. Suitable for Children? Controversies ill Children's Literature. Falmer, Sussex: Sussex UP, 1976. Turner, Ethel. Seven Little Australians. (1894). London: Ward Lock, 1973. Wheatley, Nadia, ed. Landmarks. Victoria Park, Australia: Turton & Chambers, 1991.

CHAPTER 6

Saved by the Word: Textuality and Colonization in NineteenthCentury Australian Texts for Children CLARE BRADFORD

In Australia, as in other settler colonies, colonization was conducted in and through textuality, from the imposition of English as a national language, through the deployment of discursive forms to control those subject to imperial rule (convicts, Aborigines, bushrangers), to literary expressions of colonial experience. In this essay, I consider some nineteenth-century children's texts in which textuality itself is thematized, its involvement in the processes of colonization addressed more or less explicitly. As I consider the ways in which textuality is implicated in imperialism, I want to identify what Spivak calls "the mechanics of the constitution of the Other" (90), the ways in which colonial discoursal strategies speak for and about the subaltern. At the same time, I am interested in the gaps, elisions, and ambiguities in these representations of textuality, following Pierre Macherey's dictum, "What is impOltant in a work is what it does not say" (87), or, more accurately, what it cannot say, given the relationship of the text to what Macherey calls its margins, "an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production" (90). Australian colonial texts for children, like other Australian colonial texts, manifest numerous points of tension and ambivalence concerning the imperial project, but in addition they promote the agenda of colonizing their readers, whom they construct as colonial subjects and future colonists. Such a combination of discourses, in which colonial tensions coexist with the imperative of socializing child readers, makes for a peculiarly potent mix of ideologies. Nineteenth-century children's hooks about Australian colonial life were, with few exceptions, published in Britain for an audience compJising

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British and Australian children. I British children (in most cases, the plimary readership) could be expected to enjoy stories of adventure or of domestic life located in an exotic colonial setting, while for the smaller audience of Australian children such nru1"atives offered representations of an imagined Australia whose features might be compared with the Australia known to them experientially. Many of the Blitish authors who wrote stOlies set in Australia were innocent of any first-hand expelience of the country, relying on other works of fiction, travellers' tales and populru· science for the local color that they interpolated into their nru,-atives, but as the nineteenth century wore on stolies of Australian life were more often Wlitten by authors living in Australia, though still, in the main, publishing in Britain; children's publishing in Australia is a twentieth-century phenomenon. We can often see, in nineteenth-century texts, how representations of events and characters position metropolitan and colonial child audiences, inscribing ideologies, similar but with subtle variations, appropriate to the two groups. Publishing for children increasingly divided along gender lines during the nineteenth century; among Australian colonial texts, stories of domestic life imply female readers, while colonial adventure novels are informed by masculinist ideologies promoting male heroes experiencing a variety of adventures typically involving bushfires, floods, bushrangers, encounters with hostile Aborigines, and quests for gold. In novels of settlement, which more often imply mixed reading audiences of girls and boys, boy heroes feature in adventure sequences while their sisters and mothers wait anxiously for them to return home. There exists in Australian colonial (and many postcolonial) texts a pervasive anxiety concerning the legitimacy of Australia's foundation, a foundation built on the invasion and dispossession of Australian Aborigines from the beginning of white settlement in 1788 until well after the establishment of the Australian state in 1901. A number of strategies were deployed in colonial texts to displace this anxiety, the most conspicuous of which was the discoursal representation of Aborigines and Aboriginal culture as an inherently inferior form of life, destined to yield to a superior (British) culture. 2 The laws of colonial logic led inexorably from representations of Aborigines as an inferior race to arguments that they were unworthy to own the land, a strategy which served to justify their dispossession. Colonial ideologies are evident in the privileging of English over Aboriginal languages, written over oral language, and European over Aboriginal cultural practices. But in many colonial works for children, it is not only the written word (written, that is, in English) that is a mark of

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the superiority of European over Aboriginal culture, but salvation through the divine Word, manifested in the scriptures and promulgated through fiction and through accounts of the lives of missionaries. The Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Religious Tract Society produced large numbers of books of colonial adventure, settlement, and domestic life, and in these texts the symbiotic relationship of colonization and evangelical Christianity is evident, especially in the many narratives in which Aborigines are the objects of evangelical projects.

BlACKS AND BUSHRANGERS: CONSTITUTING THE OTHER E. B. Kennedy's Blacks and Bushrangers (1889) incorporates a range of discoursal and natTative strategies which constitute the other. The story of Mat and Tim, twin brothers of gypsy origin, begins in the New Forest in England, where the boys are favorites of the local squire and are provided with an education as well as with training in the skills of hunting and gamekeeping. When they migrate to Australia, their ship is wrecked, and they enter into a period of "free captivity" with the Waigonda, a coastal clan of Aborigines. Such episodes, occurring in natTatives in which white boys or young men are befriended or captured by Aborigines, are common in colonial novels of adventure and settlement, and serve to provide child readers with representations of Aboriginal life viewed through European eyes. In addition, boy adventurers constitute focalizing characters embodying a normative set of behaviors and ideologies against which is displayed the otherness of "wild blacks." In the following excerpt, the boys first encounter the Waigonda: an old black fellow, armed with club, spear. and shield, walked boldly up to Mat, jabbering loudly the whole time, with chin in the air. and after feeling him all over, was about to do the same to Tim; but this Jumper fTim's dog] would not stand, and Tim, by signs, implored the native to keep back. The old man understood, and called to the other blacks, who immediately flocked up. and, hearing the white men talk, were evidently relieved to find that they were human beings like themselves. (58-59)

The omniscient narrator here positions child readers to compare the behavior of the two sets of characters: Aborigines jabber, whereas the white boys talk: the "old black fellow" feels Mat all over, while Mat and Tim maintain their dignity, Tim moving only to warn the Aborigines not

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to approach Jumper. FUlther markers of otherness are present as well, in the animal-like movement ("flocked up") of the Aborigines, and pmticularly in a contrast between epistemologies: while the Aborigines identify Mat and Tim as human beings through sensory experience, Mat is able to situate the Aborigines in geographic and ethnographic terms, drawing on resources of a different and higher order: Mat so far knew ... that he and his brother had fallen amongst blacks of the mainland of Australia, for he not only recognized types of visage, pictures of which he had seen in the squire's museum ... , but also most of the camp equipment, of which the squire had many specimens. Thus he was able to point out and name to Tim spears, woomeras, yelamans, boomerangs, stone tomahawks, and nullah-nullahs; also their dilly bags, large and small, containing fish and roots, and many small articles wrapt up in 'possum skins. (60)

It is precisely through his recourse to literacy that Mat is represented as exemplifying the superiority of European over "primitive" intelligence, for his knowledge of attifacts is based on his familiarity with discourses of colonialism (inscribed in the pictures and labels of the squire's collection of exotica) founded on the common nineteenth-century amalgam of scientific progressivism and Enlightenment stage theory (see McGregor). Like their weapons and artifacts, Aborigines are objectified as specimens, manifesting the "types of visage" through which they can be placed as "blacks of the mainland of Australia." Patt of the narrative involving Mat and Tim's sojourn with Aborigines takes the form of journals kept by the two, in which they record practices such as food-gathering, hunting, and fire-making, so producing "a description of the manner and customs of the natives" (94). They also master "half a dozen different dialects" and become "as good bushmen as the blacks, and in one respect even better, in that they were accustomed to travel at night ... whereas the blacks had a great hOll'or of moving after dark" (103). What the Aborigines do by instinct (for example, hunting and bushcraft) Mat and Tim do in an improved manner, for they are rational men, capable (unlike the Aborigines) of analytical thought. More than this, Mat and Tim manifest the superiority of European over Aboriginal intelligence by their access to writing, which enables them to maintain records of such details as where food and water can be found, so demonstrating their control of memory, the ordering of information and hierarchies of significance. In these ways the narrative identifies for child

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readers the boundary between Mat and Tim and the Waigonda, locating this boundary clearly on the borders between rationality and superstition, knowledge and ignorance, the written word and orality. When, after some years, Mat and Tim leave the Waigonda and are reincorporated into civilized life, their journals constitute the basis for a celebration of imperial hierarchies, for they provide Tim with information upon which he draws to give a lecture to the white citizens of Sydney on the customs of the "wild nOlthern blacks" (J 52). Dromoora, the "chief' of the Waigonda, and his wife Terebare accompany Mat and Tim to Sydney, are exhibited before the audience gathered to hear Tim's lecture, and are cheered for the way in which "these two natives, together with their tribe, had befriended the white men" (158). 3 The figure of Dromoora in Blacks and Bushrangers manifests a textual tension between conflicting representations of Aborigines. For unlike the rest of his clan, Dromoora is shown to incorporate some features of the noble savage: he is a bold fighter, a man of great presence, kind and helpful to Mat and Tim; even capable, though to a limited extent, of rational thought. Nevertheless, he is shown, in the end, to be "only an Aborigine" when, at Tim's lecture, he becomes so excited by the cheering crowd that he seizes his own hat and that of Terebare, "throwing them both into the air; then shouting, 'White fellow, cOiTOboree,'" and forcing Terebare to beat two chairs together (159). In this way Dromoora manifests both his lack of mastery of European discursive forms and the natural, childish exuberance of the Aboriginal other, providing to his white audience a reassuring demonstration that even "wild northern blacks" might be tamed, rendered comical, and so controlled by the colonial order. When, towards the end of the novel, Mat becomes "a rich and prosperous squatter" (311), the legitimacy of his possession of the land is built on the binary oppositions that I've identified; his access to literacy and to European systems of knowledge endow him with rights denied to Aborigines.

COLONIAL POWER AND RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES Religious discourses in Australian colonial texts for children have palticuJar affinities with discourses of femininity, since white women, playing out their roles as angels in the house, al'e frequently represented as instructing AbOliginal children (and, occasionally, childlike Aboriginal adults) in Christian vhtue and belief. Such episodes generally involve sequences in which scliptural narratives are read or told, and in which Aboriginal characters are invited to abandon their "primitive" beliefs and embrace

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Christianity. I've chosen E. Davenport Cleland's adventure story, The White Kangaroo (1890), to demonstrate the narrative and ideological moves

which work through an episode in which Mrs. Everdale, the wife of a landowner, instructs Sambo, one of the sheep station's "tame blacks." Sambo, alarmed by a period of heavy and continuous rain, warns Mrs. Everdale that a great flood is about to engulf the area, whereupon Mrs. Everdale reads from the family Bible the story of Noah, concluding with God's promise that the earth will never be destroyed by flood (Genesis 9: II). Sambo, unmoved by this natTative, insists that the family should evacuate their home, but when the rains subside he returns to the house and asks to see the Bible: he could not read a word, but bending down till his face was close to the page he looked at it most intently for some moments in silence. Then he stood up, and putting his hand gently on the place, said, "My word! him berry good Book that; him know everything! Misis, next time you tell 'urn me that Book say, 'No flood,' me say, 'Berry well, Sambo believe 'urn.' Berry fine Book that!" (76)

Two kinds of reading are contrasted here: Sambo's reading of nature, and Mrs. Everdale's reading of the story of Noah. In most colonial texts, Aboriginal capacities to "read the country" and the signs of weather and natural phenomena are treated as equal or even superior to those of white people, embodying the instinctive and animal-like skills outgrown by Europeans in their steady advancement towards the higher reaches of civilization. Set against Mrs. Everdale's reading of scripture, however, Sambo's reading of nature is invalidated; more significantly, Sambo is represented as realizing the inadequacy of his knowledge once it is tested by the higher knowledge contained in "the Book." But it is in this very realization that Sambo demonstrates his limitations as a primitive, for he ascribes to the physical book itself a magic through which the future may be told, so showing himself to be hopelessly enmeshed in superstition. Mr. Everdale remarks, "They are a curious race of people. And I do not see what can be done for them, except that we must treat them kindly, and not render their life more miserable than it is. They have no religion, and therefore no hope" (174). Within colonial discourse, the less indigenous people resemble "us" (that is, the normative British model of religious and social practices), the lower they are placed in hierarchies of human development; claims of their lack of belief in a divine order therefore locate Aborigines at the very bottom of such hierarchies.

