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E-book British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour

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Penilaian

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‘Books are for white people.’ It’s an old idea, and historically, mostly a true one, at least in British publishing. Not only have most books, including children’s books, been written for and about white people in Britain, the scholarly and critical histories of literature, including children’s literature, have focused on these same books and their presumed-white audiences. While it is perhaps unsurprising that a book such as F. J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England, first published in 1932, discusses only white authors and only the very rare Black character, even more modern histories of British children’s literature have been comfortable largely dismissing if not completely ignoring authors, characters – and readers – of colour. This continuing lack of attention to people of colour can be put down to two primary factors: the British Empire and population demographics.Although Britain has been producing reading material for children for hundreds of years, the so-called Golden Age of British children’s literature occurred during the late Victorian period and early twentieth century; it is during this time that many of the books considered ‘classics’, including Andrew Lang’s ‘colour’ fairy books (the first of which, The Blue Fairy Book, appeared in 1889), Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), Barrie’s Peter Pan (play version 1904, novelized as Peter and Wendy in 1911), Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and Just-So Stories (1902), Nesbit’s Five Children and It(1902) and Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) were all first published (and none of these books has ever been out of print in Britain since). These books produced an idea of Britishness that continues to reproduce and reinforce ideas and values extolled in the British Empire, leading M. Daphne Kutzer to comment, ‘where attitudes towards empire are concerned, they have continued to be conveyed in British children’s books well into the 1980s. The longing for empire, or at least for national importance, is reflected in children’s books both of the golden age and our age’ (2000: 11). These attitudes about empire are, more specifically, attitudes that normalize the idea of whiteness. As Afua Hirsch puts in in Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, the ‘real power of British imperialism ... was the mental regime, the intellectual brainwashing, inflicting upon Africans the belief that they were people who had no history, had achieved nothing’ (2018: 82). It also suggested to white British people that their history was the history, so that even today, as Hirsch goes onto point out, ‘White history is seen as “history”, black history is seen as “black history” – a specialist subject for those who wish to opt out of the mainstream’ (2018: 309). One of the lasting effects of the British Empire is its racial hierarchies; as Sadia Habib, in Learning and Teaching British Values, argues, ‘Distinct minority groups, despite claims of equality, have historically been placed somewhere in a “hierarchy of Britishness” by political elites, which impacted how they “experienced” Britishness’ (2018: 13). Britishness has historically been coded as white, just as British children’s literature has historically been represented as being for, by and about white people. At best, this idea of the whiteness of British children’s literature renders readers of colour invisible; at worst, it perpetuates racist ideas through valorizing classic, Golden Age children’s books.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

305.8 SAN b

Penerbit

London : Bloomsbury Academic., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

215 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781350196049

Klasifikasi

305.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Ethnic Groups, Ethnography, Ethnology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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