DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208-5
Using language as a mirror, we can begin to understand how power is exercised in the U.S. context. Language use or discourse reflects and circulates dominant ideologies that are responsible for constructing current power relations. Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature focuses on the examination of power as a factor in what gets written, illustrated, and published. In other words, meanings found in children’s books are not from language alone but from institutional practices, power relations and social position. Children’s books mirror these power relations and offer windows into society; critical multicultural analysis magnifies these relationships, naming the institutional and personal location of the discourses from within which we read, the power relations involved, and their implications for social justice.
Poststructuralists and cultural studies theorists maintain that we can only make sense of reality through language (Watkins, 1999). Feminist poststructuralist theories demonstrate how language constructs subjectivity (Davies, 2000; Weedon, 1997). Language is not seen as possessing a fixed, stable meaning, but as possessing significance that is bound by its historical and sociopolitical context. People use language to define and contest the reality they exist in. Language is where and how power is reproduced, distributed and maintained. Oral and written language constitute text to be analyzed and challenged. Meaning is constructed within a complex web of power relations rather than words substituting for objects and actions. These meanings are temporarily fixed. Meaning is constructed and reconstructed through interplay between texts, readers, and contexts. Just like identity, meaning is a process.
When we untangle multiculturalism from “multicultural children’s literature,” it creates a space to question and challenge the text, and re-imagine the social worlds depicted in the book. It is reading that goes beyond stretching children’s cultural imagination to reading that fosters a historical and sociopolitical imagination. Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children’s literature invites readers to deconstruct dominant ideologies of U.S. society which privilege those whose interests, values, and beliefs are represented by these prevailing worldviews. Critical multicultural analysis is reading power within the complex web of social relations.
Critical multicultural analysis disrupts binary thinking, which simplistically examines issues of privilege and power. The binary oppositions of black/white and oppressor/oppressed mask power relations. Binary comparisons can be equated with dominant ideology because it does not show the complexities, contradictions, and shifting aspects of an issue. Rather, they mask and distort. For example, multicultural children’s literature disallows the problematizing of the category of European American (Botelho, 1997a). There is an implied “fictive unity” (Medeiros, 1996) in this cultural label, as if all European Americans share the same history and socioeconomic privileging. Multicultural children’s literature grossly lumps cultural groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans, and Native Americans, and obscures intragroup and intergroup diversity and power relations.
In untangling the discourse of multicultural children’s literature we can analyze how this literary category draws on the “discursive threads” (Rudd, 2000) of otherness and self-esteem. These discursive threads circulate in society and reinforce dominant worldviews, while being “resistant to internal criticism and self-scrutiny since uttering viewpoints that seriously undermine them defines one as being outside them” (Gee, 2001: 2). (It is worth noting that the scholars whose research is linked to the conceptualization of multicultural children’s literature never took up Schwartz’s [1995] critique of multicultural children’s literature as a literary category. It was only recently that Harris and Willis [2003] cited Schwartz’s article in their consideration of the history of multiculturalism and children’s literature. In historicizing developments in multicultural children’s literature, Harris and Willis situate Schwartz’s work within a postcolonial theory and criticism.) The deconstruction of the discursive practices of multicultural children’s literature locates the invisibility and silences inherent in this way of looking at the world of children’s literature, and by extension, U.S. society.
Schwartz (1995) maintains that as long as multicultural children’s literature is about “Otherness,” it will not question the ideological hegemony of the dominant culture and will not interrogate the root causes of White privilege (Ulichny, 1996). (The “Other” is defined as people who are different linguistically, culturally, racially from the dominant White Anglo-Protestant culture.) If literature of the dominant culture is not interrogated, then we are ignoring the power structure that is in place, ensconcing “White privilege” in the perceptions of the reader, and relegating the notion of multiple perspectives to “the Other,” and thus, inadvertently, to a lesser position.
The discourse of “Otherness” implies that identity is fixed and unified, unfolding over time with a stable core in place. Stuart Hall (1996) defines cultural identity as “superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’ which a people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall, 1996: 3–4); it is an unchanged “cultural belongingness.” Implicit in “Otherness” is that culture is bounded and independent from other cultural influences: culture is static. If “Otherness” is critically and multiculturally analyzed, its essentialism is exposed and its sociopolitical construction located.
Identity is a process that is never complete. People are always in the process of becoming. Hall argues that
identities are never unified … increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions … identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are” or “where we came from” so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves.
(Hall, 1996: 4)
Identities are constructed within discourse: like race, they are social constructions, not biologically determined. Critical multicultural analysis creates a space for readers to ask if the subject positions constructed by the discourses imbedded in text are those that they want to be. Identities play a role in how we perceive ourselves sociopolitically.
The author and reader are constituted through the ideological dimensions of discourses circulating in society and text. As Cai (1998) maintains, insider artists can also misrepresent cultural experiences as do outsider authors and illustrators. However, the author’s identity is a central consideration in the debate of what multicultural children’s literature is and is not (Bishop, 1992; Cai, 1998; Cai & Bishop, 1994; Harris, 1993, 1997; Sims, 1982). These scholars argue that insider authors (those who have similar lived experiences as the book characters) are better suited to write about the nuances of their cultural experience. Marta I. Cruz-Janzen (1998) warns that cultural groups are not immune to intragroup power relations; stories can be “replete with biases.”