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The emphasis in colonial texts on the lack or poverty of spiritual belief among Aborigines both supports colonization and represents evangelization as an heroic enterprise, undertaken against great odds. The representation of Sambo's discourse in The White Kallgmvo constitutes another demonstration of inferiority, enacting the gap between the standard English of the narrative voice and the novel's European characters, and the pidgin English attributed to Aboriginal characters. Like representations of Chinese English and convict English in many Australian colonial texts, pidgin works here to "install class difference and to signify its presence" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 76), but in addition it inscribes Aborigines as perpetual children, with Sambo's capitulation to the power of Christian narrative arguing the relative weakness of indigenous tradition and of indigenous systems of belief. Colonial texts that include narratives of conversion are frequently centered on the figure of an Aboriginal child, since children were believed to be not so confirmed in superstition as adult Aborigines. 4 A mid-century text, A Short Memoir of William Wimmera (1853) by Mrs. H. Scholefield, constitutes an exemplum telling the story of a young Aboriginal boy "adopted" by a British clergyman and taken to England, where at the age of eleven he dies a lingering and saintly death.5 Willie's salvation is effected through textuality: his mentor instructs him in reading and writing, though only a little each day so as not to "overstrain his untaught mind" (13), teaching him the Lord's prayer and providing him with a simple catechism containing "all the most important truths of the Christian faith" (15). The child's untaught mind, a true tabula rasa, is remarkably apt at remembering the forms and narratives that he hears; at the same time, the text's emphasis on his difficulties in mastering reading, and on his facility with practical skills such as plaiting straw and making shoes, constmcts Willie's intelligence as of a lower order than that of his readers; additionally, representations of his pidgin English work, like Sambo's discourse, to fix him as eternal child and primitive. It is Willie's "great interest in divine things" (19) that is the principal focus of the narrative, an interest that manifests first in his account of a dream of heaven. This dream, based on the illustrations from Pilgrim's Pmgress that Willie has assiduously studied, is constituted by the tropes and motifs of Christian art: angels, devils, Christ in glory, a "ver beautiful house" (25), and it represents the child's conversion from the darkness of primitivism to the light of evangelical Christianity, an opposition that appears most strikingly in the following excerpt, where

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Willie's removal from his land and people, and his premature death, are justified: we have traced the history of this infant pilgrim, from the wilds of Australia to the pastures of the heavenly Canaan, where we trust he is feeding beside the living waters. And let us see what lesson of real instruction can be gathered from it. His life was short, but of deep interest. Indeed, it may be said, that it was only the last year of that short life in which he began to live; for while in heathen darkness he was little better than the animals around him. One of his dying expressions was, "No God in the bush;" and, "If I die there, I go to hell." (40-41)

Willie's salvation, then, depends on his rejection of "the bush" in which there is no God, for his state of ignorance and sinfulness before his conversion is projected onto the Australian landscape. The "wilds of Australia;' a location of "heathen darkness," construct the unredeemed Willie as "little better than the animals," existing in a spiIitual darkness so profound that he can scarcely be said to be alive. The metanaITative into which the story of Willie is insetted is signalled through the metaphor of the pilgrim, with Willie as indigenous Everyman, manifesting in his journey from "heathen darkness" to "the pastures of the heavenly Canaan" (and his physical journey from Australia to his death in a clergyman's home in Reading) the identification of colonization with evangelization and invoking traditions of Christian nan'ative that load his story with significance. The death of the saintly child solves a natTative and ideological dilemma, since it is difficult to imagine how the figure of a convetted adult Aborigine, capable of reading and writing, might have been incorporated into a discoursal regime whose main imperative is its insistence on Aboriginal inferiOlity.

REPRESENTATIONS OF INDIGENOUS TEXTUALITY So fat', I have focused on colonial discoursal strategies that foreground the superiority of Western forms oftextuality, especially those associated with literacy and with the pre-eminent book, the Bible. I now consider representations of indigenous textuality in colonial children's texts, drawing on two examples: the first, from Anne Bowman's The Kangamo Hunters (c. 1859), deals with the discovery, by a white family searching for shelter in a cave, of a set of Aboriginal rock paintings. In the second example, from Blacks and Bushrangers, Mat and Tim both witness a cOlToboree and invent a "ritual" of their own. These episodes are symptomatic of many such episodes in colonial novels of adventure and settlement.

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Indigenous textuality at the time of white settlement was based on an oral culture comprising a complex network of discoursal forms produced upon the land: "The land itself is constituted as a text of the Dreaming and that text is intimately bound up with the life and experience of each individual" (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 144). Colonial texts commonly homogenize Aboriginal cultural production, treating all forms of indigenous mt and performance as though they proceeded from a single community of meaning; in addition, oral forms are regarded as inferior to written forms. and the Eurocentricism of the writers of nineteenth-century texts prohibits them from attributing "beauty. artistic skill or complex social meanings" (Hodge and Mishra 78) to the examples of Aboriginal textuality that they describe. The Mayburn family, carrying out an epic and wholly impossible journey across Australia in The Kangaroo Hunters, 6 discover a large cave while hiding from "wild blacks." The cave itself is "spacious and lofty," "large enough to have contained fifty persons, dry and clean": when they had lighted a fire, they discovered that they were not the first who had inhabited the cave. for the walls were covered with rude, coloured paintings of men and animals-the men and animals of Australia. With great amusement and astonishment the boys looked on the kangaroo, the opossum. many curious lizards, and heads of men, colossal in size and imperfect in execution, somewhat resembling the ambitious child's first attempts at high art. (167)

The representation of indigenous peoples as children is, of course, common in colonial discourse and appears along with other strategies for homogenizing colonized races as "backward, degenerate, uncivilized and retarded" (Said 207). When, as here, the focalizers are themselves children, the chasm between colonizers and colonized is particularly potent, since what is inscribed is a temporal contrast, between black people in a state of fixity, arrested in a childhood from which they will never develop, and white children who will one day be adults. The pictures observed by the Mayburns are considered within a frame of reference that values accuracy above all; thus, features that do not fit within this thme are treated as markers of inferiority: "I think I couldn't draw so good a kangaroo as that, myself," said Gerald; "but I could make something more like the head of a man. Do look, Margaret; that fellow has crimson hair and a green nose." (168)

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The most telling gap in this episode is one of signification: the pictures on the cave walls are, to the Mayburns, signs carrying no meanings beyond a simplistic representation of things; cultural, symbolic, and religious meanings that might attach to the paintings and their constitutive parts the Mayburns cannot imagine, since they are outside Eurocentrically formulated symbolic codes. Just as the terra nullius doctrine justified the European invasion of Australia by its insistence that the land was empty before 1788, a land belonging to none, so Aboriginal textuality is here treated as constituting a collection of more-or-Iess empty signifiers. And in a move that invokes the culture/nature dichotomy that so often attaches to contrasts between colonizers and colonized, Gerald Mayburn claims for himself a superior proficiency in representing "the head of a man," granting to the Aboriginal attists lower-order skills in depicting animals: "I think I couldn't draw so good a kangaroo as that, myself." Desc)iptions of cOlToborees, generally focalized through boy adventurers, appear in most nineteenth-century children's adventure novels, offering their metropolitan and colonial audiences manifestations of primitive life. Despite the many colonial and contemporary texts whose white authors claim to have been inducted into secret Aboriginal ceremonies and provided with information about rituals and customs normally withheld from Europeans,7 Aboriginal culture is, as Hodge and Mishra observe, "typically enigmatic and deceptive" (72), observing complex systems of control to ensure that secret knowledges are preserved by and transmitted to those entitled to them. In their representations of Aboriginal rituals and ceremonies, the writers of children's books generally read these performative texts as transparent and artless, at the best as involving simple mimetic functions such as the imitation of the movement of animals or the coming of Europeans. At the same time, as I'll demonstrate, descriptions of cOJl'oborees are commonly associated with discourses of otherness that mat'k them as sites of conflicting meanings. In Blacks and Bushrangers, Mat and Tim, at the beginning of their period of captivity with the Waigonda, observe a con'oboree pelformed by men of the clan: ... a dozen little freshly-lit fires were burning in a circle, and in the midst of them were some fifteen painted warriors, white paint and red paint was daubed in regular lines over their faces and jaws, causing them to resemble so many death's heads. whilst their bodies were streaked with broad white stripes, each rib being distinctly marked.

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These white lines followed the course of their limbs, giving them the appearance of so many skeletons, as they appeared in the flickering light cast upon them. "What a rum sight!" said Tim. (62)

References to the skeletal marking of dancers, the skull-like painting of their faces, the dim light of the fires, are common to practically all colonial representations of corroborees and invest them with the horror of savage rites. In Blacks alld Bus!trallgers, the men's dance is seen to manifest an irrationality, a lack of control, and an indifference to physical safety that affords an implicit contrast with Mat and Tim's coolness, their rationality, their care for their survival: The "Corroboree"... waxed louder and fiercer, each man working himself up to a perfect frenzy. now darting in and out of the fires, and even in some cases plunging illlo them, and scattering the blazing embers, till exhausted, they would here and there "fall out" and beat time to recover. Their aspect appeared terrible and unearthly, the brothers were spell-bound, not knowing whether fury or joy was the cause of this extraordinary scene. Then the infernal din died away, only to be renewed louder than ever.... The ceremony was brought to a close by all stamping their feel with heavy thuds on the ground, and then each coiled himself up by his fire, exhausted. (63)

This passage, and others like it in colonial children's texts, carry out several kinds of ideological work. As I've said, the focalization of the cOIToboree through the gaze of the white boys models for young readers how Aborigines are to be seen: as primitives, manifesting through their "terrible," "unearthly," and "infernal" appearance an association with devilish forces; as irrational creatures, ruled hy their passions. Most of all, this scene demonstrates the lowly position of Ahorigines in hierarchies of civilization, at the same time reassuring readers, through the figures of Mat and Tim, that "we" are quite different from "them." But Tim's summing-up of the corroboree displays an interesting douhle movement: "'Well, if they ain't the most bloodthirsty devils I ever seed,' said Tim; 'but I suppose it's all sham .. .''' (64). On the one hand, we have the representation of the Waigonda as "bloodthirsty devils"; on the other hand, the term "sham" undermines this representation by attributing to the dancers a kind of sleight-of-hand. "Bloodthirsty devils" might constitute a real threat to Mat and Tim's unwavering self-possession;

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Aborigines merely pretending to be bloodthirsty devils are more like children, themselves capable of being tricked. This is exactly what happens in a later episode of Blacks and Bushrangers, in which Mat and Tim intimidate the Waigonda by demonstrating the power of firearms. They produce their gun, solemnly position it and train it on a bird perched on the branch of a tree: Then, with a great appearance of solemnity, Tim knelt at the muzzle, Mat at the stock, as the gun was placed carefully on the sacred spot. This was all done so far in perfect silence. The natives remaining awestruck at these proceedings, commenced to whisper. "Hush-sh!" said both brothers, putting their fingers to their lips. Then sang out Mat, "High cockeIorum, jig, jig, jig," and at the last jig was on his brother's back with a flying leap, both in this fashion careering round the gun; Jumper lying perfectly still beside it, as he was told. They then suddenly stopped, and in sepulchral tones sang bits of every song they had learnt, ... commencing with "Oh, a bully ship and a bully crew," following this with another solo, "And what do you think we had for dinner?" ... finishing with,"Now upon my life and upon my soul, I never knew a nigger but had wool on his pole." (79)

Following this performance, Mat fires the gun, to the horror of the Waigonda: There was a death-like silence for an instant. .. ; and then, amidst the shrieks of the jins, the howls of the children, and the terrified yells of the men, who knocked each other over in their frantic efforts to escape, the camp was deserted. Mat and Tim fairly rolled on the ground, convulsed with laughter, whilst Jumper amidst all this uproar rushed joyfully in, and worried the remains of the carrion bird. (79-80)

In effect, Mat and Tim create a parodic version of a corroboree, so displacing horror by laughter. The mock solemnity of their actions, the reference to the "sacred spot" where the gun is placed, and the awe demonstrated by the Waigonda, both appropriate and subvert Aboriginal rituals. In their singing of sea shanties and popular songs, the boys enact the "shamming" with which they charge the Waigonda; and their final verse, "Now upon my life and upon my soul,! I never knew a nigger but

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had wool on his pole," displays a common colonial representation, that of the colonized as clown, figure of fun, object of white mirth, doubly ludic because its meanings are unavailable to the Waigonda. Whereas "we" (the focalizing boy heroes along with the boy readers who identify with them) demonstrate the control and self-possession appropriate to socially constructed views of English manliness, "they," the Waigonda men, "knock[ing] each other over in their frantic effOlts to escape," are shown to betray cowardice as well as unchivalrous behavior towards women and children. The mixed messages of this entire sequence, its movement from the serious to the ludic and its displacement of horror by parody, signal considerable textual unease around notions of Aboriginal religion and ritual, an unease which manifests in many colonial texts and which, I think, relates to the fact that white desire for legitimacy is undermined by the existence of ancient traditions and ancient forms of textuality that constitute powerful reminders of Aboriginal ownership of and attachment to the land. ABORIGINALISM AND TEXTUALITY

