Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction Jochen Petzold (bio) Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction. By Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann. New York: Routledge, 2009. Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa by Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann is a very “political” piece of literary criticism, as it analyses, exposes and explicitly denounces cases of anti-Africanism in recent fiction for young readers. The authors divide their study into three parts: The first part, “Background,” offers three brief chapters that examine the history of imperialist misrepresentations of Africa and the failings of the contemporary American book establishment—particularly in making ill-advised choices for prestigious prizes. The second part, “Neo-Imperialist Stories, 1994–2008”, comprises eight chapters (three of which are reprints of journal articles) that discuss thirteen novels and one short story by eleven “Western” authors. All text fall into what could be broadly termed a “realist paradigm” and while many of them have received favourable reviews and even won literary prizes, Maddy and MacCann show all of them to be more or less seriously flawed in their representation of Africa and Africans, either because the texts do not adequatly reflect cultural or political realities, or because they perpetuate traditions of imperialist thought. The final part, “Rewarding the Best,” praises a collection of short stories by the South African writer Beverley Naidoo as an example of well-informed and non-racist writing about Africa. The volume is rounded off with a selected bibliography and a helpful index that keeps the material accessible. As this short overview already suggests, Maddy and MacCann have written a book with a mission—and this makes it a difficult book to review. Clearly, the authors have an axe to grind about a culture-industry that is not sensitive enough to latent or blatant anti-Africanism that still dominates (some of) its products, and about an institutionalized system of book appraisal that similarly fails to detect cultural imperialism at work. After centuries of imperialist mis-representations of Africa, care is certainly needed when (Western) pens present Africa and Africans to young readers. Finding even some fault with a study that criticizes racism and calls for true multiculturalism all too easily provokes the reproach of being reactionary and Eurocentric oneself. Yet, alas, the book may be well intended, but as an academic study it is not without its problems. While the authors do an admirable job in making their readers aware of underlying currents of racist thought in texts that might at first sight seem “liberal” and “open-minded,” they also often over-reach in their aim. For example, in their introduction Maddy and MacCann declare that “contemporary stories about Africa sustain the idea that Whites constitute a superior class of persons” (3). They do not qualify this claim and thus suggest that it pertains to all (Western) stories about Africa—and given the analyses that follow, this seems to be the case. However, this general applicability is never discussed or substantiated. The authors [End Page 300] do not reveal how they arrived at their choice of texts, or to what extent these fourteen texts can be taken as representative of the market at large—and it is a large market: a search in internet bookstores produces over 400 relevant titles (though not all of them published between 1994 and 2008). Their severe criticism of the culture-industry suggests that these fourteen texts are representative, yet at the same time Maddy and MacCann explicitly mention “The Children’s Africana Book Award” as a counter example to what is presented as a neo-imperialist mainstream. While praising ‘good’ books about Africa is not the aim of the study, its credibility would have been helped by a discussion of the relationship between the anti-African ‘mainstream’ (if it is one) and the books recommended by CABA. At various points in the analyses one gets the feeling that the authors are trying to hard, interpreting as intentional what might just as well be unintentional (which is, of course, no excuse for offensive imagery), nonchalantly passing from the statements of first...