DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208-4
Culture is one of the most complex words in the English language (Eagleton, 2000). How we define culture shapes how we understand social difference and the literary category of multicultural children’s literature. Confining the definition of culture to “the complex whole” of values, customs, beliefs and practices, which make up the lifeways of a particular group (Tylor, 1871/1958) does not take power into account. Culture, as the complex whole, is a mismatch with our globalized world.
Culture and power are bound up together. Placing a text within its sociopolitical context opens up the dominant cultural assumptions imbued in its language and images. The definition of culture with which readers align themselves shapes their reading in particular ways, and certainly influences what they deem worthy of notice and analysis (Eagleton, 2000). Embracing a more complex view of culture repositions readers as researchers and creators of language, literature, literacies, and society. We need to situate cultural analysis within larger analyses of sociopolitical contexts and processes. Children’s literature is a product of culture as well as evidence of power relations; it is a social transcript of the power relations of class, race, and gender.
Critical multicultural analysis builds on Clifford Geertz’s (1973) understanding of culture, which historically views social life as symbolic and meaning making; it is “a web of meaning” encoded in a culture’s symbolic forms such as language and literature. Sherry Ortner (1994) maintains that Geertz’s great contribution to the theoretical construct of culture is that
culture is not something locked inside people’s heads, but rather is embodied in public symbols, symbols through which the members of a society communicate their worldview, value-orientations, ethos, and all the rest to one another … Culture is a product of acting social beings trying to make sense of the world in which they find themselves, and if we are to make sense of a culture, we must situate ourselves in the position from which it was constructed.
(Ortner, 1994: 374–275)
A Geertzian concept of culture invites us to read culture as text for its underlying assumptions while others highlight its dynamism.
Marietta Saravia-Shore and Steven F. Arvizu (1992) and Brian Street (1996) define culture as a verb, demonstrating that culture is a historical and sociopolitical process. Saravia-Shore and Arvizu maintain that culture is a “dynamic, creative, and continuous process” (1992: xvii). Like Street, they further define it as the active interaction of opposing systems of values, beliefs, practices, norms, conventions, and power relations, which have been shaped by the sociopolitical history of a nation in the interests of its privileged members.
Sonia Nieto and Patty Bode (2008) define culture as “the values, traditions, worldview, and social and political relationships, and worldview created, shared, [negotiated], and transformed by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors that can include a common history, geographic location, language, social class, religion, or other shared identity” (171). Like Nieto and Bode, we align ourselves with a definition of culture as not static, isolated, permanent, inflexible, or bounded by hard perimeters, but dynamic, relentlessly changing, and influenced by historical, sociopolitical, and economic factors. Culture is thus learned, and not biologically determined, sociopolitically constructed, “porous” (Rosaldo, 1989), and always dialectical. History and the workings of power such as domination, collusion, resistance, and agency exist at its center. To try to separate culture from this interplay of power systems is to suggest that racism, classism, and sexism do not exist or that these political forces do not shape culture.
James Paul Gee’s definition of “Big D” Discourses inserts power relations and how power is exercised into the meaning of culture. According to Gee (1999), Discourses are “socially accepted associations among ways of using language [e.g., speaking, listening, writing, reading, representing, and viewing], of thinking, valuing, acting, and interacting, in the ‘right’ places and at the ‘right’ times with the ‘right’ objects (associations that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’)” (17). Integrating Discourse into the concept of culture injects its definition with the processes of how power is exercised, as well as foregrounding diversity, multiple and shifting identities, contradictions, and the sociopolitical systems of class, gender, and race. It is locating “large-scale ideological formations.” Examining culture as a sociopolitical critique of these power networks makes visible how race, class, and gender work in the U.S. context and exposes their global implications. Critical multicultural analysis of race, gender, and class ideologies in children’s literature reveals the historical and sociopolitical dimensions of culture.
By examining the sociopolitical factors that contributed to the history of multiculturalism in children’s literature, we retrace the institutional practices that led to the history of underrepresentation of various cultural groups in children’s literature. In constructing a historical analysis of multicultural children’s literature, that is, of the power relations and knowledge central in establishing the discourse of multicultural children’s literature, the resistance and agency of communities of color and their allies are foregrounded, as they demand representation in children’s literature.
All literature is a product of culture. Multicultural children’s literature has been defined as literature by and about people of color. It is bound to the history of all literature and multicultural education, and tied to trends in publishing. It is linked politically to social movements to include underrepresented populations.
In the United States, people of color were virtually invisible in children’s literature prior to the 1960s. When they were rendered in text, for the most part, they were stereotypically represented. The literary category of multicultural children’s literature developed out of this historical and sociopolitical context (Larrick, 1965/1995; MacCann & Woodard, 1985; Osa, 1995; Rudman, 1976/1995; Sims, 1982; Wader, 1997).
Charlemae Rollins, a librarian with the Chicago Public Library, compiled We Build Together, an annotated bibliography of books about African Americans. The recommended books were for elementary and high school students. The National Council of Teachers of English published the first of three editions in 1941.
Reading Ladders for Human Relations, first published in 1947, is a booklist that grew out of an American Council on Education sponsored project to find materials and techniques for improving human relations, a goal of intergroup education, with an emphasis on interracial harmony and interpersonal relations. These annotated bibliographies are organized in “ladder” themes, “perhaps because [the editors] saw them as necessary steps to take along a continuum of ever-increasing contacts with others” (Tway, 1981: 3). The ladders include: growing into self, relating to wide individual differences, interacting in groups, appreciating different cultures, and coping in a changing world. Several editions were published over a 35-year span. These booklists, used by teachers, librarians, and parents, promoted better human relations dislocated from a historical, sociopolitical context. Reading Ladders for Human Relations was largely informed by intergroup education which devotes little attention to power relations.