Hodge and Mishra coin the term "Aboriginalism" in DOli Side of the Dream (1990). Following Said, they identify among white representations of Aboriginality a set of discoursal strategies that have "a double movement, a fascination with thc culture of the colonized along with a suppression of their capacity to speak or truly know it" (27). Aboriginalism attributes to Aboriginal culture a mysterious and transcendental spirituality that is centered on "the Dreaming," a set of beliefs that incorporates Aboriginal mythology, history, law, and rituals. While it celebrates the spirituality and timelessness of the Dreaming, Aboriginalism habitually implies the incompatibility of AbOliginal culture with modernity, so fixing Aboriginality in a mythical past. In this way, the political functions of Aboriginalism are concealed beneath its apparent reverence for Aboriginal culture, and for this reason they act all the more potently to silence Aboriginal voices and especially to construct as "unAboriginal" those forms of textuality that lie outside Aboriginalist constructions of "authentic" Aboriginal textuality. Similarly, by its insistence on the identification of Aboriginality with a mythical and timeless spirituality. Aboriginalism denies the necessity for social and political action on the Palt of Aborigines (for given their access to a timeless spirituality, land rights might appear to be superfluous). I now focus on an early Aboriginalist text whose popularity endured

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up to the 1980s: Kate Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales (1896), the first of four volumes of narratives collected by Parker and with an introduction by Andrew Lang. In 1953, stories from Parker's books were selected and edited by Henrietta Drake-Brockman and published in one volume, also called Australian Legendary' Tales, and this collection was reprinted nine times between 1953 and 1973; another selection of stories collected by Parker was published under the title Tales of the Dreamtime in 1975 and reprinted in 1982. For many Australian children, then, Parker's Australian Legendary Tales and its republished versions constitutes a definitive collection of Aboriginal narratives. Australian Legendary' Tales shares with many other texts of its period what Brenda Niall terms the "authorial attitude ... of memorialist" (213-214), focusing on an Aboriginality located in a past before white settlement. Parker writes: There are probably many who, knowing these legends, would not think them worth recording; but, on the other hand, r hope there are many who think, as I do, that we should try, while there is yet time, to gather all the information possible of a race fast dying out, and the origin of which is so obscure. (ix)

This classic Aboriginalist statement both affirms and denies the value of Aboriginal nan'atives by noting the low opinion in which "many" hold them and by claiming for the collector a reflected virtue motivated by her concern for the survival of stories in danger of extinction. Parker claims a further dimension of significance through her invocation of child readers, both Australian and English: Though r have written my little book in the interests of folk-lore, r hope it wiIJ gain the attention of, and have some interest for, childrenof Australian children, because they will find stories of old friends among the bush birds; and of English children, because r hope that they wiIJ be glad to make new friends, and so establish a free trade between the Australian and English nurseries-wingless, and laughing birds, in exchange for fairy god-mothers, and princes in disguise. (x-xi)

The (white) children here positioned as the book's readers are offered Aboriginal narratives either as stories of the familiar ("old friends among the bush birds") or charming novelties ("new friends"). Despite the book's subtitle, Folk-Lore of the Noongahburrahs as Told to the Pic-

Textualit), and Colonization in Nineteenth-Cellflll}' Australian Texts 103 caninnies, the Aboriginal children who constituted the audience of the narratives do not appear as characters or implied hearers, but only as shadowy figures sitting around their campfires, the objects of Parker's benevolence: "I can only hope that the ... sale of this booklet be such as to enable me to add frocks and tobacco when I give their Christmas dinner, as is my yearly custom, to the remnant of the Noongahburrahs" (x). Given the hagiographical treatment that Parker receives in the republished version of the Tales, it seems almost churlish to contest her versions of Aboriginal narratives; this is, in fact, a common effect of Aboriginalism, which frequently manifests such a passionate defensiveness on behalf of Aboriginality and Aboriginal texts that it deflects criticism. NeveJ1heless, Parker's collection and its republished versions demonstrate how the warm glow of Aboriginalism conceals its appropriating and controlling strategies. Again. questions oftextuality are central, beginning with the collection's title, Australian Legendary Tales. The characterization of Aboriginal narratives as "Australian" collapses the boundaries between white and Aboriginal cultures, claiming on behalf of the white majority ownership of indigenous narratives. Then there is the question of what kinds of narratives these are, since the terms "legendary" and "tales," while occupying rather different semantic spaces, belong to a European taxonomy here superimposed on a vastly ditTerent set of oral traditions. As Hodge and Mishra point out, the category "oral culture" is commonly treated in a highly reductive fashion, and their definition restores something of its richness: "An oral culture is a complex semiotic system which is by no means exclusively oral" (76). Many other kinds of m1istic and perform ative texts surround Aboriginal oral narratives, prohibiting their assimilation into English genre terminology. While Parker is explicit in her attribution of the naJl"atives to the Noongahburrah and provides a glossary of terms, she does not identify any of the following: the region where the clan live, the authors or owners of the stories, the cultural practices within which the narratives belonged, the dynamics of their telling, the relationships between teller and audience. The stories appear, then, as disembodied and displaced fragments, melancholy reminders of the shadowy children to whom they were told. This sense of melancholy, derived from Parker's conviction that the NoongahblllTah would inevitably die out as a clan (and Aborigines as a people), marks a site of slippage in Aboriginalist discourse around notions of cultural and textual purity. Aboriginalist reading regimes insist that the category "Aborigine" is constituted by "full-blooded" Aborigines

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living in traditional settings, observing the cultural practices handed down over tens of thousands of years, and fixed in the mythical space of the Dreaming. Such a construction of pure Aboriginality, common at the time Parker collected the Noongahbun'ah narratives, throws onto the white collector the onus of speaking for AbOligines who are assumed not to be able to speak for themselves, an appropriating move that constructs a power relationship in which Aboliginalism stands between Aborigines and white readers, mediating for the latter its exclusive access to the former. What the apparent benevolence of Aboriginalism displaces, however, is its inability to believe in the resilience and adaptability of Aboriginal culture and the tenacity of AbOliginal people in protecting their traditions and narratives; Parker says, "The time is coming when it will be impossible to make even such a collection as this, for the old blacks are quickly dying out, and the young ones will probably think it beneath the dignity of their so-called civilisation even to remember such old-women's stories" (ix). It is, of course, true to say that Parker's collection and publication of the Noongahburrah nan'atives promoted Aboriginal culture to white children in a way that would not otherwise have been possible, at a time when ideas of an Australian national culture were based on the figure of the bushman, descended from Anglo-Saxon stock but manifesting the independence and the anti-authoritarian streak of the colonial man (for the mythology of the "typical Australian" at this time is relentlessly masculinist). There is, in such a model of national identity, no room for reference to Aboriginality, and Parker's text at least celebrates Aboriginal culture at a time when Aborigines were represented in stereotypical terms or were not represented at all. For while Aboriginalism denied a voice to Aborigines, it assumed responsibility for advocacy on their behalf and was at times of benefit to Aboriginal people in their struggle for survival, so occupying an ambiguous and equivocal position in regard to indigenous textuality. A TELLING ABSENCE I close this discussion with Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians (1894), the best-known and most widely read of all nineteenth-century Australian children's texts. My interest is in a significant omission from the text between the first edition of the book and its 1900 edition. The Wooleot children, holidaying at a cattle station, travel with the station accountant, Mr. Gillet, to a picnic in the bush. As they bump along on a bullock-dray, the children (in the book's first edition) listen to Mr. Gillet's

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telling of an Aboriginal story about why the kookablllTa laughs, a story "got at second-hand" from Tettawonga, the station's Aboriginal stockman, and "freely translated" (1894, 203). In the 1900 edition, this narrative is omitted; Niall speculates that "perhaps the episode was thought tedious," or "perhaps Ward Lock simply wanted the space for the four pages of advertisements which were added to this volume" (207). Either or both of these might have been pragmatic reasons for the omission of the story, but I'm interested in probing the use made of the story in the original version of the book, and the ideological work involved in its removal. In the book's first edition, Mr. Gillet, the alcoholic, cultured remittance man,s suggests that the group listen to a reading of Tennyson, but his proposal falls on hostile ears (apal1 from those of the romantic Meg): "How would you like some poetry, Miss Meg?" said Mr. Gillet. His hand went to his pocket, the large and lumpy Tennyson was drawn out; but a groan burst from Judy and Pip and Bunty and Nell and Baby. "I'd rather get out and drag bullocks and all," said Pip; so the book was replaced. "A tale with something in it now," Judy said-"a laughing jackass, if you can't think of anything better." (203)

Pip's response inscribes a common ideological strain in representations of the Australian boy and man in this period: his hostility to high culture, and his preference for physical activity. Judy, the "boyish" girl of the family, calls for content: "a tale with something in it"; specifically, Australian content, "a laughing jackass" (one of many names for the kookaburra). This valuing of Australian over European texts is consistent with Turner's promotion of Australia as the proper site of naiTatives for Australian children, and the telling of the story incorporates a parodic tilt at old-fashioned (that is, European) narrative modes: "Once IIpon a time" (Judy sniffed at the old-fashioned beginning), "once upon a time," said Mr. Gillet, "when this young land was still younger, and incomparably more beautiful, when Tettawonga's ancestors were brave and strong and happy as careless children, when their worst nightmare had never shown them so evil a time as the white man would bring their race, when-" "Oh, get on!" muttered Pip impatiently. "Well," said Mr. Gillet, "when, in short, an early Golden Age wrapped the land in its sunshine, a young kukuburra and its mate

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Pip's inten'uption is ambiguous: it manifests impatience at the teasingly elevated style of the narrative, but it also cuts shOlt the narrator's reference to the effects of white settlement upon Tettawonga's people. While the past is, to Pip and Judy, of no interest in comparison with the present, the story of the kookaburra is incorporated into the "now" of their experience, with Pip projecting himself into the role of the "tall young Koree": "A tall young Koree who was coming that way saw the wipparoo [snake], and with one blow from his strong nulla-nulla, which, being interpreted, meaneth a club, cut its head from its body." "I'd have swung it round my head and cracked its back, like Tettawonga does," Pip said. "Are you sure he didn't Mr. Gillet?" "I wouldn't take an oath either way," said that gentleman, "seeing the Koree is by now gathered to his forefathers, and therefore not available as a witness .... And ever since then, so strongly did the incident tickle their risible faculties, at sunrise and sunset, and occasionally between whiles, these particular birds burst into the cachinnations [sic] of laughter you are all familiar with, and whenever they see a serpent they catch it with their strong beaks and kill it as the Koree did ...." (206207)

Mr. Gillet's use of biblical language ("which, being interpreted"), archaisms ("gathered to his forefathers") and overwording ("tickle their risible faculties") both displays the story of the kookaburra as a mixture of discoursal traces, and promotes a comparison common in Australian literary and popular discourse of the 1890s: that between the old world (stuffy, conservative, tied to tradition) and the new (fresh, young, and progressive). Caught in this cluster of oppositions, the story of the kookabun'a sits oddly in the 1894 text: on the one hand it displays indigenous textuality and an Australian cultural icon, on the other hand, Turner's insistence on modernity and on an Australia differentiated from England creates tension between an ancient text and its deployment within a "modern" narrative frame. But Mr. Gillet's reference to the "evil ... time" suffered by Tettawonga's ancestors following white settlement most powerfully contradicts a key tenet of Seven Little Australians: that Australian children,

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living in a sun-filled land without a history, are thereby more joyful, more spontaneous, less constrained, than their British counterparts: the novel opens with the proposition that "the [Australian] land and the people are young-hearted together, and the children's spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of long years' sorrowful history" (10). The omission of the kookaburra narrative works to silence this contradiction around the existence of indigenous culture, the illegitimacy of the colony's beginnings, and its "sorrowful history" of displacement and genocide. The appropriating move by which Pip is projected into the kookaburra narrative in the 1894 edition is, in the 1900 edition, completed through the erasure of Aboriginality from the Australia of the book (with the exception of the tamed and domesticated Tettawonga), leaving the way clear for its white child readers to identify with Pip and his siblings as "natives" of the country. A book which was hailed on its publication as the first authentically Australian work for children is thus symptomatic of Australian children's texts fj'om the 1890s until the 1950s, which, with few exceptions, promote the while Australia of cultural formations and government policy through discoursal strategies of silence and denial. The nineteenth-century texts that I've discussed manifest the racist ideologies on which colonialism was built, but the gaps, tensions and inconsistencies that riddle these texts display the instability of the discoursal regime that produced them. The borders between colonists and their others are, as I've shown, located around oppositions between European and "primitive" texts, and between the systems of knowledge they encode. The word (and the Word) are thus deeply implicated in the politics of colonial representation. But while my title, "Saved by the Word;' can be read as an evangelical catch-cry or a claim concerning the civilizing power of imperialism, it can be applied to another discoursal regime invisible to the authors of colonial texts: that of the subaltern. For the contemporary resurgence of Aboriginal textuality, manifested within the field of children's literature through the production of children's texts by indigenous publishers (see Bradford, 1996: 1997), is founded upon two characteristics of Aboriginal culture: a steadfast maintenance of traditional texts, and the transformational freedom to represent Aboriginal culture in contemporary forms. Thus, while colonial authors were inscribing the inferiority of Aboriginal textuality and culture and predicting its demise, Aboriginal people continued the work of preserving and transforming texts, saving the words of rituals and narratives, and so ensuring the safety of their cultural system.