The issues of cultural authenticity and insider/outsider are intertwined in the discourse of Otherness. We assume that insider artists will bring us closer to a stable and pure culture, which is an essentialist view of culture, obfuscating the fact that texts reflect “the complexities of specific historical moments when many discourses and reading [subject] positions register the complex intersections of actual social practice” (Griffiths, 1994: 80). Implied in authenticity is that the text closely corresponds to a stable cultural reality.
Our findings demonstrate that we cannot discount the cultural membership of the author. The insider authors and illustrators are more versed in or have more access to culturally specific discourses and histories than outsiders to the culture. These writers and artists tend to have a greater understanding of how language is used and how power is exercised within and outside the culture. Class, race, and gender power relations shape this cultural specificity, shaking up the notion of culture as stable and fixed; its dynamic, multiple, and shifting nature is made visible. Many of these writers bring the reader up close to the complexities of culture and its power relations.
We also acknowledge that no person can speak for or represent an entire group. We are all outsiders to a degree, unless we are specifically portraying ourselves. And even then our portrayal is a representation of our lived experience.
In “What is the Author?” Foucault (1984) proposes that the author is tied to institutional systems which shape all discourses at all times in any given culture. The institutional discursive practices are more central to the definition of author rather than the contribution from a particular text, generated by a particular individual from a particular culture. Barthes (1977) maintains, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes, 1977: 147). Focusing solely on the author is adhering to the notion that an individual and/or a culture is the source of the meaning in the book. Looking at a collection of books written by the same author, and trying to get at the discursive threads throughout the books, is a way to see the discourses deployed into this writer’s writings. These discursive threads are linked to social practice and institutions. Foucault (1984) helps us to understand the “author-function” further because he points to our society’s fixation with and fear of the “proliferation of meaning,” that is, we associate single meanings with single texts, without proceeding to acknowledge the reader and the context.
“Self-esteem” is another discursive thread woven into multicultural children’s literature. Just like “Otherness,” the discourse of self-esteem assumes a fixed, unified, and stable self. Diane Hoffmann (1996) claims that many assumptions imbedded in this discourse are cross-culturally plausible. The underlying assumptions include that
- self-esteem is based on a person’s awareness of him or herself as a unique individual with particular abilities, potentials;
- it is directly dependent on so-called individual abilities, qualities, and performances, thus, completely ignoring the existence of different cultural models of learning; and
- the assumption that the self-esteem of minority children in particular requires improvement.
(Hoffmann 1996: 560–561)
The discourse of self-esteem implies that there is an inherent link between dominated cultural status and low self-esteem. This perspective privileges the dominant culture by defining it as the norm, setting it as the standard of high self-esteem toward which underrepresented groups should struggle. While Hoffman’s analysis is flawed by her definitions of culture and identity as fixed and bounded entities, her critique brings attention to this discursive thread’s fixation with the individual, isolated from community, culture, and society, as well as recognizing dominant ideologies as sources of self-esteem. The discourse of self-esteem distracts us from recognizing and resisting the current arrangements of power.
This discourse requires that individuals construct their own edifice of self-esteem, that is, “how we evaluate ourselves and our characteristics” (Kohn, 1994: 273). Joseph Kahne (1996) writes:
Those who emphasize the impact of structural factors on self-esteem judgments are oriented toward asking how social conventions and institutional arrangements affect individuals’ self-esteem. If poverty, sexism, or other factors systematically constrain the self-esteem of whole groups of individuals, and if self-esteem is a goal, then policymakers must find ways to address poverty, homelessness, sexism, and so on. If, on the other hand, improving self-esteem judgments is viewed as a means of promoting “socially desirable” behaviors, then policymakers can focus instead on raising the self-esteem of poor or homeless individuals.
(Kahne, 1996: 10)
The self-esteem discourse is slippery, tied to the dominant ideologies of class, race, gender, and individualism that contribute to the chipping away of self-worth. Alfie Kohn (1994) maintains that “a self-oriented approach may fail to help students believe in themselves because it overlooks the political and economic realities that offer far more meaningful explanations of why some children doubt or even despise themselves” (Kohn, 1994: 277). It does not create a space for individuals to consider how they are historically, socially and discursively shaped.
If we say that literature mirrors society through its text and images, then invisibility in children’s literature requires a closer look. Patricia Alexander (1983) contends, “nonportrayal is much like passing in front of a mirror and seeing only ‘nothingness.’ Indeed, invisibility is a powerful statement of value. The message transmitted may be that as a culture you are of little value within the society—of little consequence” (Alexander, 1083: 212). Invisibility in children’s literature is a quiescent prejudice.
The study of children’s literature must question whose culture gets reflected, or not, and how often. Native Americans are cultural groups of color that are largely represented by the publishing houses (MacCann, 1993). However, they remain stereotypically rendered, many times left behind in historical times. The critical question “Are the non-rendered the lucky ones?” must be considered. As Hall argues, “identities are … constituted within not outside representation” (Hall, 1996: 4). When cultural groups’ stories are published they can then begin to negotiate with publishers, readers, and society how to portray their identities in books.