In 1954, the social climate after the Supreme Court desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education forced mainstream publishing houses to confront the prevalence of ethnic stereotypes in children’s literature (Wader, 1997). African Americans were recruited to join the field of publishing as authors, illustrators, and editors. The New York Public Library began publishing an annual annotated bibliography, Books About Negro Life for Children. (In 1963, the title was changed to The Black Experience in Children’s Books.) This bibliography was published intermittently until 1994, highlighting the expansion of multiethnic voices in children’s literature. It was not until after Nancy Larrick’s (1965) article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” which called national attention to this underrepresentation, that publishers took note of their practices of exclusion and stereotyping. The increase of multicultural representation in children’s literature was a direct response central to the historical and sociopolitical reality of American children’s literature.
Nancy Larrick’s (1965) survey of 5,000 trade books published for children during 1962, 1963, and 1964, found that only 6.7 percent of the books had one or more Black characters. Many of these characters were featured as backdrop or rendered as slaves, servants, sharecroppers, migrant or menial workers. If the institutionalized omission of African Americans from children’s literature was not challenged and dealt with, Larrick argued that “There seem[ed] little chance of developing the humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict, as long as our children are brought up on gentle doses of racism [our emphasis] through their books” (Larrick, 1965: 2). Larrick’s findings confirmed what the African American librarians Charlemae Rollins and Augusta Baker (Harris, 1993) had observed all along.
It is important to note that Nancy Larrick did not initiate concern about the invisibility of African Americans in children’s literature (Harris, 1993). According to Violet Harris, Larrick’s efforts overshadowed the work of Virginia Lacy, Charlemae Rollins, and Augusta Baker. Larrick used her situated social power to call attention to this invisibility: she was a White person with strong connections to the library and publishing worlds. The work of the Council on Interracial Books for Children (late 1960s through late 1980s), Masha Kabakow Rudman’s Children’s Literature: An Issues Approach (1976), and Rudine Sims’ [Bishop] Shadow and Substance (1982) roused further attention to the biased practices of publishers.
Multicultural children’s literature as a literary category emerged in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and the growing attention to multicultural education and teaching. During the late 1960s and early 1970s activists in ethnic studies, multiethnic movements, and the African American community, frustrated with the slow pace of desegregation, demanded more community control over their schools with a goal of infusion of Black history into the curriculum (Banks, 1995).
As schools responded to the African American community’s demands, groups such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, who also experienced institutional racism and classism, put pressure on schools for representation in the curriculum and school life as well. According to James A. Banks (1995), it was during this time that “a rich array of books, programs, curricula, and other materials that focused on the histories and cultures of ethnic groups of color was edited, written, or reprinted” (Banks, 1995: 10). In this next section we draw heavily on the historical sketch compiled by Rosa E. Wader (1997), featured in The New Press Guide to Multicultural Resources for Young Readers, and Kathleen T. Horning and Ginny Moore Kruse’s (1991) chapter, “Looking into the Mirror: Considerations Behind the Reflections.”
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several organizations and awards promoted children’s literature that reflected underrepresented cultural groups. In 1967, the Council on Interracial Books for Children was founded by a culturally diverse group of writers, librarians, teachers, and parents to advocate for anti-racist children’s literature and educational materials, and to create a forum for the sociopolitical analysis of children’s books. They sponsored a contest for “Third World Writers.” (Walter Dean Myers, an African American writer, won this contest in 1968 and published his first children’s book with Parent Magazine Press, a mainstream publisher.)
In the mid-1970s, the Council expanded its mission to include the interrogation of sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, classism, and language discrimination. Toward the end of the 1970s, this organization published books on Indian stereotypes, human and anti-human values in children’s books, and guidelines for selecting bias-free textbooks and storybooks. These guidelines were distributed to libraries, national teaching associations and other agencies, and adults working with children. The Council’s list, “Ten Quick Ways to Identify Racism and Sexism in Children’s Books,” is still used today. (Many books on the theory and practice of multicultural education have included this list as a resource for educators.) This group also produced filmstrips on such issues as unlearning stereotypes about Native peoples and Puerto Ricans, and on gender roles. They also produced Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, a quarterly publication, and on occasion, bimonthly when the Council published special issues. This publication focused on educational issues, critical reviews of children’s literature and other teaching resources, and served as a gadfly to the established publishing houses.
During the 1970s and 1980s, many national organizations were formed to promote awareness about underrepresentation in curriculum materials and children’s literature: The Japanese American Curriculum Project called attention to Asian American children’s books; and, the REFORMA group of the American Library Association and the Center for the Study of Books in Spanish for Children and Adolescents at California State University, San Marcos requested authentic literature by Latina/o authors. Since 1985 the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has documented the number of books written or illustrated by artists of color, containing characters of color. African American artists were the first group to be included in this documentation.
During this time, several new independent publishers opened their doors for business: Lollypop Power Press specialized in non-sexist multicultural and bilingual picture books; Arte Público Press, which focused exclusively on the U.S. Latina/o experience, with books in both English and Spanish; and, the Children’s Book Press published books featuring underrepresented groups and languages. The materials available from these new publishers provided multiple perspectives, as well as storylines where the characters of color were at the center of the story, and not simply rendered in relation to White society.
Several new annual awards emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, bringing authors and illustrators of color into the fold. (See Appendix A for more children’s book awards information.) The Coretta Scott King Award was established by the American Library Association for authors and illustrators of African descent whose works promote an understanding and appreciation of the “American Dream,” as defined by Martin Luther King Jr.’s work for peace and world brotherhood. The Carter G. Woodson Award, from the National Council for Social Studies, encourages treatment of topics related to ethnic minorities and race relations.
In the meantime, writers and illustrators of color were recognized for their work through mainstream awards: Tom Feelings became the first African American artist to win a Caldecott Honor Award in 1972. Nicholasa Mohr became the first Puerto Rican writer to win the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1974. Virginia Hamilton was the first author of color to win the Newbery Medal award in 1975. Laurence Yep was selected as the first Chinese American author to receive a Newbery Honor Book Medal in 1975. Leo and Diane Dillon, an interracial couple, earned the 1975 Caldecott Award for illustrating From Ashanti to Zulu, by Margaret Musgrove, an African American author. Ed Young became the first Chinese American to win the Caldecott Award in 1990 for illustrating his retelling of Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China.