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NOTES I The first Australian-produced children's text was A Mother's Offering to her Children, bya Lady Long Resident in New South Wales (1841). 2 References to Aborigines as a "dying race" occur throughout colonial texts and until the 1930s, when "the doomed race theory was itself heading towards extinction" (McGregor xii). 3 See Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact (182), for an account of similar occurrences in the nineteenth century, in which Aborigines were used as freakshow attractions in circuses and touring shows. 4 Anne Bowman's novel The Kangaroo Hunters (c.1859), for example, compares the child Nakinna with her mother Baldabella. The former demonstrates "docility and obedience" to the religious instruction she is offered, whereas her mother shows "perfect indifference" to it (210-211). 5 Many thousands of Aboriginal children were removed from their families between white settlement and the 1960s. Some of these children were taken as servants to white people or adopted by white families, others were placed on mission stations, while some were treated as trophies or as living examples of a dying race. See Reynolds 165-191. 6 Anne Bowman was "an English lady with an encyclopaedia" (Niall 5) whose representations of Australia and its Aboriginal inhabitants appear to be based on picturesque travel writing, religious tracts, adventure narratives and descriptions of Australian flora and fauna. 7 This appropriating strategy is, unfortunately, alive and well in contemporary texts, such as Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under (1994), which superimposes New Age fantasies upon Morgan's ersatz version of Aboriginal culture. S The remittance man, a common figure in colonial fiction, is an Englishman in Australia because he is for some reason unwelcome in England, and supported by remittance from his family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Bowman, Anne. The Kangaroo Hunters. London: G. Routledge, c. 1859. Bradford, Clare. "Edges and Margins: Post-Colonial Literary Theory and Australian Children's Literature," Writing the Australian Child: Texts alld Contexts in Fictions for Children. Ed. Clare Bradford. Perth: U of Western Australia P, 1996.92-110.

Textuality and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Australian Texts 109 - - - . "Representing Indigeneity: Aborigines and Australian Children's Literature." Ariel 28 (1997): 89-100. Cleland, E. Davenport. The White Kangmvo. London: Wells, Gardner and Darton, 1890. Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature alld the Post-Colonial Mind. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990. Kennedy, Edward B. Blacks and Bushrangers. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1889. Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Pmduction. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1987. McGregor, Russell. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race TheO/:)', 1880-1939. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1997. Morgan, Marlo. Mutant Message Down Unde/: New York: HarperCollins, 1994. A Mother's Offering to Her Children, by a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales. 1841. Sydney: Jacaranda P, 1979. Niall, Brenda. Australia TllIvl/gh the Looking Glass: Children's Fiction 18301980. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1984. Parker, K. Langloh. Australian Legendary Tales. London: Nutl, 1896. Reynolds. Henry. Fmntier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987. - - - . With the White People. Ringwood: Penguin, 1990. Said, Edward W. Orientalisl1l. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schaffer, Kay. In the Wake of First Contact: The EIi;:.a Fraser Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 66-111. Turner, Ethel. Seven Little Australians. London: Ward, Lock & Bowden, 1894.

CHAPTER 7

Making Princesses, Re-making A Little Princess MAVIS REIMER

It has become a standard gesture in criticism of children's literature to acknowledge the peculiar designation of this literature by its targeted audience rather than by its creators. Written for children by adults, children's literature is built on the assumption that children are an identifiable group that requires a pat1icular kind of text written for it by a superior group; it assumes, as Pen'y Nodelman has argued, the sOli of ontological and epistemological distinctions between children and adults that Edward Said finds in the orientalist "style of thought" between "Ihe Orient" and "the Occident" (Said 2). In this sense, children's literature as a whole is usefully understood as a colonial text. But, when we turn to texts specifically produced for children of the colonizers by adult colonizers, the simple analogy between the child and the racialized other begins to break down. For, while as children's literature such texts instantiate the difference between the child and the adult, as imperialist texts they produce, at the same time, the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental in such a way as to include the targeted child audience within the privileged racialized group. Said suggests that one of the political questions raised by his study is, "How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to anotherT(13). This is, of course, not a question only or even primarily of the transmission of explicit messages, but also and more importantly of the reinforcement of "quiescent and unconscious ideology," which, as Peter Hollindale notes, "reflect[s] the writer's integration in a society which unthinkingly accepts [the values at stakel" (30). One of the most significant ways in which such reinforcement occurs is in the constitution of the

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reader by the text. As Mary Poovey explains, the "structural paradigms" of a text "construct the reader as a certain kind of reader and position this reader in a pmticular relation to the system of connotations to which a text gives specific form and in which it therefore pmticipates" (16). Imperialist children's literature in general seems to me one of the important sites for investigating Said's question of reproduction, since it is the literature of the last half of the nineteenth century that has set many of the nan'ative paradigms and practices of what we continue to recognize as children's texts. I consider how one such text, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, represents and transmits an understanding of the "civilizing" mission of colonialism to its audience of imperial children. I In doing so, I attempt to practice a reading strategy that surfaces quiescent ideology and reconstructs what Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin have described as "the more or less hidden" conditions of possibility of canonical English literary texts (192). Because narratives typically stage contradictions in order to produce resolutions to which characters and readers can accede, reading for the hidden or silenced features of a text often requires, as Jenny Sharpe suggests, an interruption of the "narrative demands" of a fiction (8) rather than a repetition of its terms. 2 Making visible the "narrative demands" of a fiction in order to intelTupt those demands has meant that I focus not only on story but also on discourse, which John Stephens has usefully defined as "how something is being encoded" (II). Burnett's A Little Princess is a particularly instructive text to study for its reproduction of privilege. 3 Maintaining status is the explicit problem of the story, as Sara moves from being "show pupil" to drudge to heiress, a problem Sara solves by taking up the imaginary role of princess. At the level of discourse, the figure of the princess allows Burnett to manage the complicated identifications and disavowals needed to produce this imperial subject. This becomes evident in the ways in which she repositions the figure from the 1887 text of Sara Crewe; Or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's to the 1905 text of A Little Princess, significantly subtitled Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Told for the First Time. The ideological solution Burnett finds in the figure of the princess depends on the gendering of the figure, and it is as a gendered figure that the princess continues to be utilized and redeployed in imperialist texts for children, notably in the 1995 retelling of Burnett's story in the film, A Little Princess, distributed by the American company of Warner Brothers, directed by Alfonso Cum'on, and starring Liesel Matthews.

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"IT'S ALL REAL! I AM NOT-I AM NOT DREAMING!" The crucial importance of the imagination for Sara has been discussed by a number of critics of Burnett's story, including Phyllis Bixler, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and Elisabeth Rose Gruner. Bixler points out that Burnett "remains faithful to the archetypal Cinderella tale" in the 1905 novel in that Sara's life as a servant "represents an enchantment" (87). The supernatural helpers in the folk tale are replaced in A Little Princess by Sara's imagination: in Burnett's story, the "magic" is "Sara's ability to see with the imagination" the truth "beyond external appearances" (89). This truth is that she can be a princess as fully when she is clothed in rags as when she is dressed in the extravagant clothes her father supplies for her, because to be a princess means to be in control of self. Keyser extends Bixler's analysis to demonstrate that Sara's "conception of herself as a little princess" is a sustaining fiction not only in her ordeal in the attic (232) but also in her life as a "show pupil." When she, in her position as the pre-eminent parlor boarder of Miss Minchin's school, attracts the enmity of her fellow student, Lavinia, Sara uses her "new 'pretend' about being a princess" to control her temper: "If you were a princess, you did not fly into rages" (Little Princess 71). But, for Keyser, the triumph of Sara's imagination comes, ironically, at the point where she confronts its limitations and learns that she must also "stimulate the imaginations of others" (238). Gruner reads this ability in Sara as expanding and qualifying the role of fairy-tale princess. Sara's success in the other roles she plays-those of storyteller, teacher, worker, and mother-depends on her "imaginative invention and sympathy;' leading Gruner to conclude that Sara should be seen as playing "an active role in her redemption" (168). These readings emphasize Burnett's celebration at the level of the story of the child's capacity to imagine an order of value different from the adult economics that obtain in what the text codes as the "real world." In the child's order, as Burnett represents it, the status of princess is predicated on inner wOlth, self-definition, and self-control. At the level of the discourse, however, the economies of outer wOlth and hierarchical status are very much in evidence. In the 1887 text of Sara Crewe, these economies primarily are invoked by negation: the narrator summarizes the story to the point where the letter arrives with the news of her father's death in five pages. Sara's assumption of the role of princess occurs frankly as a compensatory strategy she devises after she has been deprived of the privileges and material comforts of being a parlor boarder.

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"One of her chief entertainments was to sit in her garret, or walk about it, and 'suppose' things" (45), the nalTator tells readers. During her solitary life in the attic she manufactures the fantasy that her doll understands her feelings; she trades her ability to tell stories for access to Ermengarde's books; and she "supposes" she is a princess. The narrator assures readers directly that this particular pretense allows her to ignore the outer world: "queer, and fanciful as it was, she found comfolt in it, and it was not a bad thing for her. It really kept her from being made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her" (47). But the narrator presents all of these fantasies, which "[s ]he wanted to believe, or to pretend to believe" (27), as instances of the sole power available to the powerless, that of imaginative escape. It is only Miss Minchin's "narrow unimaginative mind" that wonders momentarily if there might be "some real power" behind Sara's pretenses (50). In fact, there was "real power" in the story of Sara Crewe, as the enthusiastic reception of Burnett's story demonstrates. 4 Nancy Armstrong has argued, in reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, that apparently banal images can acquire causality, "the power to produce common sense," at "specific moments in time" (31). The princess seems to me one such image. Ubiquitous in the fairy tales that were collected and composed during the nineteenth century, princesses seem merely conventional characters of the genre. But, at the same time, the princess is a charged political term in the imperialist culture of late-nineteenth-century Britain. Like other members of the royal family, a princess can function rhetorically as a metonym for the British system of rule at home and in the colonies. Burnett's story of Sara Crewe specifically invokes the context of India and Anglo-Indian relations. British power over India had been transferred from the East India Company to the Crown in 1858, in the wake of the restoration of order after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, events Burnett alludes to in Sara Crewe. In 1876, Queen VictOlia took the title of Empress of India, a controversial decision that formalized her dominion over the Empire she called "so bright a jewel of her Crown" (qtd. by Marriott 181). "The idea behind the title," Jenny Sharpe writes, "was to represent the British rulers as the rightful heirs of the Mogul emperors" (150). In a painting commissioned from Val C. Prinsep of the 1877 ceremony in India at which Victoria was proclaimed Empress, the common ascription of India as "the jewel in the crown" was allegorized: among the subjects approaching the Queen on her throne in the painting is a prince who carries a large jewel on a cushion. Prinsep's assignment, as Sharpe observes, was "no lesser a task than that of imperial myth mak-

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ing" (150-51), for Victoria herself was not present at the celebratory assembly. The "dutiful subjects" who climhed the steps to acknowledge their new Empress were met not by "the imposing gaze of Victoria ... but that of her framed image hanging on the tent wall" (Sharpe 150). Given this context, Burnett's story of a princess who assumes a "pretend" royal title no longer appears culturally innocent. When Burnett retells "the whole story" of A Little Princess in 1905, at the invitation of the publishing firm of Scribners, she secures from the beginning Sara's right to take the title of "little princess," not as a sign of inner, personal worth but as her visihle entitlement as a daughter of the Empire. Readers are first introduced to Sara as "little princess" when the "polite young women" in the shops speculate to each other that she "must be at least some foreign princess-perhaps the little daughter of an Indian rajah" (II), and the attribution is made two more times out of Sara's hearing-by Miss Minchin (16) and Mariette (20)-before Becky breathlessly tells Sara that she looks like the princess she once glimpsed outside Covent Garden (62). That each of these attributions is made hy characters of lower status than Sara makes it clear that princesses are made by their subjects. In each of these instances, moreover, it is Sara's outer wOJ1h-her expensive clothes and her dep0l1ment-that denominate her as princess. Only after Becky (mis)recognizes her as a British princess does Sara "begin pretending I am one" (63). For the readers of A Little Princess, her assumption of the role confirms expectations raised by the title of the novel and reiterated hy four other characters; in other words, the author and the narrator already have prepared the script and she takes up her place in it. In this reworking of the figure of the princess, Sara is mandated to cultivate inner w0l1h, self-definition, and self-control by her status in the imperial system. Public status and personal conduct are confounded repeatedly in the text: when Lavinia mocks Sara for making Miss Minchin's school "fashionable," Sara answers by noting that her intention is to behave like a princess (71); Sara's fear that her loss of status in the school makes her "just" another little girl rather than a princess is denied by Becky, who insists that she is a princess by vit1ue of essential personal differences (108), differences that Becky nevel1heless marks hy helping Sara "button her dress" (115); and the children of the Large Family know that Sara is not a beggar because she does not "bobLl a courtesy" when she is given a sixpence (147). In fact, Burnett's addition of characters and her expansion of the roles of some existing characters, which she disingenuously represents in her foreword to the 1905 edition as a belated discovery,

