Nostalgia and the American Girls

A couple of days ago, I wrote about sessions I'd attended at the 37th annual conference of the Children's Literature Association. This is a follow-up to that post.

On Saturday afternoon I attended a session called "American Dolls". The first paper was on Disney characters. The third paper, given by Bethany Dailey Tisdale, was "What Dolls Eat: The Fixation on Food for American Girls". Tisdale did a close analysis of food, class and period across several of the dolls. I wonder if she's published a paper on the topic? It was a thoughtful presentation.

This post is about the second paper, Suzanne Rahn's "Felicity, Addy, Molly, Josefina: Books for American Girls".  A retired professor, Rahn is now an independent scholar.  Her "An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for Children" was published in The Lion and the Unicorn in June, 1991 (Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 1-26). The article is a survey of historical fiction for children and young adults. She begins by praising older works of historical fiction, writing at length of the ways they preserved tradition and history and made it engaging to the reader.

But then the 60s happened...  Rahn writes (p. 17):

[T]he most powerful currents of the revolutionary sixties were set in active opposition to the past, and the historical novel was bound to suffer for it. In the 1950s, the genre had been valued for giving young people the security of tradition in a fast-changing world, but in the late sixties tradition was exactly what the young hoped to be liberated from. Teenagers warned each other not to trust anyone over thirty. Cigarette ads began assuring women, "You've come a long way, baby," making it seem (once more) a fate worse than death to be Victorian. History was, at best, not "relevant." At worst, it seemed inextricably associated with authority and the lies told by those in power--in the distortions and omissions of American history textbooks, for example. By the early 1970s, the historical novel had already plummeted to the low point of popularity from which it has still not fully recovered. Even historical novels and biographies which had been praised for featuring minorities in leading roles were under attack for racism.

The novels she says were under attack are Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates; I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, and, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox.  She doesn't say much about why they were critiqued, noting only that  The Slave Dancer "paints a darker picture of the slave trade than children had been allowed to see" (p. 18). I imagine she thinks the darker picture is a good thing, and while it IS important for children to have that darker picture, the scholars who objected to it argued that Fox excuses the whites in the story and their roles in slavery, and blames Africans for what happened. (If interested in the critiques, see Sharon Bell Mathis's "The Slave Dancer is an Insult to Black Children" and Binnie Tate's "Racist and Distortions Pervade The Slave Dancer" --- both available in MacCann and Woodard's Cultural Conformity in Books for Children: Further Readings in Racism published in 1977 by Scarecrow Press.) It seems to me that Rahn is somewhat displeased with critiques of those books, but its more than just critical discussions of race that she objects to...

She writes that Johnny Tremain emphasized ideals of the Revolution and presented war as just and necessary, and that My Brother Sam Is Dead (written by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier in 1985) is more cynical. She says that books published during and after the 70s provide "bleak" views of life in historical time periods that are are intent on refuting portrayals in older works. She says (p. 19):

Unlike the authors of the forties and fifties, who tried to make the past appeal to children, Skurzynaski, Conrad, and the Colliers seem to dislike the cultures they describe. The past, from this perspective, can be neither enjoyable for its own sake nor a source of alternative solutions--only a storehouse of folly that may enable us to perceive more clearly the follies of our own time.

Conrad wrote Prairie Songs in 1985. Rahn prefers the prairie life presented by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie.  Near the end of her article, Rahn happily says that good novels of the fifties are being republished, and, she points to a then-new series, the Americans Girls dolls and books. I provide these excerpts (above) from Rahn's article because of what she said in her session on the American Girl dolls. Nearly twenty years have passed, and Rahn's views have not changed. Here's a few items from her presentation last week:

• She began her talk by holding up Josefina, the Mexican American doll. She invited us (the audience) to come up after the session if we wanted to "cuddle" Josefina. 
• She talked about Rebecca Rubin, the Jewish doll who, Rahn said, has to learn "how to cope with being Jewish". 

Before that, however, she said that the dolls and books are "historically accurate" and can teach children about history. They, she said, are like Little House on the Prairie and Caddie Woodlawn because they educate and teach children how to be tolerant. She went on at great length about them, and it sounded more like a sales pitch than a conference paper.

She obviously likes the dolls and books very much.

That was clear when she referred to Roger Sutton's editorial about the American Girls catalog as "absurd". When I asked her to elaborate, she said that his mind had been twisted or warped (can't recall which word she used) by being at a conference about pornography. The editorial she was referencing is Roger's Dolls at a Distance where he said that he'd been at a conference where they pondered children's access to pornography on the Internet and he thought browsing the American Girls catalog would ameliorate his unsettled state of mind. Instead, the catalog gave him the creeps for the many ways its contents and presentation of the dolls is a lot like pornography.

As Rahn talked, I was aware of a lot of shifts in body language (my own, but others in the room, too). During the Q&A, she had several tough questions from people who don't see the dolls and books with the same warmth as she does. She's a fighter, however, and didn't yield at all.  I think she'd like to see the United States go back in time and be what it was before all of us radicals starting saying HEY and WTF? Is she in the minority? I don't know, but I hope so. Over at Shelf Talker (a blog on the Publisher's Weekly website), Elizabeth Bluemle's The Elephant in the Room suggests that a lot of people are paying attention to how white the children's literature profession is. Rahn's praise for American Girl may not seem like the same thing, but I think it is. The issue is power and control, who says what, what they say, and how they say it.

I did not like Rahn talking about "cuddling" Josefina, and said so in my comment to her. Cuddling Josefina, or Addy, or Kaya may feel like a "tolerant" thing to do, but Latino/a Americans, Blacks, and American Indians don't want to be cuddled by affluent members of society. We want respect for who we are. We want our history, our viewpoints, and our ideas to be treated with respect. Returning to the mindset and books of the fifties is not the way to get there.