In 1985, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a children’s literature library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, began documenting the number of books by and about African Americans. In 1994, the Center added Asian Pacific/Asian Pacific Americans, American Indians, and Latinos to the list. The Center defines multicultural literature as books by and about people of color. They publish an annual publication, CCBC Choices, which provides publishing statistics and an annotated bibliography of noteworthy titles.
Oyate, an educational organization that focuses on the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in children’s literature, was founded in 1987 and incorporated in 1990. This group’s goal is for all children to learn “the truth of history” (www.oyate.org). Their website offers text analyses of selected books, a list of books to avoid, and announcements of workshops to assist teachers in uncovering anti-Indian biases in children’s materials. In-house publications include Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children (1987/1998/2006) and A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (2005), both edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, founding members of Oyate.
All of these organizations and awards mark some of the ways underrepresented groups and their allies struggle for equality and equity within the publishing world of children’s books.
In Joel Spring’s (2004) brief history of deculturalization, he documents the struggle for educational equality within the Native American, African American, Latino American, and Asian American communities, groups that have been historically silenced, and offers a historical background for understanding the narrow definition of multiculturalism in children’s literature. He defines the process of deculturalization as a stripping away of one culture to replace with a dominant culture. Many scholars of children’s literature (Harris, 1993, 1997; Huck et al., 2001; Mitchell, 2003; Norton, 1999; Temple et al., 2006; Tomlinson & Lynch-Brown, 2002), building on the scholarship of Rudine Sims Bishop (1992; 1997; with Cai, 1994), define multicultural children’s literature as literary works that focus on African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans. These cultural groups have been demeaned or rendered invisible both in literature and society. Against this historical scaffold, the definition of multicultural children’s literature developed and became accepted through its pedagogical application (Cai & Bishop, 1994) and publishing practices (Ford, 1994).
The publishing of children’s literature does not occur in a vacuum. Children’s literature is a social institution; it reflects our larger society. The writing, illustrating, and publishing of children’s books are influenced by society whose institutions still discriminate against individuals based on their race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, age, ability, and sexual orientation. Critical multicultural analysis leads readers to “reading the world” (Freire, 1970/1985), as Geertz (1973) argues, “To see social institutions, social customs, social changes as in some sense ‘readable’ is to alter our whole sense of what such interpretation is …” (Geertz, 1973: 31). Extending the notion of text beyond the written word on paper draws our attention to how meaning is inscribed in practice and how, through discourse, institutions work and exercise power. Critical multicultural analysis connects discursive practices to institutional and political power structures: Its goal is to disrupt intellectual and social hierarchies and contribute to the “refiguration of social thought” (Geertz, 1973: 19). By using historical and sociopolitical lenses, critical multicultural analysis problematizes childhood, children’s literature, reading, and the enterprise of publishing children’s books.
When the world of children’s books was all White, children who were not in the privileged majority felt invisible and demeaned. In the past twenty years, publishers have attempted to acknowledge, through their publishing decisions, the need for portraying diversity in books. In 2006, of the approximately 5,000 children’s book titles published, 546 were by and/or about people of color (Horning, Kruse, Rudiger & Schliesman, 2006). The percentages are still skewed toward the White-Northern European-Protestant-middle-class society. However, there are several publishers like Arte Público Press, the Children’s Book Press, Just Us Books, Lee & Low, and Shen’s Books that focus particularly on publishing books featuring underrepresented populations. Some of the large publishers also have small imprints (e.g., Hyperion Books for Children’s Jump at the Sun) and sections in their catalogs (e.g., HarperCollins and Scholastic) devoted to these cultural experiences. (See Appendix B for more information on small presses.)
There are more than 345,880 children’s books currently available for purchase in the United States from 15,190 U.S. publishers (Bowker, 2005). This figure represents more than three times as many books available to children now than a decade ago. Information compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) indicates that out of the 5,000 new titles published every year in children’s literature, the number of books by and about people of color has rarely reached more than ten percent. (In 2007, CCBC received 3,000 children’s books out of the 5,000 new titles.)
The CCBC’s definition of multicultural literature is “books by and about people of color” (Horning, Lindgren, Michaelson, & Schliesman, 2008: 3). The Center’s statistics for 2007 indicate a decrease from the 2002 publishing activity (when the Center began disaggregating its statistics for children’s books by and about people of color) of books with African/ African American (166 to 150 new titles), American Indian (64 to 44 new titles), Asian Pacific and Asian Pacific American (91 to 68 new titles), and Latino/a (94 to 59) themes. At the same time, in 2007, there was an increase from 2002 in the number of books (out of the above titles) created, that is, written and/or illustrated, by African/African Americans (69 to 77 new titles), American Indians (remained at 6 for both years, with an increase to 14 in 2006), Asian Pacifics/Asian Pacific Americans (46 to 56). Books written and/or illustrated by Latinos/as decreased from 46 to 42, with an increase to 50 in 2005. Given the publishing industry’s increasing concentration in the hands of eight multinational corporations (Hade & Edmondson, 2003; Taxel & Ward, 2000) and despite the intermittent publishing increase during the past ten years, the power relations of class, race, and gender still have a hold on children’s book publishing. (See Appendix B for more information on conglomerates.)
Publishing trends are shaped by the distribution of power in the United States. In some instances, the increase in publishing by writers and illustrators of color reflects independently owned small presses’ publishing activity (e.g., Lee and Low, Just Us Books, Third World Press, The Children’s Book Press, Cinco Puntos, Arte Público Press, and Shen’s Books). Joel Taxel and Holly M. Ward (2000) propose that adults and children can “exert some form of economic pressure on publishers (possibly through a selected boycott) to publish the kinds of books our children need … [while] join[ing] our colleagues in the publishing industry in resisting the increasingly tyrannical bottom-line imperatives of the market” (Taxel & Ward, 2000: 58). Daniel Hade and Jacqueline Edmondson (2003) argue that children should be able to experience books “without being subject to the homogenized, synergized, commercialized texts dominating the children’s book market today” (143). Young and adult readers’ book selecting and buying habits can challenge these imperatives by placing “economic pressure” that can contribute to the redistribution of power.