The issue of invisibility demands cultural specificity, and historical and sociopolitical analysis. The cultural grouping of European Americans, for example, implies a common history and heritage that does not exist. (That can be said about any cultural group.) For example, to understand why there are not any children’s books by or about Portuguese Americans published in the United States, one needs to consider the multiple historical and sociopolitical contexts of the Portuguese experience (United States and the predominantly working-class, immigrant experience; Açores and its agrarian economy; Portugal and its history of colonization; and the European Community). European American as a cultural identity prevents us from disclosing the more subtle socioeconomic and linguistic hegemony that exists in this country (Botelho, 1997a). The “European American” label contributes not only to the invisibility of the Portuguese in U.S. children’s literature, but also to the lack of exposure to many cultural groups’ experiences.
Michel Foucault maintains that “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (Foucault, 1980: 27). Jacques Derrida’s (1980) work further provides insights into absence and silence. For Derrida, the unsaid and the unwritten can be just as important as what is said and written. Bronwyn Davies (1999) maintains that poststructuralist theory tries to locate these silences and examine “what work it is that they are doing” (Davies, 1999: 16).
In addition to the discursive threads of otherness and self-esteem, and the issue of invisibility, the literary category of multicultural children’s literature distracts us from focusing on two social silences—how class and gender work with race. (As a society, we have many silences around issues such as ageism, heterosexism, and ableism, to name a few. While we acknowledge that these power relations intersect with class, race, and gender, they are beyond the scope of this book.) It is easier to focus on a bounded, fixed, and stable notion of culture because it is something we all agree we all possess, whereas social privilege based on gender-, class-, and race-based memberships is not something we can say we all have.
The interrogation of class alongside race and gender is a direct attack on U.S. power relations. George Lipsitz (1997) argues that
by reinforcing ideologies that see social existence as primarily private and personal, our teaching discourages social theory …. This way of knowing about the world is a deficient approach … it is particularly inadequate for understanding social relations and the connections that link individual lives to broad social structures.
(Lipsitz, 1997: 11)
Untangling multiculturalism from multicultural children’s literature demands the study of social class, race, and gender as elements in text construction. (In her teaching experiences, Maria José has found that teachers and students have difficulty articulating and analyzing experiences and perspectives, especially defined by social class and race.) A critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature offers opportunities to identify vocabularies to expose the historical and sociopolitical dimensions of these power relations as they are constructed in the text.
Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature foregrounds that race, gender, class, culture, and otherness are socially constructed and must be contested in efforts to create reading spaces that move against and beyond traditional sociopolitical boundaries, at the same time, mounting social critique for social change. Young and adult readers should know that unless they are able to read for social change and justice, they will find themselves affirming and maintaining dominant ideologies that privilege some groups over others. Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children’s literature invites the reader to deconstruct dominant ideologies that have been instrumental in perpetuating social inequities and distributing power unequally in the United States. The discourses of class, gender, and race work together.
Contradiction, construction and practice frame critical multicultural analysis (Parker, 1999). By contradictions, we focus on what different meanings are at work in the text. We locate the contradictions and link them to dominant ideologies or social myths, recover dominated meanings, and highlight processes of domination, collusion, resistance, and agency. By examining the construction of texts, we ask how these meanings are constructed. We attempt to retrace how texts have been socially constructed. Finally, in critical multicultural analysis, we are concerned with what these contradictory systems of meaning are doing to us as people and as a society: we focus on the sociopolitical function of texts and issues of power.
People are defined in relationship to other people because discourses are always defined in relationship to other discourses. Critical multicultural analysis situates language in social and political contexts, as well as taking into account how authors and readers collude with or challenge dominant ideologies. In the process of critical multicultural reading, power is located and a site is created for social justice and social transformation. Critical multicultural analysis can contribute to our deconstructing and reconstructing ourselves and society. It focuses on how language in books works to position readers in particular power relations. The theoretical constructs of discourse, ideology, subjectivity, and power ground critical multicultural analysis and offer tools for uncovering dominant messages in children’s books by locating how the power relations of class, race, and gender are exercised in text and images.
James Paul Gee (2001) defines discourse as a social practice comprised of ways of being in the world. Discourse is “a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’ ” (Gee, 2001: 1). The distinction between discourses and texts is that discourses are worldviews or ideologies, whereas texts, oral or written, contain discourses. Gee (2001) highlights several points that are crucial to understanding discourse:
- Discourses are inherently “ideological.”
- Discourses are resistant to internal criticism and self-scrutiny since uttering viewpoints that seriously undermine them defines one as being outside them.
- Discourse-defined positions from which to speak and behave are not, however, just defined internal to a discourse, but also as standpoints taken up by the discourse in its relation to other, ultimately opposing, discourses.
- Any discourse concerns itself with certain objects and puts forward certain concepts, viewpoints and values at the expense of others.
- Discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society. Control over certain discourses can lead to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status) in a society.
