Cross-Cultural Misreadings: MacCann and Maddy’s Apartheid and Racism Revisited

Abstract

Cross-Cultural Misreadings: MacCann and Maddy’s Apartheid and Racism Revisited Elwyn Jenkins (bio) and Elizabeth Muther (bio) This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, with its focus on South Africa, marks a critical occasion in the short history of the international reception and evaluation of South African literature for children. It promises to offer new perspectives on the cultural mirror provided by literature for children in post-transition South Africa: the revisions of national story and of the identity of the “representative child” that have occurred during this period. It reflects the increasing visibility of this literature in the global marketplace. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to correct a sometimes problematic historical record—and to revisit a cluster of critical texts on South African children’s literature that provide an object lesson in the hazards of comparative cultural studies in the field. “Passionate trans-cultural engagements . . . will often reveal more about the aspirations and grievances of the people doing the comparing than about the people compared,” Rita Barnard remarks on the discourses of comparative history (“Of Riots and Rainbows” 404). Work on South African children’s literature produced outside of the methodological constraints of comparative studies may indeed create such distortions. Substantial critiques of recent South African youth literature are rare. The few that do exist are field-defining—and have disproportionately influenced the reception of this literature. American academic Donnarae MacCann’s critical work in the South African arena reflects such passionately invested cross-cultural readings. Her scholarship in South African children’s literature has had international visibility, and her status as a critic of racism in American books gives her opinions particular weight. Her books and articles—variously co-authored— have had a profound influence over the reception of important transitional South African cultural texts. Yet, for all of the productive energy and vitality of MacCann’s broader contributions, her studies of [End Page 237] South African children’s books sometimes blur cultural boundaries and distort the telescopic lenses used in this transnational work. In this essay, we address the assumptions that underlie MacCann’s analysis of South African cultural politics, especially as regards race relations— and begin to suggest the kind of comparative methodologies that might allow what Barnard has called a “transactional cultural analysis, alert to the ways in which historical actors on both sides of the Atlantic have interpreted and misinterpreted each other” (“Of Riots and Rainbows” 402). We focus on Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature, 1985–1995 by MacCann and Yulisa Amadu Maddy (2001), using that book and MacCann’s other writings and collaborative work on South African texts to explore the implications of transnational criticism in children’s literature.1 The Work of MacCann and Maddy Donnarae MacCann has a significant track record, dating back over thirty-five years, in what she has called antiracism work. She aligns her own early efforts with the impetus provided—and the interventions offered—by the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), an organization founded in 1965 as a direct product of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (MacCann, “Editor’s Introduction” 339; Banfield 17). CIBC provided explicit guidelines for detecting the presence of exclusionary or racially demeaning content in trade books and textbooks for children (Banfield 18). MacCann’s first co-edited collection of essays (with Gloria Woodard), The Black American in Books for Children: Readings in Racism (1972), stands as a signal event in scholarship in children’s literature (Martin 53). Many of the essays were gathered from the CIBC’s Bulletin of Interracial Books for Children, and the book was republished in 1985 with many new and updated articles. The book—in both editions—pinpointed important cultural questions about the roles of black children’s authors and about representations of black Americans in books for children.2 MacCann won the 1998 Book Award from the Children’s Literature Association—an award given annually “to recognize outstanding book-length contributions to children’s literature history, scholarship, and criticism”—for her study of nineteenth-century representations of African Americans in children’s literature, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900...