Violet Harris and Arlette Willis (2003) maintain that definitions of multicultural literature are fluid and linked to shifting historical, sociopolitical, and economic contexts. These definitions are influenced by developments in multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and critical literary criticism. From its historical developments, children’s literature by and about people of color was a response to racist social and publishing practices that led to the underrepresentation and disempowerment of people of color in U.S. society, curricula, and children’s literature. The scholarship of multicultural children’s literature mostly focuses on the conceptualization of its definition.
Rudine Sims Bishop (1982) conducted one of the seminal studies on the “cultural substance” of children’s literature, that is, how cultural values influence social interaction and people’s lives. She surveyed books published by and about African Americans between 1965 and 1979, and published her findings in the National Council of Teachers of English publication, Shadow and Substance. She maintains:
At issue is not simply “racial background,” but cultural affinity, sensitivity, and sensibility …. The irony is that as long as people in positions of relative power in the world of children’s literature—publishers, librarians, educators—insist that the background of the author does not matter, the opportunities for Black writers will remain limited, since they will have to compete with established non-Black writers whose perspective on the Afro-American experience may be more consistent with that of the editors and publishers and whose opportunities to develop their talents as writers have been greater.
(Sims Bishop, 1982: 13–14)
Three considerations grounded Sims Bishop’s analysis of 150 realistic fiction books featured in Shadow and Substance. The first consideration was the implied reader of the book. Who is the target audience of the text? Is the book written for White children about Black people? Is the book for Black children about Black people? She argued that the primary audience influences both the theme and content of the book. The second consideration was the tension between viewing the United States as a culturally homogeneous society and a population comprised of a diversity of many cultures. This period of time (1965–1979), Sims Bishop maintains, contains evidence of African American writers’ and illustrators’ reclamation of their culture. The third consideration examined the book’s cultural perspective or focalization. Did the book reflect an insider’s viewpoint of African American culture or was it an outsider’s perspective? These guiding questions led Sims Bishop to organize the 150 books into the categories of social conscience, melting pot, and culturally conscious, which created a framework for her analysis.
The social conscience books reflected U.S. society prior to 1970. These books chronicle the interpersonal effects of desegregation: conflicts emerging when African American students desegregate White schools; how White children cope with prejudice and discrimination against African American friends; Blacks and Whites working together within the power structure of the time; and Black children becoming friends with White children.
The melting pot stories focused on racial integration. Twenty-five percent of the books were told from a White child’s point of view. While 30 percent of the books portrayed racial integration, Black children as main characters were depicted in integrated settings outside of their families. The remaining 30 percent of the stories focused on Black children within the context of their families and communities.
The last category, culturally conscious, consisted of books that placed Black characters at the center of the story. These stories were told from their perspective. Some aspect of the text and images represented the African American experience.
These three categories emerged out of a particular place and time in children’s literature and U.S. society. Sims Bishop’s (1991) assertion is that “if you want authentic African American experience, go to the people who have lived it and who bring those life experiences to bear on creating literature for children” (Sims Bishop, 1991: 34–35). And once you become familiar with these experiences, Sims Bishop contends that readers will develop background knowledge of the African American culture, offering points of reference, as they encounter new books and authors.
The first and second editions of The Black American in Books for Children: Readings on Racism (1972/1985), edited by Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, further examined the portrayal of the Black experience in children’s books, especially on early racist representations (e.g., The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), twentieth-century fiction and biography, picture books, and international and legal issues. In the first edition of Children Literature: An Issues Approach (1976), Masha Kabakow Rudman advocated for a “critical, or issues, approach,” that is, a “critical examination of the books in the light of how they treat contemporary social problems and conditions” (Rudman, 1976: 3). She devoted two chapters to literature about African Americans and Native Americans, building on the criteria developed by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Comprehensive annotated bibliographies of good books about these cultural groups were included. (The third edition, published in 1995, combines these chapters and expands the notion of multicultural literature to looking at heritage in literature. Heritage is broadly defined to include all cultural groups, with special consideration of underrepresented groups.)
The All White World of Children’s Books and African American Children’s Literature, published in 1995 and edited by Osayimwense Osa, opens with Nancy Larrick’s Saturday Review article (op. cit.) and explores issues of African American representation in text and illustration, orality and literacy, and multiple genres. One chapter looks at developments in African American children’s literature since the sixties: While African American writers are represented in each genre, the author asserts that realism dominates the fiction of the 1990s as it did in the 1970s and 1980s.
These texts by Sims, MacCann and Woodward, and Osa, and one chapter by Rudman, focus on the specific history of the African American experience in children’s literature and bring together scholarship that grounds the overall research of multicultural children’s literature. These scholars highlight the issues of underrepresentation, misrepresentation, cultural authenticity, and the artist’s social responsibility. This research lays the groundwork for defining multicultural literature as books about and by people of color.
The early studies of multiculturalism in children’s literature focused on African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and Native Americans. The term multicultural children’s literature gained recognition in the late 1980s: The Horn Book Guide editors adopted the term alongside the categories of Afro-American and Black (Harris & Willis, 2003). Multicultural literature gained wider acceptance because of the scholarly (i.e., publishing of books and journal articles, and conference presentations), pedagogical (i.e., developments in multicultural education and whole language), and publishing activities (e.g., editing, book reviewing, awards). Multicultural literature’s early definition focused on race and ethnicity. By the mid-1990s, the definition of multicultural literature expanded to include other groups and issues such as gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, and geographical location.
In “Multiple Definitions of Multicultural Literature: Is the Debate Really Just ‘Ivory Tower’ Bickering?” Mingshui Cai (1998) argues that at the center of this debate is “how many cultures are included in multicultural literature” (Cai, 1998: 312). He identifies three principal definitions in the research of multicultural literature: (1) the focus on “people of color”; (2) the assumption that “multiple + culture = multiculturalism”; and, (3) the assertion that “all literature is multicultural.” The issues of insider/outsider and cultural authenticity, deemed basic criteria for evaluating multicultural literature, emerge from these definitional developments. Static and bounded notions of culture that essentialize these cultural groups further complicate these debates.