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work to ensure that Sara's external worth is repeatedly recognized by others, that she is repeatedly constituted as princess. That "the whole story" is as much about an imperial child coming to power as it is about a powerless child beset by powerful adults is also evident in Burnett's representation of the racialized other. In the 1887 text, the unnamed native servant is a curious composite of Btitish stereotypes of Indian men. He appears to be an experienced household attendant to the Anglo-Indian Mr. Carrisford, yet Sara-and the narrator follows her lead--chooses to call him "the Lascar" (68). Lascars were Indian sailors on the merchant ships carrying the goods of the Empire between India and Britain, typically underpaid and often mistreated, according to Rozina Visram. Frequently left on shore unemployed for long periods between voyages, the lascars were a common sight begging on London streets. Sara also speculates that "the Lascar" might have "saved his master's life in the Sepoy rebellion" of 1857 (68). Also known to colonial historians as the "Indian Mutiny" and to Indian historians as the First War of Independence, the widespread riots coalesced around British officers' severe discipline of Indian soldiers who refused to use cattridges greased with animal fats, although handling the cartridges violated both Hindu and Muslim proscriptions. Stories were told of sepoys who saved their officers from murder by escorting them to safety, acting out of what historian P. E. Roberts, writing in 1923, describes as a "remnant of fidelity" (369). The Lascar, "evidently very faithful to his master" (68), seems to Sara like one of these soldiers. In Sara's dream, her mysterious benefactor appears as still another version of the "native servant," but this time as a "glittering and strange ... Eastern magician, with long robes and a wand" to whom she speaks Hindustani and makes salaams (79), a figure who is both exotic entertainer and prince. Burnett's confusion of Indians of all ranks and employments in the figure of the native servant situates her text firmly in an homogenizing orientalist discourse that denies complications to the other. On the other hand, the ambiguity of the figure of the native servant also points to the instability of such hierarchies. since "the Lascar" both greets Sara "with salaams of the most profound description" (71) and is a "magnificent personage" to whom she salaams in her dream (79). In the 1905 text, the confusion of lascar and personal attendant remains, but Ram Dass. now named, is more decisively contained in the role of servant: Sara immediately recognizes that "he had been accustomed to European children" (163) and he recognizes her as a little princess, speaking to her "as if he were speaking to the little daughter of

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a rajah" (J 65); Burnett excises the reference to the Sepoy rebellion with its allusion to Indian insubordination to the British masters; and Ram Dass's transformation of Sara's room while she sleeps, in this text directed by Carrisford's white male secretary, is substituted for her dream of him. In the later text, Sara does not bow down to Ram Dass,just as Mr. Carrisford does not bow down to the "idol" he brings from India (156). To the contrary, meeting Ram Dass stirs "all her past memories" and reminds her of "a sOli of dream" of the past in which she was accustomed to being "sUlTounded by people ... who salaamed when she went by, whose foreheads almost touched the ground when she spoke to them, who were her servants and her slaves" (I65-166). The substitution of night work for dreamwork makes evident the narrative function of the native servant in the production of the princess as a figure that permits the elision of inner and outer, imagination and reality. Ram Dass overhears Sara's fanciful staging of the scene of the royal feast in her bare attic room, a piece of play regarded by Ermengarde and Becky as the ultimate show of Princess Sara's ability to control her hunger and cold through her "magical" imagination. The changes he effects in the room make actual what she has imagined. Sara's repeated references to her wonder at her dream made real-nine times in four pages-mystify the work Ram Dass has done as "The Magic" to which the chapter title refers. "I am dreaming it stays-real! I'm dreaming itfeels real:' Sara "hear[s] her own voice say" (239). Reading with a knowledge of the cultural context of imperialism, we might rather say that the real magic of this night is located not in the princess's royal reveries and self-control, but in the imperial subject's power to command others and thus to create a world that conforms to the images of her dreams. In her performative production of the dream as the real, Sara experiences her own voice as ventriloquized. Voice, often used in Western metaphysics as the guarantee of presence and authenticity, is produced elsewhere and spoken through the little princess. The source of the speech is identified in the chapter immediately preceding "The Magic" as that of "the sahib," who has "please[d] himself with the thought of making her visions real things" (204). This chapter is inserted into the 1905 text, but, at the level of story, adds only the character of the secretary to the cast of the ) 887 text. At the level of discourse, however, the chapter shifts forward the retrospective, summary explanation of "the Magic," which is found at the conclusion of Sara Crewe after she is safely ensconced in the Carrisford home and which, in that lext, confirms for her "that she had been living in a story even more than she had imagined"

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(98). The discursive strategy of the 1905 text seems, at first, an odd one: by having the explanation precede the transformation, the natTator disperses the mystery about the nature and provenance of the fairy feast even before it is created and, arguably, must work hat'der to remystify "the Magic" in the following chapter. A clue to the function of the interpolation is found in the title of the chapter, "What Melchisedec Saw and Heard," which identifies the point of view Burnett takes in telling this part of the story. Stephens has theorized that "[f]ocalization is particularly important to any consideration of sUbjectivity or ideology" in children's literature (81). In the Melchisedec chapter, the oblique and even awkward focalization through the eyes of the rat Sara has domesticated makes the constructedness of this fiction obvious, a fictionality that is also thematized by the secretary, who comments: "It will be like a story from the 'Arabian Nights'" (204-205). Burnett notably does not feel the need to use such character-bound focalization in other sections of the text that tell of events occurring outside the main character's sight and hearing. In "The Other Side of the Wall," for example, she assumes the omniscience of her nan-ator in reporting on the interactions between the Indian gentleman and the Carmichael children in his home. In the Melchisedec chapter, apparently, it is important ideologically for Burnett to establish the facts for the reader before Sara's interpretation of them is recorded. Or, rather, it is impOltant for Burnett to establish the fiction of the facts before Sara's interpretation of them is recorded. This opens the possibility that Sara's far more fanciful and engaging game of fairy princess's feast--:frankly a fiction--can be read as more true than "the facts." In other words, Burnett's discursive strategy here makes a reader's experience a recapitulation of Sara's understanding that "[eJveIJ,thing's a story" (140): Sara herself, her friends, Miss Minchin, Melchisedec, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the French revolution, the diamond mines where "strange, dark men" work for her father (66) all exist at the same level of reality to Sara's mind. And the reader is invited to mimic this conflation of ontological categories. Indeed, to think otherwise is to be implicated with Miss Minchin as having the sort of "sordid" mind that imagines that unexpected packages of clothing arriving for Sara actually can be used to deduce "some powerful though eccentric friend" or "some previously unknown relations" in the background (257). That Sara herself "can't help" speculating about her "friend" (260), however, erases any obvious difference between Miss Minchin's imagination and Sara's. Early in the novel, Sara has wondered about just

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this problem, when Miss Minchin caJls her a beautiful child at first meeting her: "I should be telling a story if I said she was beautiful," she thought; "and I should know I was telling a story. I believe I am as ugly as she is-in my way. What did she say that forT' (8)

Elizabeth Keyser has read this passage as suggesting that the difference between the two is one of self-knowledge: Sara knows when she is telling a story, which makes such a story different from a lie (234). But there is no indication in the narrative that Miss Minchin does not know she is "telling a story" when she lies about Sara's beauty to her father. Since she says "the same thing" to every parent (9), the implication rather is that she deliberately "tells stories" as a means to the end of securing students for her school and income for herself, a fact that makes her lie egregious within the stated economies of Burnett's text. I would argue that, if there is a qualitative difference between Miss Minchin's and Sara's imaginations, it is quite the opposite of Keyser's proposition. It is Sara who forgets, or almost forgets, or pretends to forget, when she is telling a story. The difference is that Miss Minchin knows herself to be insincere, while Sara appears to remain innocent of knowledge about her motivations. And readers who align themselves with Sara also are invited to repress some of what they know. In order to consider the question of what it is Sara and her readers know, and what they almost forget, we might approach the issue of storytelling through a different problematic, that of the visual imagery of the text.

"IT WOULD PLEASE THE SAHIB TO SEE AND SPEAK WITH HER." For Freud, Elizabeth Grosz observes, scopophilia, or the drive to look, is directly linked to "the desire to know" and "the desire for mastery," which she glosses as "the conversion of the position of passivity in activity": "Scopophilic impulses playa key role in the quest for knowledge and mastery of the world" (447). Freud's formulation serves as a useful gloss on Burnett's text, for Burnett articulates Sara's movement toward defining and securing her desire through the actions of looking out, looking in, looking at, and being looked at. The beginning of the novel establishes the centrality of the metaphor ofJooking. In the first paragraph, the natTator mentions the shop windows

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that "blazed with gas as they do at night" (I); lighted windows at night, we later are told, allow passers-by to "look into" rooms (142). Also in the first paragraph, readers are invited to look at Sara, who is described as "an odd-looking little girl," a description that is expanded in the third paragraph: "She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child oftwelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven" (I). In the second paragraph, we also see Sara looking out, more precisely "star[ing] out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes" (1). It is this mode of looking that predominates during the first part of Sara's story: looking out of windows is a trope of introspection and solitude in Burnett's novel. For example, Sara watches her father's cab disappear around "the corner of the square" from the window of her sitting room (IS); the window-seat in the playroom is Sara's chosen location for "absorb[ing herself] in a book" (68); Sara first talks to Ermengarde when she finds her "bundled rather disconsolately in a window-seat" (28); and the skylight in the attic room later allows Sara the respite of imagining that "she had all the sky and the world to herself' (160). But, as Miss Minchin's show pupil, Sara also finds herself being looked at: "On that first morning ... the whole schoolroom was devoting itself to observing her" (26), the narrator tells readers. Sara responds to being the object of such devoted observation by returning the gaze, "Iook[ing] back quietly at the children who looked at her" (18). In doing so, she notices "fat, slow, little" Ermengarde "star[ing] wonderingly" at her and, after repeated "glanc[es] toward [Ermengarde] through the morning" (27-28), Sara determines to befriend the unhappy student. It is through a similar pattern of mutual gazing that Sara establishes her friendship with Becky. Sara first catches sight of Becky "peer[ing] at her through the railings" of the kitchen steps with "wide-open eyes" (51). When shortly thereafter she discovers Becky asleep in her chair, Sara looks at her "with interested eyes" (60) until the little maid-of-all-work awakes. Film theorist Ann Kaplan has noted that experimental studies show that mutual gazing characterizes the mother-child relationship, in which pleasurable gazing first is set in motion (205). Sara, who acts as mentor and mother to Ermengarde and Becky, uses such a reciprocity of looks to establish female-to-female bonds of friendship. Sara also knows the power of the gaze. She has believed from the first that pat1 of the "magic" of her doll Emily is that she "will just sit there and stare" while people are watching her, waiting to "go and look out of the window" until she is left alone (19). By learning to wield such

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a gaze, Sara retains her integrity-what she calls being "a princess inside" (167)-even when she is reduced to being a scullery maid outside. "When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word-just to look at them and think," she tells her doll; "Miss Minchin turns pale with rage when I do it, Miss Amelia looks frightened, and so do the girls" (150). She uses this knowledge as a survival strategy, "keeping her eye on Lavinia, who was quite ready to make mischief," for example. Lavinia's complaint that Sara now "Iook[s] at people without speaking-just as if she was finding them out" is cOlToborated by Sara: "That's what 1 look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward" (114). To this point, the story verifies Sara's suitability for the princess status she has been assigned from the beginning of the text: she is capable of rich introspection, of strong self-control, and of commanding moral authority through her knowledge of others. But these qualities of inner worth do not give her material power. In her hunger, fatigue, and cold, she often finds herself outside looking in at the warm, lighted comfOlts of the other houses in the square. Burnett's nan'ator makes it clear that the crux of Sara's problem is that, without the markers of outer wO\th, she can no longer attract the right kind of look: When she had been the Princess Sara driving through the streets in her brougham, or walking, attended by Mariette, the sight of her bright, eager little face and picturesque coats and hats had often caused people to look after her. A happy, beautifully cared for little girl naturally attracts attention. Shabby, poorly dressed children are not rare enough and pretty enough to make people turn around to look at them and smile. No one looked at Sara in these days, and no one seemed to sec her as she hurried along the crowded pavements. (141 )

