Postcolonial Approaches to Latin American Children's Literature

ISBN-13: 9781138124738 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 192 str.

Ann Gonzalez

Opis

This volume is the first book-length study in English to explore how the effects of a traumatic colonial experience are (re)presented to Latin American children today, almost two centuries after the dismantling of colonialism proper. By analyzing a variety of texts written, adapted, or marketed expressly for Spanish-speaking children, Gonzalez examines how children's literature approaches, intentionally or unintentionally, the Spanish American colonial and postcolonial experience and communicates national and hemispheric perceptions of reality, identity, and values to the next generation. The goals of this study, therefore, are to look closely at examples of children's literature that have been produced or adapted for mestizo juvenile audiences in Latin America to understand both how the logic of coloniality works as well as how strategies of resistance, appropriation, and transformation have been passed on from one generation to the next. Gonzalez visits important canonical works from the pre-Columbian Popol Vuh, to Vallejos' Paco Yunque and Quiroga's Cuentos de la selva, to more contemporary writers like Claribel Alegria and Isabel Allende. Engaging works that illustrate the issues of transculturation and postcolonial responses to it, Gonzalez analyzes how Latin American children's books represent an active form of political, social, and cultural resistance to long-term forms of colonialism. This book will appeal to scholars in the fields of Latin American literary and cultural studies, Children's Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Comparative Literature.

Spis treści

Introduction Part I. The Problem of the Double Bind 1. Vallejo’s Paco Yunque and the Logic of Coloniality 2. The History of the Popol Vuh for Children: From Appropriation to Reinscription of the Mayan World View Part II. Resistance Strategies 3. Rebellion and The Right to Play 4. Covert Resistance 5. Syncretism 6. Hybridity 7. Reinscribing the Past: Chang Marín and the History of Panamá Part III. Ambivalence 8. To Remember or Forget: Claribel Alegría 9. To Obey or Resist: Horacio Quiroga Conclusion: Escaping the Double Bind