Along with Harris (1993, 1997), Sims Bishop (1993, 1997), Cai and Sims Bishop (1994), Barrera, Thompson, and Dressman (1997), and Yokota (2001), the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (Lindgren, 1991) argues that we must focus on the populations who have experienced exclusion and marginalization such as African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans. CCBC’s working definition of multicultural children’s literature is that it is literature by and/or about people of color. Sims Bishop (1993) outlines three types of multicultural literature: culturally specific, generically American, and culturally neutral. Culturally specific literature speaks to a particular cultural experience, for example, illuminating specific language, religious, and family differences.
Multicultural literature that is generically American portrays characters of color but leaves out cultural specificity (e.g., books with universal themes). Culturally neutral literature acknowledges people of color, but focuses on other topics (e.g., informational books). While culturally neutral and specific stories echo Sims Bishop’s (1982) earlier classifications of melting pot and culturally conscious books, generically American books are dissimilar from social conscience stories, another category from her 1982 study, because social conscience books come out of the particular historical conditions of desegregation, whereas generically American books show African Americans integrated into U.S. society. All of these categories speak to the book’s focalization or point of view, which positions the characters in specific power relations.
Cai and Sims Bishop (1994) offer new ways to categorize multicultural literature into three classifications—world literature, cross-cultural literature, and parallel culture literature—in an attempt to reconcile the tension between pedagogical and literary approaches to defining the term multicultural literature. They further argue that these terms are political, “implying at the very least an intent to include the literatures of underrepresented peoples, American and otherwise, in the curriculum of schools in the United States” (Cai & Sims Bishop, 1994: 62). Thus, all of these types of multicultural literature focus on the historically underrepresented communities.
Cai and Sims Bishop define world literature as literature that includes literary works (e.g., folktales, fiction) of “other underrepresented groups outside the United States” (Cai & Sims Bishop, 1994: 62). Cross-cultural literature is “(1) literary works explicitly about interrelations among people of different cultures, without apparent focus on the unique experience of any other culture or cultural group, and (2) those about people from a given cultural group by a writer from another cultural group” (p. 65). This category highlights the “gaps between the author’s cultural perspective embodied in the literary work and the cultural perspective of the people his or her work portrays” (Cai & Sims Bishop, 1994: 65). Cai and Sims Bishop argue that many children’s books fall under this category of multicultural literature.
Finally, parallel culture books are “written by authors from parallel cultural groups to represent the experience, consciousness, and self-image developed as a result of being acculturated and socialized within those groups” (Cai & Sims Bishop, 1994: 66). This last category showcases a culture’s shared experience, its “collective subjectivity” (Eagleton, 2000). Cai and Sims Bishop argue that parallel culture authors are best qualified to represent their cultural experience and parallel culture literature best serves the goals of multicultural education.
Many scholars (Rochman, 1993; Schwartz, 1995; Shannon, 1994) caution against definitions that reduce multiculturalism to racial essentialism. According to Patrick Shannon, “Such treatment allows most teachers and students to stand apart from multiculturalism, as if it were only about The Other and not about themselves” (Shannon, 1994: 2). He argues that all books “demonstrate the complexity of multiculturalism” (Shannon, 1994: 3).
Sims Bishop responds:
I would answer, first of all, that if multiculturalism has been equated with racial issues, it is not because Violet Harris or I have made it so. America is, and has been for centuries, a racialized society … That is why the canon is what it is. That is why the image of the African-American in “mainstream” American literature, including children’s literature, for so long had been either pathetic or laughable or nonexistent. It is because race matters that people confuse race and culture. Black people and other people of color have been segregated, discriminated against, and worse; and part of our designs for living, our cultures, have evolved out of the conditions under which we have lived.
(Sims Bishop, 1994: 7)
Like Sims Bishop, Toni Morrison (1992) argues that the United States is a historically “racialized” society with its literature formed and shaped by the four-hundred-year-old African and African American presence. She maintains that this presence needs consideration: “The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (Morrison, 1992: 5).
Race and ethnicity are social constructions and should be at the center of any discussion about all literature, but it is a limited perspective all by itself, because racial oppression interfaces with classism and sexism. Hazel Rochman argues that “Too many lists of so-called multicultural books function only as a well-meaning spotlight—shining brightly but briefly on one cultural island or another, providing overdue recognition, yes, but imposing a different kind of isolation, celebratory but still separate” (Rochman, 1993: 14). In many ways multicultural literature as literature about people of color isolates these cultural groups from power relations.
Rochman (1993) advocates for a definition that means “across cultures, against borders” while not just referring to people of color. Julia Candace Corliss (1998) calls for a “literature of diversity” that “reflects the broad range of human experience and global kaleidoscope of cultures” (5). She emphasizes literature about and by people of color because of the disparity in publishing practices.
Corliss includes European American literature when those books “add to the kaleidoscope of human experience and connect to an aspect of the overall theme of crossing borders” (Corliss, 1998: 5). Junko Yokota (1993) places emphasis on the “multi” part of the term multicultural and defines multicultural literature as “literature that represents any distinct cultural group through accurate portrayal and rich detail” (157).
More recently, Yokota (2001) rejects this definition and argues for a multiethnic literature because “a focus on ethnicity-related issues in literature allows us to consider the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues shared by ethnic groups that lie outside the mainstream” (xiv). Yokota advocates for an expanded view of diversity, while “recogniz[ing] that different kinds of diversity are not necessarily parallel in their issues and that although some issues affecting a range of diverse group are the same or at least similar, others are quite different” (Yokota, 2001: xiv).
