The Case of Children’s Literature: colonial or anti-colonial?

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children’s literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children’s books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose’s rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children’s literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children’s texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures. The case of Jacqueline Rose’s influence on children’s literature scholarship is an instructive one, demonstrating how ideas and language circulate within scholarly fields and how they come to be regarded as ‘true’. In this article I consider Rose’s references to and deployment of concepts of colonialism and colonisation in her influential book The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (1984).[1] In my 2001 study Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian children’s literature, and later in Unsettling Narratives: postcolonial readings of children’s literature (2007), I grappled with Rose’s influence on discourses of colonisation in children’s literature research. In this article I build on my earlier work, extending it by considering the ethical questions which arise when scholars use terms such as ‘colonised’ to apply to non-Indigenous child populations. In the second section of the article I consider some of the strategies whereby Indigenous authorillustrators engage in strategies of decolonisation in alphabet books addressed to very young readers. These strategies, in my view, constitute a powerful counterbalance to the shallow and unreflective approaches to colonisation which have haunted children’s literature scholarship. When The Case of Peter Pan was published in 1984 it immediately attracted the attention of scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States, setting off a flurry of reviews and responses.[2] During the three decades since its publication, The Case of Peter Pan has frequently been cited in children’s literature scholarship, to the extent that it would be difficult to find a discussion of conceptions of childhood or about the field of children’s literature which did not refer to Rose’s work. The book’s continuing influence is evident in the fact that in 2010 the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly published a special issue, ‘The (Im)Possibility of Children’s Fiction: Rose twenty-five years on’. Most citations from The Case of Peter Pan do not engage closely with the book’s arguments, but assume a priori that a quotation from Rose represents an ineluctable truth. Thus, Roderick McGillis says: ‘As Jacqueline Rose and others have noted, children are colonial subjects’ (1999, p. xxvii). The implication here is that it is enough to refer to Rose (and unnamed others) to justify the contentious claim ‘children are colonial subjects’. Another approach used by children’s literature scholars is to treat what Rose has said as a rule to which specific texts might be