(Gee, 2001: 2)
Consequently, discourses that translate into the acquisition of social goods and power are “dominant discourses” and groups who use them with great facility are “dominant groups.” How we come to these discourses throughout our lives is through a combination of acquisition (acquiring through exposure, imitation, and trial and error) and learning (learning through teaching). Gee offers a caveat: “We are better at what we acquire, but we consciously know more about what we have learned” (Gee, 2001: 4). Critical multicultural analysis makes the reader conscious of dominant discourses. Gee’s (1999) definition of the little “d” discourse deals with the specific details about language, showing how language use becomes social and political practices with material consequences.
David Rudd’s (2000) analytical tool of discursive threads is central to critical multicultural analysis as a way to uncover how texts draw on discourses in society. Rudd sums up the usefulness of discursive threads as follows:
Through a critical multicultural lens, the study of literature becomes a study of discursive practices and the political and social ramifications underlying them. How do we recognize ideology, the conduit of power, in children’s books? Peter Hollindale’s (1988) and John Stephens’ (1992, 1994 a & b; 1999) scholarship in ideological critique of children’s literature offers guidance. Stephens applies critical analysis to children’s books; he constructs a strong theoretical grounding that includes children as people who are invited to conduct critical textual analysis. He elevates children’s literature to a position worthy of study and analysis by situating it in the landscape of critical literary theory.
Discourse is inherently imbued with ideology: Ideology is inseparable from discourse and discourse is constituted from ideology. Stephens asserts that “the discourses of children’s fiction are pervaded by ideological presuppositions, sometimes obtrusively and sometimes invisibly” (Stephens, 1992: 1–2). He further states that “the discourse of a narrative fiction yields up both a story and a significance” (Stephens, 1992: 2). Ideology is imbedded in both. Stephens states that the “… story comprises what we might roughly think of as what certain characters do in a certain place at a certain time, and discourse comprises the complex process of encoding that story which involves choices of vocabulary, of syntax, or order of presentation, of how the narrating voice is to be oriented towards what is narrated and towards the implied audience” (Stephens, 1992: 17). He further argues that the significance inferred from the text, “its theme, moral, insight into behaviour, is never without an ideological dimension or connotation” (Stephens, 1992: 2). Since these implicit messages or ideologies can shape readers’ attitudes and worldviews, it is imperative that readers read resistantly.
Hollindale (1988) identifies three aspects of ideology: It can be deliberately or implicitly rendered in the text, and is inherently ideological. First, the most tractable ideology discloses the writer’s explicit social, political or moral beliefs. Books that openly promote socially progressive messages are part of this category. Hollindale suggests that overt ideological representations pose problems for the writer: explicit advocacy tends to incite reader resistance to the message(s). Therefore, the more covert or implicit ideology is, the more interpretatively demanding it is for the reader.
Hollindale’s second category is “passive ideology.” This ideology is the implicit representation of the writer’s unexamined assumptions. Hollindale argues that these hidden messages demand a critical analysis from the adroit reader. This passive ideology is the taken-for-granted values of society: that is, what people perceive as the “norm.” These values permeate the text. Stephens (1992) maintains that the implicit ideology of children’s literature has been clouded by discussions and controversies about the concept of the implied reader—largely created by the text’s own narrative construction such as point of view.
Lastly, Hollindale maintains that ideology is inherent within language, while he defines ideology as “the words, the rule-systems, the codes which constitute the text” (Hollindale, 1998: 14). He argues that ideology in language works to contain conflicts and to confine meaning making to the attitudes and interests of dominant social groups.
The author and reader are constituted through the ideological dimensions of discourses circulating in society and text. Stephens invites us to look at the interactions among the characters in the stories in terms of their reception of each other’s messages, and in so doing, he asks us to look at ourselves as readers. He invites the reader to contemplate “the Implied Author/Implied Reader pair as a construction within texts which has little, if any, narrative function, but which operates principally as the bearer of implicit social practices and ideological positions” (Stephens, 1992: 21). Ideology is not all coercive. We need ideologies that are in the interest of all people and which advocate for the equitable re/distribution of resources. We must consider the ideologies that are compatible with a democratic society.
Feminist poststructuralism theorizes that subjectivity is socially and discursively constructed, rather than being innate or natural. Chris Weedon (1997) defines subjectivity as “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of individuals, their sense of self, and their ways of understanding their relations to the world” (Weedon, 1997: 32). An individual’s subjectivity is not simply an identity, but one’s sense of self that is always in flux, responding to the discourses available to one in a specific historical, sociopolitical context. Language, a signifying system, contributes to this process. By examining the ideological dimensions of a text, the reader can become aware of the subject positions it creates.
Stephens recommends analyses that consider the wide array of meaning systems within children’s books such as the visual and textual features, issues of focalization or perception (Who sees?), as well as the unity of the text (e.g., spatio-temporal representation, point of view, intertextuality, and sense of closure). He claims that narrative structure, and especially closure, is an ideologically powerful component of texts, since aesthetic completeness and the sense of an appropriate story ending spill over into affirmations of the discourse’s thematic conclusions. But an open ending can still be ideologically powerful by evoking particular values and assumptions by its very evasion of them (Stephens, 1992: 44).