Cai (1998) argues, “If the issues of inequality, discrimination, oppression, and exploitation are excluded from consideration when we try to define multicultural literature, there is a danger of diluting, or even deconstructing, the social, political concept that underlies the term” (313). He further states “a definition of multicultural literature should therefore draw a demarcation line between the literature of the dominant mainstream culture and that of marginalized culture” (Cai, 1998: 313). While the definitions by Rochman, Corliss, and Yokota are idealistic and do not acknowledge the privileging and punishing systems of class, race, and gender, distinguishing between dominant and dominated groups is also problematic: Power relations are rendered as dualisms. Power is a complex matrix. However, expanding the definition of multicultural literature to include other groups is important, because it acknowledges the fact that all groups originate from historical and sociopolitical associations and disassociations and that all literature is a cultural product.
Toward the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the definition of multicultural literature expanded in some of the research. Frances Ann Day (1999) broadens the definition by including European American authors in her multicultural literature resource book for teachers. In her book, Multicultural Children’s Literature: Through the Eyes of Many Children, Donna Norton (2001) never explicitly defines multicultural literature, but includes Jewish Americans in her study of multicultural literature. Daphne Muse (1997) contends that works of multicultural literature are “books that chronicle, acknowledge, and examine the values, perspectives, and experiences of groups that have been marginalized because of race, gender, ethnicity, language, ability, age, social class, religion/spirituality, and/or sexual orientation … [they are] works written for, by, and about people of all cultures and backgrounds” (1).
Shannon’s (1994) commentary on multicultural literature is that all people have multiple social memberships, and perhaps these identities can link people across social lines. Cai (1998) argues against this position because the sociopolitical basis for the creation of multicultural literature is undermined when this happens. Examining how all literature is culturally coded and the multiple identities of characters and readers, as well as embracing a wider understanding of power relations, rejects “the idea that a dominant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture is the single force of acculturation in the United States” (Allender & Adams, 1999: 33). All literature is multicultural, showing the complexities of intercultural relations as well as cultural hybridity; other social memberships work together with race. Multiple perspectives, cultural similarities and differences broaden our understanding of multiculturalism, while highlighting the complex web of power relations. Schwartz (1995) points out that Shannon’s article, “I Am the Canon: Finding Ourselves in Multiculturalism,” summons us to “struggle against the canon, a struggle to foster an inclusive multiculturalism within a full-fledged social analysis of the relations between language, culture, and power …” (Schwartz, 1995: 637). While all the scholars associated with the above definitions of multicultural literature are committed to multicultural education, their social analyses differ considerably.
Schwartz argues that multicultural children’s literature is problematic in several ways:
- it signifies that [W]hite is the normative term against which all other groups are defined as “Other”;
- it is an exclusive term that signifies a social group based on perceived differences and described in the idiom of biology as opposed to the idiom of culture;
- ultimately, it leads to the exclusion of other issues that may be represented within multicultural children’s literature, such as issues of class, gender, disability, religion, and sexual orientation; and
- the use of terms such as “people of color” and “parallel cultures” may ultimately be more divisive than liberating and more disempowering than empowering within the full context of inequitable power relations in western capitalist society.
(Schwartz, 1995: 641)
While definitions of multicultural literature refer to the demand of historically marginalized groups to be heard and represented in the literary history of the United States, these conceptualizations can be divisive and essentializing. They assume a one-directional power base (i.e., oppressed and oppressor), that is, power is owned, while culture is static and bounded. These definitions isolate race from the power relations of class and gender, as if they do not influence racism. These explications do not take into account that social identities are multiple, contradictory, and shifting. The assumption imbedded in multicultural literature is that there is a single meaning coming from a single writer. Thus, language, culture, and power are seen as fixed and stable, but cultural difference is historically and sociopolitically constructed.
Prejudice and discrimination occur not just because people lack cultural information or contact, but also because there are institutional policies and social practices in place that are racist, classist, and sexist. If we agree that all literature is socially constructed, then we accept the understandings that texts are historically, socially, politically, and discursively constructed. In doing so, we no longer privilege middle-class, White, Anglo-Protestant Americans by assuming that their culture is monolithic and accepted as the norm and that all others are “Other” and separate from the norm. We also acknowledge that reading is a sociopolitical activity influenced by society’s institutions that privilege some groups over others as well as by individual experiences, values, and biases. These are significant shifts from the conventional approach to literary study and multicultural criticism.
In the Council on Interracial Books for Children’s Human and (Anti-Human) Values in Children’s Literature, published in 1976, the authors conclude that any language decision, whether oral or written, is a political one that emerges from a particular sociopolitical context. A critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature posits that all literature is a historical and cultural product, inscribed with the dominant ideologies of a particular place and time. Critical multicultural analysis builds on the scholarship that advocates for reading critically and multiculturally.
In 1976, the Council on Interracial Books for Children questioned the source of values imbedded in children’s books. They argued that they were not from individual writers, but from society as a whole: “Children’s books generally reflect the needs of those who dominate that society … the prevailing values are supportive of the existing [power] structure” (Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1976: 1). Their criteria, they claimed, emerged from a particular time. Their values checklist brought race, gender, class, age, and the like together. The Council maintained that values were imbedded in the words and images.
Critical teachers, Bill Bigelow (1994) and Herbert Kohl (1995a), advocate for reading children’s books that challenge the way things are and how we perceive the past. Bigelow outlines the key elements of critical multicultural curriculum and teaching. Kohl discusses the characteristics of “radical children’s literature”:
- the major force in the story is the community, beyond the family;
- the conflict involves a whole community, class, ethnic group, nation;
- a wide range of collective action is present;
- the presence of an enemy who has abused power and who is nevertheless a three-dimensional person or group of people, not an abstract force;
- the story depicts comradeship as well as friendship and love; and finally,
- there is not a compulsory happy ending or resolution of the problem. Hope and possibility are evident.
(Kohl, 1995a: 66–68)
Bigelow and Kohl promote reading and stories that stretch children’s social imagination and complicate their understanding of power.