No longer "naturally" attracting the benevolent attention that would mark her as "rare," Sara must find a way of making herseIf visible again, of reinselting herself into the story of the princess. Sara twice finds herself the subject of the wrong story. Shortly after the narrative explanation of Sara's invisibility, she does manage to attract the attention of Guy Clarence of the Large Family by looking at him. The little boy has been moved by the stories he has heard "about children who were poor and had no mammas and papas to fill their stockings and take them to the pantomime-children who were, in fact, cold and thinly clad and hungry" (144). When he sees Sara's "hungry" look, he accurately

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recognizes her as such a child and gives her his Christmas sixpence. That a sixpence might be useful in staving off her hunger is obvious in Sara's later fantasy of finding just such a coin. But Sara is deeply humiliated by the gift, because "until now she had not known that she might be taken for a beggar" (147). She can be taken for a beggar in patt because she is "standing on the wet pavement" of the street (145), outside the domestic space that ensured the WOlth of girls and women in the dominant Victorian ideology of separate spheres. In the second story, Sara appears to be fully inside. Having stimulated the imaginations of her friends Becky and Ermengat'de, as Keyser notes, Sara manufactures with them the fiction of the royal feast, transforming the attic into a banquet-hall. But this fiction is also the wrong story, as becomes obvious when Miss Minchin intel1'Upts the revelries and puts the girls back into their "proper" places. An inside space, governed by a "woman of sordid mind" (285) who has not taken up a domestic role, evidently is not conducive to the dreams of princesses. The two stories dramatize the terms of Sara's dilemma. She must be seen as princess outside the female space to which she is confined if she is to have access to real power, but she can only obtain such power through her demonstration of her worth as a domestic ideal. At the same time, Sara's power and worth has been encoded in Bumett's text as her ability to look at people and "find them out" while remaining inscrutable herself. In other words, Sara must look as an imperial child but also be looked at as a female child. The problem of Sara's invisibility is articulated at the beginning of the chapter entitled "The Indian Gentleman." In this chapter Sara turns what she knows about looking to the task of becoming the object of the gaze of the powerful man. In the chapters that follow, Sara uses her ability to know people by looking in at them to construct a shrewdly accurate story of "the Indian gentleman" in which she assigns herself the role of "adopted ... friend" (172); she uses her instinct for mutual gazing to attract Ram Dass's look across the roof slates-"The friendly look in Sara's eyes was always very effective when people felt tired or dull" (162), the nan-ator assures us; and she correctly judges that, like her, Ram Dass can know people by looking at them and thinking about them afterward. By showing the "bare shabbiness" of her room to "his quick native eyes" (165), she submits herself as the object of those eyes. In several scenes after this first visit, those eyes peer in at her through the skylight. The skylight is an ingenious nalTative solution to Sara's dilemma, allowing her to be seen by the outside and yet remain within a space she domesticates. Ram Dass's witnessing of her plans allows him to prepare

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"new delight[s]" for her that make real her domestic dreams; the result is that Sara begins to look "wonderfully well" again (254). By the time Sara appears at Mr. Carrisford's house to return the straying monkey, the native servant rightly supposes that "it would please the sahib to see and speak with her" (271). The vindication of Sara's story of herself as princess demonstrates precisely what film theorist Laura Mulvey has called the split between active and passive looking in "a world ordered by sexual imbalance": The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female tigure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (19)

Sara, it is clear, has taken up the position of to-be-looked-at-ness assigned to women in the heterosexual system of patriarchy, object to the agency of the male gaze. In my description of the resolution of Sara's dilemma, I have insinuated that she knowingly creates a story about "the Indian gentleman" into which she can inselt herself and that she systematically sets out to attract the attention of Ram Dass. At the level of the story, Sara never acknowledges such motivations, nor, at the level of the discourse, does Burnett's natTator. In fact, this is a text that works precisely to the extent that readers can be convinced to "unknow" the character's motivations. In the second half of the novel, the rapid and repeated alternations between scenes focalized through Sara and narrator-focalized scenes set in the Carrisford house work to verify Sara's supposings so quickly that it is difficult to recalJ which information has come from which source. For example, in "The Other Side of the Wall," Burnett stages a scene in which Sara holds on to the railings outside of CatTisford's house and sends her ardent wishes to him: "Perhaps you can feel if you can't hear," was her fancy.... "J wish you had a 'Little Missus' who could pet you as I used to pet papa when he had a headache. J should like to be your 'Little Missus' myself, poor dear!" (174)

Within three pages, we see Mr. Carrisford wondering whether the child he is seeking might be anything like "the poor little soul next door"' (177)

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and, within another page, the child has been identified as the daughter of Ralph Crewe. The narrative sequence here implies causality, a suggestion that is reinforced by the repetition of the descriptors used by both characters, but the narrator does not acknowledge these implications. The alternating viewpoints also dramatize the near misses as Sara, for example, overhears that the lawyer Carmichael is looking for a little girl as he rushes to his carriage and wonders who the little girl might be. Scenes such as this screw the suspense of the story to such a pitch that readers are likely to quicken their pace in reading to discover what happens next, rather than to piece together how it happens. These discursive strategies work to screen the sustained, symbolic logic through which Sara's quest is articulated. For Burnett's female child, mastery is gained through the conversion of the activity of looking to the passivity of being looked at. "WITHOUT THE HELP OF AN ORIENTAL, IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN DONE." Just before Sara is revealed to Carrisford as the child for whom he has been seeking, he teIIs the Carmichaels of the "romantic plan to help her" he has invented and acknowledges the necessary role of the native servant in his scheme: "Without the help of an agile, soft-footed Oriental like Ram Dass, however, it could not have been done" (271). Ram Dass's agility in climbing over the roofs to observe Sara's pretending and then to carry in the goods that realize those fantasies is critical to the unfolding of the story. It seems likely that Burnett's characterization of him as a lascar is intended to make plausible his balance and fearlessness in such a precarious situation. The function of native sailors in facilitating the exchange of goods between England and India-and, as a source of cheap labor, allowing such traffic to be economically profitable for the East India Company-suggests that, at the level of discursive rhetoric, "the Lascar" might also serve as a mediating figure. I have already argued that the native servant allows Burnett to elide inner and outer, imagination and reality, in her production of the princess as rhetorical figure. The native servant is also the rhetorical site on which the nan'ator transacts the relation between the child-adult structure and the Oriental-Occidental structure. The native and the child are identified in their homesickness, a mutuality which grounds their initial dialogue, but this identification quickly is disavowed as Ram Dass recognizes Sara's status as European child. In his report of Sara to Mr. Carrisford,

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however, Ram Dass, as adult, represents her as a miserable child who requires the help of a powerful adult. At the same time, his ancillary status as servant and as native is firmly maintained, as is obvious in Can'isford's comment. Ram Dass, then, can bring Sara and Mr. Carrisford into relation with one another by being at once like and unlike each of them. In both cases, the limit of his likeness is set by his racialized identity. Burnett, in fact, secures the imperial father-daughter relationship as primary through representing the native as an other to be feared. The descriptions of Ram Dass's access to and egress from Sara's room through the skylight are unsettling. He first tells the secretary of his habit of lying "close to the open skylight" to listen to Sara's stories and boasts that "I could have entered this room in the night many times" (204). At two separate points in the Magic chapter, the reader is aletted to "a dark face" (218) "pressed against the glass and peering in" at the skylight (236), a face which is not seen by the characters. Liminal spaces, such as the attic with its skylight, can be metaphors for both danger and possibility. In at least two other popular girls' books of the period, L. T. Meade's The Palace Beautiful (1887) and The Maflor School (1903), such rooms are places in which young girls are assaulted by older men; in both of these instances, the penetrability of their rooms is a metonym for the girls' sexual vulnerability. Burnett's text acknowledges the potential for danger, but quickly dismisses it in order to emphasize the possibility of "the Magic." On one of the occasions when Ram Dass has been watching them, Ermengarde suspects that the soft sound at the window is made by robbers, but Sara "cheetfully" maintains that there is nothing in the room wOlth stealing (218). Burnett's production and then denial of the threat makes this another instance in which readers are given a plausible reading only to be asked to (almost) forget it. But the girl's bodily vulnerability shadows the story and works to ensure that readers will agree with Sara's urgent need for a home protected by a father, at the same time that the assignment of sexual threat to the native other forecloses any possible linkage of sexual violence and the father. In raising the specter of predatory native sexuality, Burnett takes up a trope common in the literature and journalism of late-nineteenth-century Britain, a trope Jenny Sharpe maintains achieves cultural currency after the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Almost immediately after the Mutiny began, tales spread throughout the Anglo-Indian community and England that the mutineers were subjecting English women "to unspeakable torments" by "systematically raping" them and "dismembering their ravished bodies" (Sharpe 61). Although official repOIts discredited the

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accounts as rumors, the stories continued to circulate, so that "the Mutiny was remembered as a barbaric attack on innocent white women" (Sharpe 2). The dead and violated body of the Englishwoman became an icon in the brutal British retaliation after the rebellion, with the execution of mutineers ritualistically designed to mirror their alleged actions. Sharpe argues that the Mutiny and British counterinsurgency marked the limits of colonial power (79) and the vulnerability of colonial authority (81), but the response of the British was to deny such limits or vulnerability. The Crown's assumption of direct authOlity for the colony was intended to signal a break with past practice, so that the excessive force of the British troops could be recorded as "a lapse in British authority" (79) and as "the aberrant response of otherwise civilized men driven mad at the thought of their tormented women" (81). And, in creating a new logic for Empire in the face of the evidence of their own savagery and barbarism, the British represented their superiority in racialized terms as a moral superiority marked by their elevation and maintenance of women in their roles as domestic ideals (102). Kathryn Castle has demonstrated that, in the history textbooks used in British schools, a hardening of attitudes to the Indian mutineers takes place over time. By 1914, The Oxford Survey of the British Empire advised that "a concentration on the 'heroism of the British' ensured that a study of the Mutiny 'added to rather than diminished British prestige'" (25). Burnett does not directly address any of these matters in A Little Princess. But the description of the situations of the Anglo-Indian adults of the story resonates with the events of the Mutiny and its aftermath as these were constructed in the dominant cultural narrative. Sara's mother is said to have "died when she was born" (3), but her identity as French citizen links her with the violated and dismembered bodies of the aristocratic women that are central to Sara's interpretation of the French revolution. For Sara, the women's humiliation and murder actually signify their true strength, a strength that is superior to that of the "furious people dancing and howling" around them (215). Captain Crewe and "the Indian gentleman," as military man and merchant, pal1icipate in the primary spheres of power in British domination of India. No specifics are supplied about Captain Crewe's military activities, but the diamonds in which the two men invest read as a metonym for the wealth generated for the homeland by the ''jewel in the Crown." The brain fever from which each of them suffer, apparently at the same time, are gaps in their histories. Carrisford recalls only that he "was driven mad with dread and horror": "The night I staggered out of my house all the air seemed full of

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hideous things mocking and mouthing at me" (181). The state of ill health into which he sinks is such that he appears to have taken on the mark of the racialized other; the girls at the school initially assume that he is Chinese because he is "such a yellow gentleman" (157). It is not so much that Burnett masks or conceals the events of the Mutiny in metaphorical descriptions as that the widely dispersed terms in which the historical events were commonly understood pervade, inform, and enable her thinking about the making of girls in late-Victorian England. At the same time, it is apparent that Burnett accedes to the dominant narrative of her culture and reproduces that narrative as the quiescent ideology of her text. For Sara, the "magic" of the story is that her dreams are made real. For Carrisford, the "magic" of the story is that Sara chooses him as friend and substitute father after she hears his story. The lawyer's prediction that "[t]he man will be himself again in three weeks" (279) is realized: "In a month's time he was, as Mr. Carmichael had prophesied he would be, a new man" (296). As a female child, Sara validates Carrisford's home as a domestic sanctuary and so restores him to health. As a child who both knows and "unknows," Sara permits Carrisford to forget the cost of the imperial project from which he has so richly profited: the nan-ator tells readers that "he began to find an actual pleasure in the possession of the wealth he had imagined the burden of' (296). Like Sara, through Sara, he is now also able to elide the actual and the imaginary. Ram Dass disappears from the Cm1"isford home once Sara enters it and becomes a character in the story Sara and "the Indian gentleman" tell. Indeed, the favorite pasttime in the home constituted at the end of the story is retelling the story, with child and adult filling in the gaps in each other's narrative, both narratives amalgamated into the voice of the narrator, making a whole story, complete, closed, and (almost) untroubled by the world outside their doors. "EVERY LITTLE GIRL IS A PRINCESS. DIDN'T YOUR FATHER EVER TELL YOU THAT?" The princess in Burnett's text is mandated to cultivate her imagination by her class status, is able to realize those rich fantasies because of her position in a racialized economic system, and is secured in her possessionsboth her self and her things-because, as a female child, she can make the father "a new man." This imbrication of class, race, age, and gender relations makes Burnett's text appear to be a sealed system. But the critical