The reader is best equipped when multiple reading strategies are available, including “an interrogative engagement with the implied reader” (Stephens, 1992: 69–70), the “implied reader” being the reader’s role implicit in the text, which is linked to the dominant discourses. Stephens claims that texts create estranged or distanced subject positions when the following textual constructions are present: multiple protagonists are present; the main character misunderstands a situation; character development shifts over time; the text is playfully self-conscious (Stephens, 1992: 70).
Readers are often constructed intertextually, that is, out of a dialogue between the literary text and other literary and nonliterary texts. Discourses make available particular subject positions. Readers can resist the position constructed by the text and create alternative or resistant reading positions that support more collective values or worldviews. For example, they can interrupt reading subject positions that privilege some people over others based on race, class, and gender, and speculate on new ways to enact power relations that are socially just.
Power is an important element in any critical multicultural examination of text. Foucault (1972) maintains that power is exercised and not owned, with power circulating within what he calls fields of discourse, which he defines as the relationship among language and social institutions, subjectivity, and power. Foucault is important to our work because, as he argues, we create discourses as much as they create us. It is within this discursive grid that we learn about how we may or may not access power, how to exercise this power as well as how power is exercised on us. Foucault’s work foregrounds language and power and how it positions people.
Foucault explores power relationships that are involved in constructing reality. He argues that the following questions must be asked:
Who exercises power? How? On whom? Who makes decisions for me? Who is preventing me from doing this and telling me to do that? Who is programming my movements and activities? Who is forcing me to live in a particular place when I work in another? How are these decisions on which my life is completely articulated taken?
(Foucault, 1995: 41)
Foucault maintains that the question of “who exercises power?” is not “resolved unless the other question ‘how does it happen?’ is resolved at the same time” (p. 42). He asserts that even if you come to know who the decision-makers are, you still do not know how power was exercised. Michel Bakhtin’s (1981) perspective about language is useful here because users of language exercise agency with each utterance as they appropriate their intention in the words they use.
Bakhtin views language as heteroglossia (many languages), a site of ideological struggle. He states that “the word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it for his own semantic and expressive intention” (Bakhtin, 1981: 294). At the center of critical multicultural analysis, we must ask what cultural statements author and illustrator are responding to. Texts and images are sites of sociopolitical struggle.
Bakhtin situates the person within a larger dialogical and ideological world. Within this world the self is constructed through dialogic relationships. While engaged in these dialogic relationships we borrow each other’s words, using them to inform and drive our own thinking and learning. According to Bakhtin (1981), these relationships are mediated by language as we engage with texts, whether these are oral or written.
Critical multicultural analysis is the “discursive leveling of texts,” a way of placing books in the total discursive field (Rudd, 1999), that is, placing children’s literature alongside literary and cultural criticism, and other secondary sources, because discourses circulate everywhere, including in book reviews, research, theory, pedagogy, and the like. Therefore, what books “do” in the world cannot be explicated through text analysis only (Pennycook, 2000; Reese, 2000). Critical multicultural analysis of children’s books makes sense of literature against a broader historical, sociopolitical context and the discursive landscape.
Race, class, and gender are situated in discourse. They are inseparable from discourse and power. Ann Louise Keating (1995) argues that racial categories must be historicized to ascertain the relational processes of all racialized identities. She outlines four reasons for grounding race in history:
- our conceptions of “race” are scientifically and historically inaccurate;
- constant references to “race” perpetuate the belief in separate peoples, monolithic identities, and stereotypes;
- racial discourse quickly degenerates into a “black/white” polarization that overlooks other so-called “races” and ignores the incredible diversity among people; and,
- racial categories are not—and never have been—benign. Racial divisions were developed to create a hierarchy that grants privilege and power to specific groups of people while simultaneously oppressing and excluding others.
(Keating, 1995: 916)
Finally, she states that “at the very least, we should complicate existing conceptions of ‘race’—both by exploring the many changes that have occurred in all apparently fixed racial categories and by informing students of the political, economic, and historical factors shaping the continual reinvention of ‘race’ ” (Keating, 1995: 917). Race, class, and gender are ideologically and materially bound.
Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres (1999) argue that the study of race ignores the influences of capitalism, a class-based system. They write that “racism is an ideology that produces the notion of ‘race’ not the existence of ‘races’ that produce racism” (p. 186). They argue that just examining race “leads us further down a theoretical and political dead end” (Darder & Torres, 1999: 186). They advocate for a “plural conceptualization of ‘racisms’ and their historical articulations with other ideologies” (Darder & Torres, 1999: 185). This kind of theorizing challenges the black/ white paradigm and demands historical specificity, thus exposing “the historically shifting and politically complex nature of racialization” (Darder & Torres, 1999: 186). They contend that the social problems experienced by racialized communities are not about “ ‘race’ but rather about the intricate interplay between a variety of racisms and class” (Darder & Torres, 1999: 186). Darder and Torres propose that an analysis of these complex power relations will bear “a multiplicity of ideological constructions of the racialized Other” (Darder & Torres, 1999: 187). Thus “shattering the race lens” unsettles essentialist, unified, and ahistorical perceptions of power.