Several scholars in the field of children’s literature advocate for reading children’s literature against race, class, and gender ideologies, so readers can become aware of how these systems of power work in society (Ching, 2005; Hade, 1997a & 1997b; Harris, 1999; Harris & Willis, 2003; Mendoza & Reese, 2001; Nodelman & Reimer, 2003; Rogers & Soter, 1997; Schwartz, 1995; Yenika-Agbaw, 1997). (It should be noted that many of these scholars still use the literary category of multicultural children’s literature.) They move away from simplistic definitions of culture and argue for bringing history, culture, and power together.
Critical multicultural analysis draws from the above multiple definitions of multicultural literature. It is grounded in the historical silence of underrepresented groups, keeping this history of underrepresentation at the center, while bringing the interrogation of the complexities of power relations into the fold. It is grounded in a definition of multiculturalism that affirms diversity and resists the “comfort zone of multiculturalism” (Nieto & Bode, 2008; Jackson & Solís, 1995; Kanpol & McLaren, 1995) by going beyond affirmation and difference, and by examining hegemony and issues of social power. Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature examines the complex web of power in our society, the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender and how they work together. It focuses on the process of analysis rather than the simple presence of characters who are people of color.
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1991) argues that even though class is a reality in the United States, “class is not a central category of cultural discourse in America, and the anthropological literature that ignores class in favor of almost any other set of social idioms—ethnicity, race, kinship—is in some ways merely reflecting this fact” (Ortner, 1991: 169). Anthropological research, like other social science inquiry, tends to overlook class because it is a layer of reality that we do not talk about. The American Dream ideology contributes to this silence in public and academic discourse. Ortner notes: “The United States has glorified opportunity and mobility, and has presented itself as more open to individual achievement than it really is” (Ortner 1991: 171). The U.S. ideology around social mobility masks class, racial, and gender inequities, placing the blame of economic oppression on the individual. What happens, according to Ortner, is that class gets displaced into the discourses of ethnicity, race, and gender, with the latter two social identities greatly shaped by class.
Sarah Theule Lubienski (2003), a professor of education, claims that class is not explored in educational research because researchers tend to focus on the affirmative characteristics of diversity, a response to “blame the victim” research trends. Another reason, Lubienski offers, is our “national discomfort” with addressing the presence and endurance of classism in the United States and acknowledging our own class privilege. As a society, we believe that domination is inevitable (Guinier & Torres, 2002). Furthermore, class definitions have moved away from the dualisms of the “haves” and “have-nots” to definitions that reflect the complexities of power relations. Lubienski maintains that social class has been overlooked in education research because “differing ethnic and language traditions can be viewed in strictly positive lights, [but] it is hard to view diversity in wealth and power in the same way” (Lubienski 2003: 32). This research elision is present in the scholarship of children’s literature.
In surveying the research on U.S. children’s literature, we have found a lack of scholarship exists in the analysis of class (Krips, 1993; Wojcik-Andrew, 1993). (This is broadly the case throughout the world although some exists by British scholars examining British children’s literature (Dixon, 1977, Leeson, 1977). In their research, the British literary critic Peter Hunt (1992) and the Australian literary critic John Stephens (1992) treat class broadly by analyzing ideology in children’s literature.)
In the 1954 edition of Reading Ladders for Human Relations, economic differences are discussed as a way to expose young readers to a “wide range of economic privilege” (Heaton & Lewis, 1954: 83). The books recommended show how many people live under different economic circumstances and how those class positions will lead the reader to recognize “the handicaps and privileges that exist for particular people in the communities in which students live” (Heaton & Lewis, 1954: 85). Class issues are relegated to the individual and never discussed as system of power.
The next edition (Crosby, 1963) of this reading sourcebook asks adults to consider books that deal with change by sharing the following questions with children: “What does change come from? What does change, in given case, do to people? How do people make changes? What is the role and responsibility of the individual in change?” (Crosby, 1963: 157–158). While these questions remain with the individual, they invite the reader to think about change as it is depicted in children’s literature.
In the fifth edition, change is dealt with more specifically and linked to “changing historical, social, and economic conditions” (Reid, 1972: 262). The editors argue that the books included in this “reading ladder” will remind readers that change is inevitable because “life is not static.” Social change is naturalized in this discussion as something that has a life of its own and that people are not the cause of its instability. The focus here is on how the characters endure change. In the sixth edition, edited by Eileen Tway (1981), economic differences reside with the individual. A complaint is issued that the rich are not depicted in children’s books.
In the guidebook for parents, educators, and librarians, the Council on Interracial Books for Children (1976) examines class relations as values of elitism, materialism, and individualism. The value of conformity is part of this checklist because, as the Council maintains, conformity “discourages readers from questioning whether the ‘usual’ way of doing things is best for all people concerned. It serves to prop up the status quo” (Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1976: 21). In their values matrix, these values co-exist with other values for analysis such as sexism, ageism, and racism. The Council’s work brings these power relations together and attempts to show the complexity of social identities and values.
The Council published two analyses of class issues in children’s literature during the early 1980s. The first, published in 1982, is an investigation of how class and race work together in children’s books about the American Revolution. Joel Taxel conducted the study and found that the books overwhelmingly presented the Revolution from the middle- and upper-class perspective. He comments:
Although several books point out that colonial America provided unprecedented opportunity for personal advancement, they stop short of explicitly pointing out that this greater freedom was restricted to [W]hites, and even then, not to all [W]hites. And, of course, none mention that this “advancement” was achieved at the expense of Native peoples who were either killed or dispossessed.
(Taxel, 1982: 8)
This perspective constructed a false universality of experience, masking the difference in participation and insight among other groups. Jan Goodman’s study, published in 1985, examined a set of books on the U.S. economy and how it works. Her study revealed many distortions and incomplete information about U.S. capitalism in the interest of “indoctrinat[ing] our children with a pro-capitalist view” (Goodman, 1985: 8). These two studies substantiate the claim that children’s literature contributes to the social legend that we live in a classless society, permeated with equal opportunity for all.
One study conducted by Patrick Shannon (1986) analyzed books from The Reading Teacher’s “Children’s Choice” list to see if these books offered individualist, collectivist, or balanced perspectives. He discovered that 29 out of the 30 books examined provided an individualist message, an ideology linked to capitalism, while only one offered a balanced perspective (the protagonist pursued self-development but not at the expense of family and community commitments).