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and theoretical work of the last two decades has demonstrated that ideology, however apparently coherent, is unstable. s In the conclusion of her story-a conclusion that is unchanged from the 1887 text to the 1905 text-Burnett points to one such instability. The novel ends with Sara's return visit to the bun shop and her brief reunion with the street girl, Anne. By "writing beyond the ending," which Rachel DuPlessis has identified as a strategy of women's reworking of the nineteenth-century narrative codes of development and romance, Burnett registers the unsatisfactory nature of the conclusion of Sara's story and holds open the possibility that a remnant of female community can exist within the patriarchy. It is Anne who focalizes the last paragraph of the novel, mutely watching as Sara drives away with Mr. Carrisford, an ending which, as Roderick McGillis observes, puts a reader "in Anne's position" (71). It is also an ending that repeats the earlier scene in which Sara watches as her father's can'iage drives away. Perhaps Anne, too, despite her class status, can learn to inselt herself into the naJTative of the princess. This seems to be the assumption of the 1995 Warner Brothers film, A Little Princess. In the opening sequence, Ralph Crewe confirms for his daughter her ayah's comment that "every little girl is a princess." By making Becky an African American and by showing the two girls walking out of the school hand-in-hand as sisters in the happy ending, Alfonso Cuaron implies that such privilege crosses racialized boundaries. If there is some movement across lines of race, however, it is only in this singular situation. At the same time, the opposition of child and adult remains intact and there is a hardening of the opposition of male and female. Not only is Sara's fantasy that she is a princess authorized by adults, but also her pretense that her doll is the best companion is suggested to her by her father. The appropriation of the princess's inner life by the father is obvious in the structure of gazes in the film. While the film references the various ways of looking Burnett thematizes in the novel, it consistently undercuts the princess's sense of the power of looking. For example, the scene of Sara's first appearance in the schoolroom in the film is collapsed with her introductory visit to Miss Minchin's school with her father. In this scene, the camera is located inside the room and pointed at the doorway from a low angle, with the consequence that Captain Crewe, first to enter the room, covers most of the doorway behind him. As he enters, he looks toward the front of the class at something out of view of the camera. Sara's entrance is occluded by her father's bulky presence in the foreground of the screen. As she moves to stand beside him, her eyes follow

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his look. The next shot, a high-angle view from the left rear of the room, establishes the object of interest, the French master asleep at his desk. Sara remains only partly visible at the far left of the frame, hidden by the figure of Miss Minchin, who rapidly moves in front of Sara and Captain Crewe to call Monsieur LeFarge to attention and then pulls Sara toward her to introduce her to the schoolgirls. During these introductions, she is framed by her father on her right and Miss Minchin and Monsieur LeFarge on her left. The camera does register her point of view on the classroom before her. But her glance at Ermengarde, whose weakness of sight is signalled by the thick glasses she wears, is intercepted by Lavinia. The most charged gaze in the scene is Lavinia's, who stares challengingly at Sara while dipping the ends of Ermengarde's hair in her inkpot. Errnengarde's face, pmtly cut offby the frame, is out of focus. The scene substitutes antagonistic gazing between the girls for the mutual gazing that is a source of pleasure and strength to Sara in Burnett's novel, constrains Sara's being looked at firmly within authorized frames, and subordinates Sara's gaze to her father's gaze. Several subsequent scenes in which Sara attempts to establish reciprocal gazes with Ermengarde and Becky corroborate these terms: each is cut off quickly by a reminder that such looking is illicit. "Begging your pardon, Miss, but we'll both be in trouble," Becky reminds Sara at one point. The objects of introspection are similarly constrained. Sara is shown looking out of windows twice, once when she watches her father leave for the trenches of World War I, the transposed setting of the story, and once when she writes him a letter. On the other hand, Sara is made more available to the gaze of Ram Dass. Her tower room contains double glazed garden doors, which often stand open and are positioned directly opposite the similar doors of the house across the way. Several scenes that take place in Sara's room end with a reverse shot from the point of view of the Randolph house. which makes it obvious that all of the activities in her room are fully visible to the occupants of the third floor of the Randolph house. It is from this room that Ram Dass watches the unfolding of Sara's story. It is also in this room that her father recovers from the temporary blindness and amnesia brought on by his being gassed at the front. The double function of the room shows Ram Dass to be an agent for the father; the terms of this relation between father and servant are specified in the scene in which Captain Crewe first mTives at the Randolph house. His eyes bandaged, Crewe hesitates in stepping out of the carriage and Ram Dass gently reminds him, "You must trust my eyes, Sahib."

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In this text, those eyes are fully trustworthy, far-seeing, benevolent, wise. Ram Dass first appears on screen watching Captain Crewe and Sara dancing on the deck of the ship crossing from India to America. His presence onboard is inexplicable in terms of the nan'ative logic of the film, for, when he reappears, it is as a faithful and, apparently, long-time servant of the Randolph family. But it is explicable in symbolic terms: his name and the name given in the film to the monkey he calTies on his shoulder, Hanuman, suggest that he should be seen as a type of the Hindu deity, Rama. In other words, the Hindu deity is pressed into service as the guardian of the imperial father and daughter. It becomes obvious, then, that the racialized opposition between the Oriental and the Occidental has not been fundamentally altered. But, rather than using the Oliental as the fearful other who secures the inside by being outside, Cuaron writes the Occidental into the Oriental's mythology as the purpose of that mythology. In the film, Sara herself retells the epic story from the Ramayana in which Rama rescues the princess Sita from the demon Ravana. The virtual-reality sequences used to depict these imaginary scenes are interpolated into the main nan'ative and feature a blue-black Captain Crewe in the role of Prince Rama and the dead Mrs. Crewe in the role of Princess Sita. The Occidental, it turns out, is the best example of the Oriental. The sense in which this is so is given in Captain Crewe's first line of dialogue in the film. "India is the only place on earth that stirs the imagination," announces the Captain, and in this film the obverse apparently is also true: the imagination can be seen as the true source and meaning of India. Through the Oriental story, the imperial princess imaginatively constructs herself both as victim and as hero. Sara inserts herself into the epic story by taking up the place of Princess Sita, imprisoned in the tower and awaiting rescue by the prince. But she also takes on the role of Prince Rama. Rama draws the magic circle around the princess to keep her safe in the story; Sara draws a magic circle around herself in the attic room. The prince defeats the many-headed monster, Ravana, and so unlocks the tower in which Sita is waiting; Sara eludes the monstrous Miss Minchin in her daring escape from the locked room of the tower. In giving Sara active as well as passive power, the film speaks to the aspirations and experiences of contemporary girls and women, and seems to revise the conversion of Sara in Burnett's text from active looking to passively being looked at. But this active power is found in imitating the father and is dependent on the authorization of the father. Two scenes in the final sequence of the film warn that the father can withhold such authorization; in the first of these scenes, Captain Crewe closes the windows

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of his room to shut out the sound of Sara pounding on the locked door of her room and calling to Miss Minchin to listen to her explanation. Sara's struggle to reach the Randolph house from the third floor uses the solution proposed in the 1939 film, The Little Princess, directed by Walter Lang and starring Shirley Temple, but exacerbates the peril of her situation: rather than walking along the roof ledges, Sara crosses between the houses on a narrow plank in a violent thunderstorm. While Sara recognizes and acknowledges her father, she must plead with him to remember and to name her. Throughout the final sequence, Sara is in imminent danger of being atTested by the four policemen Miss Minchin has dispatched: failure to effect a return to the father, it is clear, would put the daughter literally outside the law, outside of meaning. The assertion of patriarchal control is extensive in the conclusion to the 1995 version of Sara's story. The sympathetic Miss Amelia happily elopes with the milkman, Miss Minchin's school is renamed The Randolph School for Girls, and Miss Minchin, whose personality problems are attributed to a bad father who has never told her that "every little girl is a princess," is reduced to the status of menial assistant to the boy chimney-sweep.

CONCLUSION I began this inquiry by asking how privilege is reproduced in and by children's literature. In the several versions of Sara Crewe's story which I have considered here, one of the terms through which privilege is discursively encoded is that of imagination, a notion closely aligned both with children and with fiction itself. In the 1887 story, the imagination is a compensatory strategy for the powerless; in the 1905 novel, the imagination is the marker of privilege and the occasion for the operations of power; in the 1995 film, the imagination is the source of power and the means by which privilege is secured. The instability of the term and its play through the structures of class, race, and gender suggest to me that this might be a useful problematic through which to study other texts of colonial children's literature. Each of the versions, too, stages scenes that are not fully readable in the terms offered in the text, scenes to which we might look for ways to think the undoing of the structures of privilege. I have already mentioned one of these scenes, Burnett's conclusion to both the 1887 and 1905 versions, in which Sara meets Anne again. The narrator notes the difficulty of decoding this scene, since Anne says "so little" (302), but the meeting reiterates the mutual gazing that has characterized Sara's peer friendships in

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the school: ''The children stood and looked at each other ... they looked straight into each other's eyes" (302). Sara's dream in the 1887 text in which she returns Ram Dass's salaams and speaks to him in his language is another such scene. A version of this scene is reintroduced into the 1995 film, when Ram Dass calls Sara by his magic to the open door of her room at night. No words are spoken. The characters gaze at each other, smile, and bow. Rewriting the scene at the beginning of the film where her father spins her round and round as they dance on the deck of the ocean liner, Sara dances alone, her arms raised in triumph.

NOTES 1 I use "colonial" as the more general term for the relations of power between England and its colonies and "imperial" to refer specifically to actors, events, and relations at the center of power, first in England, but also more generally in Anglo-American societies. 2 I have found Jenny Sharpe's Allegories of Empire instructive in various ways, most notably in theorizing and modelling a reading strategy from which I have borrowed, and in researching and interpreting the historical events surrounding the Sepoy Mutiny, which seems to me to shadow Burnett's text. 3 Teaching Burnett's novel to students in my children's literature classes at the University of Winnipeg has given me the opportunity to undertake such study in a veriety of contexts. I would like to acknowledge, in particular, the writing of Nancy Kurtas and Cassandra Kulay, for prompting me to look again at aspects of Burnett's text. 4 Bixler (87) and McGillis (1-7, 27-29) discuss the reception of the story. ~ C/, for example, Poovey's discllssion of ideology in her first chapter, "The Ideological Work of Gender," 1-23.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong, Nancy. ''The Occidental Alice." differences 2.2 (1990): 3-40. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice ill Post-Colonial Literatures. New Accents. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Bixler, Phyllis. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess, Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Toldfor the First Time. 1905. London: Warne, n.d. - - - . Sara Crewe, 01; What Happened at Miss Minchin's and Editha's Burglar. 1887. London: Warne, n.d.