Power is an under-explored theoretical and social construct. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’ (2002) work is instructive here. Building on Foucault’s concept of power, they propose “a political race project.” Political race highlights the central role race has in constructing social identities, processes, and structures, while infusing the concept of political race with power, which the authors claim, is missing from the current dialogue. Guinier and Torres contend that race works alongside class and gender. They add the term “political” to signal the collective interaction at the individual, group, and institutional levels. This shift is an attempt to reframe and situate conversations about race within historical and sociopolitical power relations. Linking race to power reveals that “the distribution of resources in this society is racialized and that this racial hierarchy is then normalized and thereby made invisible” (Guinier & Torres, 2002: 15).
People in U.S. society are racialized. Guinier and Torres invite us to think about race as a verb. As a verb, race captures the social processes by which people become raced in multiple ways, times, and across contexts. Those closest to these experiences along with their allies, they argue, should be the ones to guide the political race project. They add: “Race is instructive in identifying the workings of class, but it cannot be swallowed up into class” (Guinier & Torres, 2002: 49). Our charge is to explore how these power relations intersect.
Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV’s claim that “race, unlike gender and class, remains untheorized” (Ladson-Billings & Tate IV, 1995: 49). We contend that the complexities of race power relations remain untheorized, with class and gender implicated in these social processes, as power relations that work together.
While Marxist analysis highlights the workings of class through sociohistorical, dialectical analysis, foregrounding contradictions and conflicts, it also generalizes race relations and White privilege (Ladson-Billings and Tate IV, 1995). Marxist scholarship can be overdeterministic, with domination perceived as inevitable: Power is constituted as domination and alienation, which are passive subject positions.
As stated earlier, education and social science research tend to focus on the “positives” of diversity and/or conflate race with ethnicity and class. Reading race alone, class alone, or gender alone does not reveal how power is exercised. We agree with Ladson-Billings and Tate IV that we must keep in mind the impact of race on gender and social class. They propose untangling democracy and capitalism because, they claim, “traditional civil rights approaches to solving inequality have depended on the ‘rightness’ of democracy while ignoring the structural inequality of capitalism” (Ladson-Billings & Tate IV, 1995: 52). U.S. democracy was founded on capitalism.
Race, gender, and class are social constructions that establish sociopolitical and economic hierarchies or power relations among people. Children’s literature is a microcosm of these ideologies. The construct of race was/is used to divide people into groups on the basis of particular hereditary characteristics. Gender was/is used to divide women and men in complex ways to confer different degrees of social power. Race and gender are socially constructed differences, not biologically based. Class is also socially made. Class was/is used to confer different degrees of power and opportunity based on people’s birth, wealth, occupations, education, social networks, and social position. In the United States, we hold to the romantic belief that success and failure in life are determined by individual factors rather than sociopolitical circumstances. Roxana Ng (2003) defines class as “a process whereby people’s lives are organized and transformed in terms of the relation and means of production. Although this transformation hinges on economic relations in a capitalist society, it is not simply an economic relation” (p. 211). The social processes of race, gender, and class converge in everyday life and “(re)organize” our lives. Ng proposes that class locates this (re)organization.
These social processes of race, gender, and class happen within discourses and are relational and context dependent. They emerge in microinteractions. The power relations of race, class, and gender are complex because they are historical, sociopolitical, multiple, contradictory, fragmented, and intersect; implicate the nexus of the language/power relations because they are ideological, discursive, and interdiscursive (draw on each others’ discourses); and, are social processes because they are exercised, negotiated, circulated, transformed, fluid, porous, relational and generative. Power is exercised and generated in relation to race, class, and gender. Power is dynamic.
Guinier and Torres (2002) reject the inevitability of domination and speak to the generativity of human agency. Power is constituted in discourse and rendered natural or “that is the way things are” in texts. By looking at how language use creates power subject positions, “the focus is on the way in which the discursive practices constitute the speakers and hearers in certain ways and yet at the same time is a resource through which speakers and hearers can negotiate new positions” (Davies & Harré, 1990). We must rethink power to disrupt it in children’s literature, and by extension, in U.S. society. Maria José’s teaching and research have led us to the following understandings:
Reading class, race, and gender we become more aware of these social processes and see how dominant discourses figure in these social ways, in social structures, and social change. Taking responsibility for our everyday interactions we become aware of how discourses position us in society, and how we are implicated in their circulation.
Antonio Gramsci’s (1988/2000) notion of hegemony, dominant groups’ over others, is largely maintained by controlling society’s beliefs and practices through the media it controls. Hegemony happens through ideas. Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature is a way to understand the workings of hegemonic relations, as well as considering ways of resisting dominant messages.
Critical multicultural analysis is reading power and exposing how power is exercised, circulated, negotiated, and reconstructed. Children’s books are windows into society and the complexities of the power relations of class, race, and gender. Critical multiculturalism underpins this kind of analysis because it respects diversity and uses it as a resource for learning, by going beyond affirmation to solidarity and critique (Nieto & Bode, 2008), and by examining hegemony and issues of social power.
