ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one hand how children's literature criticism has engaged with post-colonial theory, and on the other with how post-colonial criticism has dealt with the figure of the child in Kipling's work. It explores how the figure of the child in Kipling's Mowgli' stories can by contrast be read as potentially destabilizing putative certainties around species and race, not because of the inherently unstable character of childhood but rather because of its structural challenge to adult unitary' identity. Clare Bradford's remarks are suggestive of the way that the concept of the child', especially as applied to the colonized subject, may have unlooked for and potentially destabilizing implications in figurations of colonial ventures. The act of colonization then, in Nodelman's formulation, is intrinsically linked, as noted by Bradford, to a question of voice', or of speaking for' or in the place of the other.
