ABSTRACT
The critical reevaluation of the book began in the 1930s, but intensified in the 1960s with the rise of African-American studies. So it is perhaps surprising that Sambo would reappear in two revised versions almost one hundred years after its initial publication. Can the appearance of Julius Lester's Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo, illustrated by Jen-y Pinkney (1996), or Fred Marcellino's illustrations to The Story of Little Babaji (1996), which reuses the majority of Bannerman's text with minor name changes to the characters, counteract the racist reputation of Bannerman's colonialist text? Are these books revisions, or simply reviving and reintroducing the late-nineteenth-century racial stereotypes imbedded in Bannerman's text for a new generation of readers, or are they postmodem adaptations that successfully sidestep the cultural history of the original? The note in Marcellino's The St01Y of Little Babaji argues that this version is postcolonial, rather than colonial in that the setting is now clearly India and the characters are provided with "authentic Indian names" (The St01yof Little Babaji np). Lester's Sam and the Tigers, which the author calls a new telling, rather than a retelling, of Sambo occurs in a fantasy world called Sam-sam-sa-mara where everyone is named Sam. Is this new telling of Bannerman's story a postmodem adaptation that humorously mixes the past with the present; is it equivalent to the ironic reworking of European folk tales such as Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith's The True Story of 3 Little Pigs (1989) or Scieszka's The Fmg Prince Continued (1991)? As AflicanAmerican author and illustrator, can Lester and Pinkney reclaim and rename Sambo as Sam and thus produce an authentic African-American hero from Bannerman's colonial text written at the height of English imperialism by a woman who was an active participant in the English expansion into India and whose work has subsequently been criticized as being derogatory to Africans and Aflican Ameticans? The postmodem tendency to take a detached, distOlted view of history IUns counter to the postcolonial impulse to confront and clitique history in these two new versions.