Critical multicultural analysis is about opening a space for agency as readers make sense of texts. This space is where social constructions are challenged and new ways of being and organizing society are actively constructed and reconstructed. Our challenge as readers is not to reproduce dominant readings but to interrupt them. Many scholars (Collins, 2000; Darder & Torres, 1999; Goode & Maskovsky, 2001; Guinier & Torres, 2002; hooks, 2000; Ortner, 1991 & 1998; Perrucci & Wysong, 2003) argue that class analysis must be integrated into the critical dialogue on race and gender, especially since class helps us to understand the deeper dimensions of racism and sexism. For example, Rosaura Sánchez (1992) argues for looking at ethnicity, gender, and class together in Chicano/a literature because these discourses are “a dialogue with a number of texts in Chicano literature, with critical theory, and with Chicano history” (Sánchez, 1992: 73). She continues: “one of the salient characteristics of Chicano literature is its dialogue with history and its focus on collective subjectivity” (Sánchez, 1992: 73).
Building on Foucault’s (1972, 1980) understanding of discourse (a way of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic or practice), knowledge, and power, we have identified four positions, which we believe form a continuum of how power is exercised (see Appendix C). In our critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature, the positions that characters assume lie on a continuum from domination to agency. This continuum exists because of structural power inequities: We live in raced, classed, and gendered hierarchical arrangements in the U.S. society. It is important to note that power exercised in dominated and/or collusive ways is coercive in constitution. There is an assumption that there is “zero-sum power” (Guinier & Torres, 2002), that is, when one person or group has more power, there is less for everyone else. Power exercised from collusion to agency is constitutively collaborative. Collaborative power is not fixed or inevitable, but something that is created in social interactions, between or among people. Jim Cummins’ (2003) discussion on coercive and collaborative microinteractions between teachers and English language learners is useful to understanding these power relations.
Domination11, collusion, resistance, and agency are historical and sociopolitical possibilities available for selfhood, for being in the world. Discourses translate these social positions into the text and make available particular reading subject positions. These patterns of power relations are not fixed but fluctuate over time, depending on particular contexts and interactions among people. Our goal as readers is not to freeze or isolate these positions, but to demonstrate their fluidity by examining the social processes of power in texts and demonstrate how these positions are constructed. There are multiple and contradictory discourses within each position, especially the subject positions of collusion and resistance. With any of these positions, with the recognition that there is a power matrix or how it works, people may help themselves move along the continuum to agency. When people become aware of their power, they can share their privilege for social change. Critical multicultural analysis focuses on the processes of gaining power, instead of keeping static power relations. It assumes that human agents are responsible for how power is exercised and circulated, as well as functions as a tool for examining discourse in the text.
The first position in the continuum is that of domination. It is the exercise of power over social circumstances. This position’s attributes include dehumanization, victimization, imposition from external sources, and unequal power based on race, class, and gender. Sometimes, the domination occurs de facto because of existing social constructs and systems. Sometimes, it is interpersonal and used to manipulate the behavior of the particular individuals. It is always dehumanizing: unequal voice, participation, decision-making, and access.
The second position is collusion. This position differs from domination, mostly in the characteristic of internalized oppression or domination. Collusion may be conscious or unconscious. Colluders remain silent even when they have knowledge of wrongdoing. Towards the end of the continuum of collusion, colluders become conscious of their power to take action, while conspiring with dominant ideologies to gain power to resist and gain agency. Domination and collusion can be conscious and/or unconscious. Resistance and agency must be conscious.
Resistance is active questioning; it is the quintessential power construct of poststructuralism. It is not haphazard nor purely reactive. It is an unwillingness to be universalized and essentialized. It is by definition oppositional to imposition and coercive power. It is speculative. It challenges discourses, or as Bronwyn Davies claims, resistance is the “shaking up” by new discourses.
Agency is initiation and power. Agency ideally resides with all classes, genders, and ethnicities. Agency is all-inclusive and complex. An agent can be an agent as well as another subject position. Being able to read multiple discourses is part of agency, as well as holding contradictory discourses. Agency is understanding; it is the ultimate subjectivity. Bronwyn Davies (2000) maintains that “agency is never freedom from discursive constitution or [constructedness] of self but the capacity to recognize that constitution and to resist, subvert, and change the discourses themselves through which one is being constituted” (Davies, 2000: 67). Davies argues that agency lies in knowing the composition of discourse and a shift in consciousness “through imagining not what is, but what might be” (Davies, 2000: 67). Everyone possesses and participates in multiple subject positions.
Self-reflexivity is when readers become aware of their constituted subjectivities and the subject positions offered by texts. This kind of reflexivity challenges discursive practices responsible for maintaining and perpetuating the power relations of class, race, and gender. Davies argues that agency lies in knowing the “constructedness” of discourse.
How people perceive their place in the world influences how they act in the world (Freire, 1970/1985; Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutierrez, 2003). Subjectivity is a process of becoming. Social transformation can only occur when people develop a critical consciousness of power relations and possibilities for changing or undoing oppressive ways of social organization. Critical multicultural analysis provides a site for deconstruction and reconstruction. This space offers readers cognitive flexibility in how they perceive the world, by questioning and theorizing, and taking up collectively minded worldviews. It is reading toward a sociopolitical imagination and social change.
