SONIA NIETO
Professor Emerita University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nancy Larrick’s 1965 groundbreaking article, “The All-White World of Children’s Literature” pointed out what many already knew but were reluctant to voice, that is, that children’s literature was a racist domain. In the context of children’s literature, the emperor had no clothes, and the fiction of a representative children’s literature was laid to rest.
It has been over 40 years since that historic article was first published. Thefield of multicultural children’s literature was born partly as a result of the awareness inspired by that article as well as by demands from within and outside the discipline of children’s literature. It has been a robust and exciting area of study and practice for at least three decades. Because of advocacy on the part of various communities, as well as the nation’s changing demographics, and the publishing industry’s recognition that their bottom line could improve if they were more inclusive, children’s books today reflect a much broader racial and ethnic representation than ever before. But is that all there should be to making children’s literature more inclusive, more socially just, more democratic?
Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman’s Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors represents the next step in the evolution of the field. In their insistence that an analysis of power relations must play a decisive role in how we read children’s literature, they invite readers to think about the interplay of race, class, and gender in books (and, indeed, in life in general). They ask us to think about the context in which children’s books are published, written, disseminated, read, and used in the curriculum. That is, they want us to recognize that the school and library are not islands unto themselves but rather that they exist within a sociopolitical context that is global, national, and local. This context currently includes, on the national and world levels, globalization policies that are leading to increased poverty and deprivation, particularly in developing countries. In those countries, it is a context that is resulting in decreasing opportunities and increasing oppression, and consequently, in greater immigration and, at the same time, in harsher immigration policies, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. It is also a context that includes an undeclared war in which thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed; and a “war on terror” leading to a growing fear of the “Other” in our own nation, a chipping away of our civil rights, and, on an international level, to a greater mistrust of the United States among many other nations in the world. In schools, and, increasingly, in colleges and universities, the context includes rigid accountability structures, the scripting of the curriculum and erosion of faculty rights, and even the imposition of particular teaching methods (for example, at the school level, the exclusive use of phonics) or approaches to research (in schools of education, inflexible conceptions of “scientifically based research”) that make teaching, and especially the teaching of literature to children, almost an impossibility in many schools. This is the context that Botelho and Rudman think about as they ask us to consider using a critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature in our work as teachers and teacher educators.
The critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature presupposes an understanding of this sociopolitical context. In these pages, you will find, for instance, a history of the publishing industry in terms of children’s literature, as well as a history of the representation of people of color in the literature. You will find theoretical discussions of the social constructions of race, class, and gender, and a deconstruction of multiculturalism. You will learn to use various lenses to develop multiple analyses of the same texts, and you will read descriptions and analyses of many children’s books. While theorizing about gender, you will read about the Cinderella story in numerous global contexts; while learning about the controversies and conflicts inherent in the topic of hair, you will find cogent and helpful analyses of children’s books that treat this topic in many different ways. And, at the end of the book, you will find yourself engaged in conversation not just with the authors but also with Junko Yokota, Mingshui Cai, and Patrick Shannon, some of the most significant scholars in the field, as they reflect on the critical teaching of children’s literature. Throughout, you will discover that it is the weaving together of theory and practice that makes this book especially unique and timely.
Children’s literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics. As such, they are of fundamental significance for the Language, Culture, and Teaching Series and a welcome addition to our understanding of children’s literature. Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field. In the process, they invite readers to, in the words of Paulo Freire, read both “the word and the world” (Freire, 1970), that is, to reflect on the words in the text and on their meaning in their lives and in the world so that they can become active agents in the world. Surely all of us—children, teachers, and academics—can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books.