Neo-Imperialism in Children's Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction

by Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Donnarae MacCann

Overview

In the spirit of their last collaboration, Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985-1995, Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann once again come together to expose the neo-imperialist overtones of contemporary children's fiction about Africa. Examining the portrayal of African social customs, religious philosophies, and political structures in fiction for young people, Maddy and MacCann reveal the Western biases that often infuse stories by well-known Western authors.

In the book's introductory section, Maddy and MacCann offer historical information concerning Western notions of Africa as "primitive," and then present background information about the complexity of feminism in Africa and about the ongoing institutionalization of racism. The main body of the study contains critiques of the novels or short stories of eleven well-known writers, including Isabel Allende and Nancy Farmer—all demonstrating that children's literature continues to mis-represent conditions and social relations in Africa. The study concludes with a look at those short stories of Beverley Naidoo which bring insight and historical accuracy to South African conflicts and emerging solutions. Educators, literature professors, publishers, professors of Diaspora and African studies, and students of the mass media will find Maddy and MacCann’s critique of racism in the representation of Africa to be indispensible to students of multicultural literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415809092
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/15/2011
Series:	Children's Literature and Culture
Pages:	190
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yulisa Amadu Maddy is a Sierra Leonean playwright, novelist, and literary critic who has taught at Morgan State University, the University of Iowa, and in Zambia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. His publications include Obasai and Other Plays; the coming-of-age novel No Past, No Present, No Future; and the co-authored African Images in Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction (1996) and Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985-1995 (2001).

Donnarae MacCann was the director of the Laboratory School Library at UCLA prior to teaching children’s literature at the University of Kansas and Virginia Tech, and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her publications include White Supremacy in Children's Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (1998, 2001), which won the Children's Literature Association Book Award, and the co-authored works on Africa: African Images in Juvenile Literature and Apartheid and Racism in South African Children's Literature, 1985-1995 (2001).

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Background

Chapter One: "Darkest Africa": A Persistent Western Fantasy

Chapter Two: Feminism in Africa: Complexities and Activism

Chapter Three: Institutional Racism

Part II: Neo-imperialist Stories, 1994-2008

Chapter Four: Eurocentric Feminism in The Shadows of Ghadames and Our Secret, Siri Aang

Chapter Five: White Supremacy in Isabelle Allende’s Forest of the Pygmies

Chapter Six: Anti-African Themes in "Liberal" Young Adult Novels

Chapter Seven: Crime and Crime Syndicates in Many Stones and Zulu Dog

Chapter Eight: "Doomed Races" in Elana Bregin’s "Ella's Dunes"

Chapter Nine: Disease and the "Darkest Africa" Myth: Novels about AIDS and Smallpox

Chapter Ten: When the West Talks to Itself: Ethnocentricity in Nancy Farmer’s "African" Novels

Chapter Eleven: Child Soldiers and Survivors in Chanda’s Wars

Part III: Rewarding the Best

Chapter Twelve: Out of Bounds and the Legacy of South African Child Martyrs

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Complete with notes, this is a valuable resource for those interested in African Studies or children's literature....Highly recommended."

— Choice, June 2009

"A veritable gold mine of vigorous rebuttals against distortions of Africa found in literature for children. It is an invaluable contribution to making multiculturalism and social justice relevant in our contemporary multicultural world, which cannot afford any more irrelevancies or any more affirmations of human inequality."
- Osayimwense Osa, Virginia State University, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2010)

From the Publisher