Critical multicultural analysis is a multi-layered lens (see Appendix D) that is focused and refocused through a recursive process of analysis. At the center of this lens is the focalization of the story (Whose story is this? From what point of view? Who sees? Who is observed?). We analyze the characters’ language use and its role in the social processes among the characters, considering that language use constitutes discourses, ideologies, and subject positions; the characters’ social processes relate to U.S. power relations of class, gender, and race. The focalization(s) of the text offers particular reading subject positions, linked to class/race/gender discourses and ideologies. After examining the point of view of these texts, the social processes of the characters are considered (How is power exercised? Who has agency? Who resists and challenges domination and collusion? Who speaks and who is silenced? Who acts? And who is acted upon? Who waits? What reading subject positions are offered by these texts?). The end or closure of these texts will be the next layer of analysis (How did the writer close the story? What are the assumptions imbedded in this closure? Is the ending ideologically open or closed?). Critical multicultural analysis requires examination of the historical, sociopolitical, and discursive forces that have constructed these texts.
We draw on Norman Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional process of discourse analysis: Any discursive “event” (i.e., any instance of discourse) is seen as being simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice. Discursive practices construct social processes or power relationships between people, as well as contribute to maintaining raced, gendered, and classed power relations or structures. Discursive practice contributes to reproducing society, that is, social identities, social processes, and knowledge/power structures, as well as transforming power relations. Discursive practice draws on conventions. We are interested in how race, class, and gender ideologies draw on each other—intertextuality (texts draw on other literary and non-literary texts) and interdiscursivity (discourses drawing on other discourses). Fairclough states: “it is the nature of the social practice that determines the macroprocesses of discursive practice, and it is the micro-processes that shape the text” (Fairclough, 1992: 86).
We record and analyze the “instances of discourse” (Fairclough, 1992) among characters. The units of analysis are determined by a shift in language use due to time, place, character, event, or perspective changes. We discern how discursive practices or language use shapes social processes or relations by enacting the subject positions of dominator, colluder, resister, and/or agent. The microanalyses demonstrate how characters exercise power along a continuum of domination, collusion, resistance, and agency in representative texts.
We selected representative or key texts across many genres to explicate the emerging cultural themes of a text collection. In locating cultural themes, topics that run through these stories and interactions, we make visible how words live among other words, and how these word associations are implicated in how society is organized. Words possess histories and worldviews.
The categories that guide our analysis are: focalization, social function, class/race/gender ideology, and reading subject positions of domination, collusion, resistance, and agency. The last category is what the discourse is doing to social processes among the characters.
Since most of the books in our analyses are picture books, historical and realistic fiction, fairy tales, and nonfiction narratives, we closely examine how these genres position the characters and the reader; what subject positions are offered by each genre; and, how these genres organize the reader’s perceptions of reality by managing ideology. In many ways, genre is the material representation of ideology. Our analyses locate some of the historical, sociopolitical, and discursive influences upon these genres.
Critical multicultural analysis examines texts against a sociopolitical lens. What cultural statements (in literary and nonliterary texts) is this book responding to? (Myers, 1988) What dominant messages about race, gender, and class are imbedded in the book reviews, research, and other literature about these books? What is the sociopolitical context of the cultural theme present in the text?
The lens widens to look at texts historically (What are some historical developments of the cultural theme?). Since the texts are social transcripts of U.S. power relations, the following questions are considered: What are the prevailing dominant ideologies about class, race, and gender translated in the texts? In what ways does the discourse of the American Dream prevail? The multi-layers of critical multicultural analysis are immersed in the discourses of race, class, and gender. These layers of analysis make visible the subject positions offered by each text.
The next step is the “discursive leveling of texts,” a way of placing books in the discursive field (Rudd, 1999); that is, placing children’s literature alongside literary and cultural criticism, and other secondary sources, because discourse circulates everywhere, including in book reviews, research, theory, pedagogy, and the like. A critical multicultural perspective places children’s literature into the discursive field. David Rudd’s (1999) discourse analysis of Enid Blyton’s books is instructive. Critics deem Blyton’s books sexist, for example. Rudd argues that by simply labeling this body of literature sexist, we fail to see how the other discourses have their hold on this power relation, overlooking the dynamics of this particular discourse. Rudd’s analysis demonstrates that Blyton’s books explore sexism, and in some cases, challenge it. By focusing on the textuality of children’s literature, critical multicultural analysis discloses how discourses are layered in the construction of the text.
Like Allan Luke (2002), we advocate for a critical multicultural analysis that “move[s] back and forth from analysis of text to analysis of social formation and institution, then, the text can only be made sense out of if we have sufficiently theorized power, political relations, material and historical change, and the social institutions under scrutiny … theorized reading of the social world” (Luke, 2002: 5). The reading subject position offered by a critical multicultural analysis is constructed intertextually, by reading the narrative against particular literary and nonliterary texts, and generic expectations. Through these dialogic strategies, the reader challenges the ideologically raced, classed, and/or gendered text, exposing the processes whereby race, class, and gender are constructed and rendered natural in texts, and enabling alternative subject positions. Thus, the meaning of the text lies within the spaces between or among texts (Bakhtin, 1981) in interaction with the reader.