For further reading, see:
Rethinking Schools article on AMERICAN GIRLS

American Girls Collection: Kaya

A thoughtful response from Laurie Halse Anderson

Over on Condensery, blogger Kate Slater posted an essay about Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains. Slater started by noting "hurtful or reductive representations" of American Indians in Caddie Woodlawn, and then she moves on to talk about Chains. She says Anderson engages with marginalization, oppression, and violence in a rich (not reductive) way, and Slater notes some anachronisms in the book that she found jarring.

Anderson replied, asking Slater about the anachronisms, because, she said "If I made any mistakes, I would like to correct them."

That sentence leaped out at me! How many other authors are willing to say that?!

Slater replied to Anderson, and Anderson responded again. It is a terrific thread. Click on over to read "Rememory and Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains". That sort of engagement is what I wish I could have with authors who, in some way, include American Indians in their books for children and young adults. Course, it isn't possible with those who are no longer living (such as Wilder or Brink) but what about Rinaldi?

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Further reading, see:

Reflections on CADDIE WOODLAWN: Teaching about Stereotypes using Literature

Illustrations of the "scalp belt" in CADDIE WOODLAWN

The "scalp belt" in CADDIE WOODLAWN

Children's Literature Association 37th Annual Conference

I'm in Ann Arbor for the 37th annual conference of the Children's Literature Association, enjoying listening to others talk about their research. I was headed to the 10:00 session, "Telling Tales" but so were a lot of other folks. I arrived a few minutes late, opened the door, and saw no empty seats. So, I'm taking a break and hope to hear from other conference-goers about papers given by Catherine McKenna paper and Kay Weisman.

At 8:00 I went to a session chaired by blogger, friend, and scholar, Sarah Park. It was called "Constructing the Author and/as Celebrity".  Papers were given by Sara van den Bossche (Ghent University) on Astrid Lindgren's work, Camille Parker (independent scholar) on blogging and author blogs, and, Maria de Guadallupe Serrano Diez (University of Winnipeg) on the works of Mexican Francisco Gabilondo Soler, a Mexican writer who created and performed as Cri-Cri: El Grillito Cantor (in English, the Little Singing Cricket).

I enjoyed all three immensely and hope that each paper evolves into a publication. There were interesting points made about what gets canonized (most people know Lindgren's work while few outside of Mexico would know Soler's work), and how writers today use blogs.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to a session called "Playing Indian" that was also quite good. Both, Alan Scot Willis (Northern Michigan University) and Kay Harris (University of Southern Mississippi) cited Native scholars, specifically, Philip J. Deloria and Rayna Green. It is very important that people studying depictions of American Indians read the work of Native scholars and apply that work to their analysis of children's books. I look forward to reading more from Willis and Harris.

At the books exhibit, I bought two books. One is Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. I bought it because of one name on the cover.... Durango Mendoza. The volume includes one of his stories. This one is "The Passing". Durango is husband to my dear friend, Jean. First published in 1966, it would be interesting to compare how the volume evolved over time, what authors were added and when. The copy I bought also has a story by Louise Erdrich, and one by Ralph Ellison... The Ellison story looks intriguing. It's title is "A Couple Scalped Indians".

I also bought Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction about Learning to be American. I'll have to study the stories, and think about the collection and the title of the book. "Learning to be American". It includes several stories I want to read: Tiffany Midge's "A Half-Breed's Dream Vacation", Louise Erdrich's "The Red Convertible", Diane Glancy's "Portrait of the Lone Survivor", Sherman Alexie's "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" and Simon J. Ortiz's "To Change in a Good Way".  They are all Native writers. Would they say their stories are about "learning to be American"?

Enough for now... going to gather my things and head for another session.

Roger Ebert on the Arizona Mural and Race..... but...

On his blog, Roger Ebert posted a long, thoughtful essay that starts out with him imagining he's a brown-skinned child in Arizona who learns that a mural that reflects his skin will have to be be changed so that the skin of the children in the mural is not so dark.

Ebert grew up in Urbana, Illinois, where the University of Illinois is located (it actually straddles Urbana and Champaign). In his essay, he talks about African American children in his school and in his childhood.

He understands racism where African Americans are concerned, but he seems to be conflicted over stereotyping of American Indians. In a 2009 essay at his blog, he said that "Chief Illiniwek" is "the world's greatest sports symbol". Following his essay is a video of the mascot's "last dance".

In the comments section (he got LOT of comments), he says:

The Chief. *Sigh* I understand intellectually why Chief Illiniwek was retired. I agree with the decision ideologically. But my heart cries out, as in my memory he stands proudly on the 50 yard yard line and the Marching Illini conclude the school Song, Illinois! Illinois! Illinois! He was so much more dignified than a buckeye, a wolverine, a badger, a boilermaker, a spartan. He was greatness. I'm glad I was there.

His emotions and his intellect are at odds.  He can't condemn "Chief Illiniwek". Based on my understanding of all he says in the post itself about African Americans and race, I don't think he'd say that his heart cries out for the old black and white minstrel shows. I wish he had that same insight for American Indians and our objections to stereotypical depictions like "Chief Illiniwek".

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Update: I'm adding another comment from Ebert that pre-dates the others above. The comment below is from  "Noble Spirit, More than Just a Mascot" dated 2001 the Chicago Sun Times.

"Chief Illiniwek, for nearly a century the symbol of the University of Illinois, was until recently seen as a positive image of American Indians. The Chief never was a 'mascot,' and indeed goes back so far that he pre-dates the use of "mascots" for most sports teams. ... In recent years, however, Illiniwek has been under attack from a small, self-righteous coalition that wants to wipe him from the university's history."