ABSTRACT
It has become a standard gesture in criticism of children’s literature to acknowledge the peculiar designation of this literature by its targeted audience rather than by its creators. Written for children by adults, children’s literature is built on the assumption that children are an identifiable group that requires a particular kind of text written for it by a superior group; it assumes, as Perry Nodelman has argued, the sort of ontological and epistemological distinctions between children and adults that Edward Said finds in the orientalist “style of thought” between “the Orient” and “the Occident” (Said 2). In this sense, children’s literature as a whole is usefully understood as a colonial text. But, when we turn to texts specifically produced for children of the colonizers by adult colonizers, the simple analogy between the child and the racialized other begins to break down. For, while as children’s literature such texts instantiate the difference between the child and the adult, as imperialist texts they produce, at the same time, the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental in such a way as to include the targeted child audience within the privileged racialized group.