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Castle, Kathryn. Britannia's Children: Reading Colonialism Through Children's Books and Magazines. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond tire Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twellfieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Grosz, Elizabeth. "VoyeurismlExhibitionismrrhe Gaze." Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Ed. Elizabeth Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.447-450. Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. "Cinderella, Marie Antoinette, and Sara: Roles and Role Models in A Little Princess." The Lion and the Unicom 22.2 (April 1998): 163-187. Ho1lindale, Peter. "Ideology and the Children's Book." Signal 55 (January 1988). Rpt. in Literature for Children: COllfemporary Criticism. Ed. Peter Hunt. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 19-40. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Routledge, 1990. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. "'The Whole of the Story': Frances Hodgson Burnett's 'A Little Princess.''' Triumphs of the Spirit in Children's Literature. Ed. Francelia Butler and Richard Rotert. Hamden, CT: Library Professional Publications, 1986. 230-243. A Little Princess. Dir. Alfred Cuaron. Perf. Liesel Matthews. Warner Brothers, 1995. The Little Princess. Dir. Walter Lang. Perf. Shirley Temple. Madacy Entertainment Group, 1939. Marriott, John A.R. The English in India: A Problem of Politics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1932. McGillis, Roderick. A Little Princess: Gender and Empire. New York: Twayne; London: Prentice Hall, 1996. Meade, L.T. The Manor School. 1903. New York: Grosset ancl Dunlap, [1903]. - - - . The Palace Beallliful: A Storyfor Girls. 1887. New York: Hurst, n.d. Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and NmTative Cinema." 1975. Rpt. in Visllal and Other Pleasllres. Bloomington: fndiana UP, 1989. 14-26. Nodelman, Perry. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, ancl Children's Literature." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 17.1 (1992): 29-35. Poovey, Mary. Unel'en Del'elopmellfs: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1988. Roberts, P.E. History of British ",dia Under the Company and the Crown. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. Said, Edward W. Oriellfalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

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Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. Language in Social Life Series. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Visram, Rozina. Ayahs. Lascars and Princes: Indians ill Britaill 1700-1947. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

CHAPTER 8

Colonial Canada's Young Adult Short Adventure Fiction: The Hunting Tale JEAN STRING AM

In a discussion of nineteenth-century young adult literature written for and sometimes by Canadians, the most frequent response even by educated persons is still, "Was there any?" For decades most readers have dismissed the Canadian children's literature of the late colonial period as either small in number of works published or not very good, and the young adult literature as nonexistent. This attitude ignores the periodical literature of the day, much of which was tailored expressly for an audience of young adult readers. The periodicals themselves declare this in their titles and mastheads, which refer to youth, young people, boys and girls, and so fOlih. In addition, with few exceptions, the heroes and heroines of the tales in both the United States and the British publications are unmarried young people aged approximately twelve to nineteen, age being one of the important descriptors of young adult literature. When adults do figure in the tales, they are not usually the focus for the action: they are neither the heroes nor the adventurers. Instead, the stories center on the young adults' perception of the world, their struggles with the environment, their relationships, and their understanding of cultural codes, both those unspoken and those rigorously promoted by adult society. Significantly, in these stories youths are not members of the colonized other as so frequently happens, but are young empire-builders. themselves smaller versions of the adult empire-builders, miniature colonizers who attempt to establish imperial domination over colonials more vulnerable than they-animals. The language of Empire tells youths they have a moral responsibility to lead those groups with less power or agency than that which is rightfully administered by themselves as young

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Anglo-Saxon representatives of the dominant culture. Young colonists may practise their colonizing forms of power on animals. A substantial amount of young adult short fiction about Canada and Canadians was produced from 1870 onward by authors, both celebrated and obscure, from Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. They published their adventure tales in widely read British and American periodicals for young adults, since the few magazines for children and young adults published in Canada at the time were associated with individual churches and other local groups, and had a very limited readership. The authors created and consolidated a rich colonial young adult literature, much of it steeped in the romantic impulse, much of it structured on realist principles, and nearly all of it based on the conventions of the adventure genre in plot structure, theme, and characterization. These writers attempted to distill into a few decades what the United States took nearly a hundred years to do and what the British had taken over two centuries to accomplish. I examine here representative examples of only the hunting story, one of the larger subsets of stories for young adults. The magazines in which these stories appeared upheld in their stOlies high standards of morality and honor to support the moral tenets taught in middle- and upper-class homes and schools throughout Britain, the United States, and Canada. The hunting and trapping literature conformed to the cultural values of the time. Of course, readership was all-important to the survival of the periodicals, and the key to an adolescent's subscription money (or his or her parents') was entettainment. Joy in some form was not far from the surface of most of the tales in which a young man encounters a wild animal. The thrill of the chase, the power of nature, the beauty of the physical creation-all these are celebrated aspects of the Canadian experience in the tales. Violence and the fear of violence are also not far from the surface of the tales. "Playfulness and violence are always the two faces of adventure," says Martin Green in The Adventurous Male (15), and these two faces are readily apparent in the nineteenth-century short adventure fiction about Canada. Hunting was also implicated as part of an elaborate military ethos, according to Robett H. MacDonald (Language 22), which confounded the terms associated with it. MacDonald sees the blun·ing of categories in the following schematic: war = game unarmed war = sport

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sport =war against animals game =animals killed in this war (21)

Toward the end of the century the terms for sp0l1, hunting, games, and war were entirely conflated in the jargon of the Imperialist. Men of Empire saw hunting as a rite of an elite class born to lead, for the hunting culture had been part of the royal prerogatives of kings and rulers since time immemorial, as Hugh Nibley demonstrates in "The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State." One of the dominant by-products of Imperialism was the active desire of Imperialists to train an elite corps of rulers or administrators who would take over the kingly right to hunt, for wherever they conquered, the British elite created game preserves for hunting to be used by this restricted group of rulers. For them, as well as for the backwoodsman, knowledge of the environment and natural history, physical endurance, qualities of character such as self-discipline, hard work, and even stoicism were associated with successful hunters and trappers in the nineteenth-century Canadian wilds. It is ironic, then, how men and boys of essentially plebeian class, became associated with a sophisticated system that valued exploration and adventure in itself, for the hunting agendas of both classes existed side-by-side in the periodical tales. In the hunting tale, power is always central to plot and theme. Whether the protagonist is on a hunting expedition, an errand, or merely pursuing pleasure, wild animals are omnipresent. Since the settings arc largely rural, the youth is generally armed, usually with a gun, but nearly always with at least a trusty pocket knife. He also encounters one or more wild animals. With little exception, the wild animals in the tales represent the other-other needs, other value systems, other means of power, the other side of the settler's psyche. The dialectic that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin see as indicative of postcolonialism in The Empire Writes Back (1989) is actually there from the beginning of the colonial experience: "the matrix of post-colonial literatures [isJ the dialectic of self and Other, indigene and exile, language and place, slave and free" (173). Animals, as a voiceless other, cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. The writers for young adults of this period supplied this representation using all the sincere fervor of the young empirebuilder rhetoric of the age. Margaret Atwood in Sun'il'al (1972) interprets Canadian animal stories as allegories with archetypal dimensions. Robel1 H. MacDonald follows Atwood in his essay "The Revolt Against Instinct," when he discusses the way in which rational and ethical animals are created by

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Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts (two writers generally credited as the originators of the realistic nineteenth-century Canadian animal tale). MacDonald sees a movement toward the spiritual and away from the base instincts, a movement that he believes "provides a mythic structure for what is at first sight, realistic fiction" (18). But realistic fiction, by definition, exists without mythical or archetypal positioning. As MacDonald says elsewhere, a myth "reduces the problematical to an obvious 'truth'" (Language 5). Myths simplify-this is true-but if these hunting adventures are really stories of legitimation, do they necessarily operate on a mythic level? I do not think so. Yes, the stories' purpose was primarily to socialize youth by engaging their imaginations in riveting adventures, but this does not mean that the Canadian animal tales have the power of myth to organize our society's thinking as Atwood and MacDonald suggest. While the archetypes they present are common to all literature and are in no way limited to the Canadian experience, and while the adventure genre they embody presents a way of life that appeals to the male imagination across cultures and periods of history, they reflect the cultural values of their era rather than imprinting a form and a moral. Paul Zweig maintains that "No matter how the myth is moralized and integrated into a system, the kernel of experience which makes it wOlth telling and listening to is adventure" (6). Most definitely, the animals in the stories are conquered and colonized reflections of their own and their human contemporaries' cultural and historical positions. But a myth imprints. By contrast, these adventure tales reflect-they reflect their genesis in the colonialist agenda of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In addition to sounding the colonial theme, the young man's sojourn in the forest is frequently seen as a rite of passage in which the youth returns, or continues onward, changed in some way, older, wiser. Inevitably the youth must face the challenge the animal represents. Wanton destruction is generally held to be an evil in these stories, but killing the animal is an act of manly courage. At the end of the tale, the boy as conquering hero returns to receive the accolades of peers or family. The youth has experienced a sense of his own power and emerges validated as a wOlthy member of the culture. One of the best-known authors, Charles G. D. Robelts, wrote over two hundred stories about animals, many of which were published in hard-bound book collections during his lifetime. Of the approximately fifty that appear in the children's and young adult periodicals I have examined, many of them follow the colonial story by reflecting some as-

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pect of the attitudes CUlTent in literatures of conquered peoples throughout the British Empire. In his essay "The Animal Story," which introduces the collection of animal tales Kindred of the Wild (1900), Robel1s writes that man and animal are one in their use of resources and habitat; however, that philosophy is not to be found in his young adult stories. In real life, animals throughout the century were being displaced, becoming peripheral, being reduced in numbers. Roberts seems to have sensed their disappearance and desired to bring wildlife back into primary focus, but he is unable to write against the grain of his own culture. He continually reinscribes the animals as at fundamental odds with the encroaching civilization. They are always less fit than man-with-a-weapon. Robel1s explains his animal stories as "psychological romance constructed on a framework of natural science" ("Animal Story" 24). The term "psychological romance" is an oxymoron. "Romance" implies a fulcrum, a balance between good and evil that disallows the ambiguities of everyday life. "Psychological" attempts to account for those ambiguities by referencing the mental, attitudinal, motivational, or behavioral characteristics of an individual or group. Only in the context of the colonial other does this apparent paradox make sense. If this literature tends to reinforce social polarities between good and evil, or similarly, between man and animal, then the baggy fit of the psychological aspect justifies the existing cultural hegemony of an imperial power over a diverse population. I now turn to the stories about wild animals and hunting and trapping that so thrilled the hem1s of nineteenth-century adolescents. Under the title "The Eagle's Nest" (1896), Roberts's chapter heading gives an overview of the story which follows: "A bird's ingratitude.-Two farmboys have an exciting struggle.-A hazardous encounter and capture." Here, we have the basic imperialist themes in a nutshell-the moral recalcitrance of the native, the thrill of conquest, and the subsequent exile/enslavement of the displaced. The story opens in mid-conversation in a farm kitchen. The younger brother informs the family that an eagle has carried off the sick lamb, whereupon the older brother grabs his gun and rushes off to exact retribution for the kidnapping, with the full approval of their mother. In the space of just six sentences, Roberts creates a nan'ative in which the colonizers have moral right on their side-the lamb is an innocent, a victim. and an object of pity and compassion in its sickness. The morally incapable eagle invades the farm scene of moral order and commits murder. The colonizers exercise justice by exacting the death of the other, thus restoring an imposed order fi'om an alien culture, fundamentally opposite to the order of the indigenous colonized,

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which itself required a restitution of the imbalance created between a healthy animal and a sick one. This violent little opening contrasts with the next section in which Robelts paints an edenic setting for this farm on the Gaspereau River in Acadia, further emphasizing the pastoral by placing the farm near "Evangeline's village of Grand Pre." Roberts identifies the pair of eagles in their specific habitat and explains that the farmer values them "for their rarity, and for their majestic bearing." By appreciating rarity and majesty, the farmer demonstrates aesthetic value, class sensitivity, and economic advantage. The farmer's wife has her reasons for liking the eagles, too: they "added a certain distinction to the farm," and on a practical side, they rid the farm of small creatures. So her reasons are essentially no different from her husband's-the colonial imperatives hold true across gender. The story continues: "Such care being taken not to frighten them, the birds began to evince a celtain haughty contempt for such harmless creatures as Mr. Rogers and the boys appeared to be." Here we have the first inkling that the colonized do not know their place, do not understand that they are the ones who must be diffident and thankful for any place at all in this new order of things. As an example of this lack of perception, the birds begin to steal clothing from the colonizers in order to line their nest. When the eaglets are born, the parent eagles commit the final atrocious act of reappropriation and kill the colonist's lamb in order to feed their young. The story then returns to the kitchen, where supper is in progress. Pointing to the dead eagle, Tom asks his father if he could have him stuffed: "'I'd like to give him to mother, pattly to make up for the lamb, and to remind her how she was a victim of misplaced confidence. You know, mother: he continued, turning to her as she set the final plate of pancakes on the table, 'I always did mistrust the eagles!'" Inselt the name of any indigenous group of whatever skin color or language found in the wake of the European nations' colonizing endeavors, and the same moral inversions occur. The coloniseI' in the above paragraph sees himlherself as the victim of his/her own vhtuous nature in having extended trust to a morally deficient aboriginal. The son asselts his own canny sense of the true nature of the untrustwOlthy colonial by proclaiming his former and ongoing accurate instincts to be COll'ect: the natives are not to be trusted. And with good reason, because the colonized everywhere keep up a guerrilla warfare, wearying in the extreme to the conquerors. The plot continues. The father agrees to have the male bird stuffed, and the mother states, "I hate the ungrateful things, now." The son says

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he didn't kill the female eagle when he had a chance because the babies would starve, whereupon his mother points out the inconsist