Herbert Kohl’s (1995a, b, & c) critical essays on children’s literature address issues of power, including colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism. He makes a plea for “radical children’s literature,” books that resolve conflict collectively and make visible the forces of power.
The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (Nodelman & Reimer, 2003) is one of the only survey texts often used in the teaching of children’s literature in undergraduate and graduate education (Huck et al., 2001; Norton, 1999; Russell, 2001; Temple et al., 2006; Tomlinson & Lynch-Brown, 2002) that considers class and ideology. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer claim that texts written during the same time and place tend to have shared ideologies. Therefore, if readers know something about the cultural and historical context in which the book was written, they can make the connections to its temporal and cultural contexts. Nodelman and Reimer further maintain: “Readers can develop a better understanding of literature by learning something about the culture or period of history that produced it. They can also develop a better understanding of a culture or period of history by reading the literature it produced” (Nodelman & Reimer, 2003: 152).
The books that Nodelman and Reimer cite are products of British culture, but they pose some critical questions that are relevant to the U.S. context: Which class distinctions are important and how are they portrayed? What are the author’s assumptions about social hierarchy? Is social inequality taken for granted? They also suggest that one way to get at the assumptions of a text is to have readers look at the story from the point of view of the story characters featured from the lower socioeconomic class. Assumptions can also be uncovered if we look at the story from the point of view of the characters of color and the women.
Nina Mikkelsen (2000), in her book, Words and Pictures: Lessons in Children’s Literature and Literacies, addresses ideology in children’s literature. She cites Peter Hollindale’s (1988) work on ideology. Hollindale claims that ideology can explicitly or implicitly be rendered in text, and that language is inherently ideological. Mikkelsen outlines Hollindale’s scholarship and invites the scholar/reader to think further about issues of elitism, authenticity, and censorship.
Diana Mitchell (2003) takes up the power relations of race, class, and gender in her book, Children’s Literature: An Invitation to the World. She offers criteria, which echo the efforts of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, for evaluating the presence of class or socioeconomic bias in children’s books. Many of the criteria deal with stereotypes about working class or poor people. Some of her guiding questions include: “Are middle- and upper-class authority figures shown solving the problems of the working class or poor? Are they seen as successful only if they embrace the values of the middle and upper class? Would the portrayal be hurtful to a child in the working class or living in poverty?” (Mitchell, 2003: 184). Mitchell uses the theoretical construct of power to ground her criteria. These criteria could also be used to examine stereotypes about people of color and women.
More recently, in Interpreting Literature with Children, Shelby A. Wolf (2004) devotes a chapter to issues of culture and class. But the chapter falls short of any structural analysis of cultural and class relations. Culture and class are left with the families in the stories analyzed. Wolf uses a transactional lens for reading books about migrant workers. In transactional criticism, the reader’s lived experience guides her or his response to the text. While Wolf mentions the value of a sociocultural interpretation of the text, that is, analyzing power, she does not take up this position in her chapter. She provides a fixed and stable definition of culture and, while class is shaped by work, the power system of class is overlooked. Intragroup cultural differences are defined as “a range of lifestyles,” which, we argue are constructed by the power relations of class, race, and gender.
The dissertation research by Edward L. Starkenburg (1999) represents the most recent comprehensive examination of class issues in U.S. children’s literature. He uses the class markers of appearance, authority, capacity for making choices, career, housing, knowledge, language, social mobility, money, possessions, and status feelings as analytical tools to identify class representation in five award-winning works of fiction. He locates several silences of the authors, that is, what the authors do not say about social class, which, he concludes, impacts the readers’ understanding of how society is organized and how social class shapes this organization.
Starkenburg finds that authors do not acknowledge that social class exists or take a position on its presence. The sampled authors do not indicate that “life is good regardless of class status” nor that “hard work can mobilize and move people up the hierarchy” (Starkenburg, 1999: 159). The ideology of the American Dream was not central to his text sample, but Starkenburg maintains “our culture still clings to its message” (Starkenburg, 1999: 159). In summing up, Starkenburg claims that these silences translate into the position that social class is unavoidable, shaping people’s lives, with minimal possibilities for overcoming these social circumstances. Overall, the characters go along to get along in a stratified system. These silences perpetuate dominant class ideology.
Starkenburg concedes that while he extracted class from the social triad of class, race, and gender to magnify how class is rendered in text, race and gender were implicated in the texts he analyzed. He strongly recommends further research as essential to our understanding of the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, and classism, research that looks at these power relations together, in order to understand and resist dominant class ideologies.
In contributing to this dialogue, our intent is to invite teachers, librarians, undergraduate and graduate students, teacher educators, and scholars of children’s literature into a process of ideological deconstruction, grounding them in textual analysis that is based on the theoretical perspectives of feminist poststructuralism, critical theory, and cultural studies. They, in turn, can guide children in reading dominant discourses of race, class, and gender, and identify how ideology is rendered in the materials they read and are exposed to. Like Terry Eagleton (1996), we believe that all texts and literary theories are ideological, and that knowing this can be a source of power, enabling readers to identify the processes of their own social shaping. We acknowledge the power of literature to inform and inspire, and we believe that a critical multicultural perspective creates the opportunity and space for young readers to take a socially responsible stance and to be open to ethical decision-making.
In the next chapter, we reclaim the mirror metaphor as a reflection of how language use is a reflection of our society. The discourse of multicultural children’s literature is investigated. We then consider the theoretical constructs that ground critical multicultural analysis. Power is considered against the multi-layered lens of critical multicultural analysis.
We theorize critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature and discuss the theoretical constructs of discourse, ideology, subjectivity, and power because they lead the reader to locate how the power relations of class, race, and gender are exercised in text. We develop a continuum of how power is exercised as a tool for making visible the reading subject positions offered by the text. Lastly, we demonstrate how the multi-layered and recursive nature of critical multicultural analysis works.
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