Introduction

This chapter aims to analyze, from a postcolonial perspective, a variety of contemporary texts written, adapted, or marketed expressly for Spanish-speaking children to explore how the effects of a traumatic colonial experience are re-presented and re-described to Latin American children. It explores a range of strategies for postcolonial resistance, negotiation, and accommodation as these play out in a selection of children's literature from the region. The first task of postcolonial studies as a field has been to unmask and deconstruct the naturalized and implicit assumptions that derive from centuries of colonial thinking and logic. The first and hardest assumption to dismantle is the entrenched belief that civilization, modernity, and progress are the patrimony of Europe. With the independence movements of the nineteenth century, two conflicting ideological impulses became evident in the region's literary production, all responding to centuries of colonial domination and the logic of coloniality. The chapter also presents an overview of this book.