Rebecca! I have an email for you, since I couldn’t leave a comment on your last post. There’s a lot that doesn’t bother the French as much as it bothers the rest of the world… And, more seriously, they’re very good at discussing and debating these things without getting hot under the color. Debate as sport, really.

Also, we do have a copy of TinTin in the Congo… but in French. It seems that the French publisher finds it less offensive than the English publisher. Or maybe, in French, the racist bits don’t come through the same way?

Also, we have a newer copy of Dr. Doolittle that has been meddled with. I don’t really mind as the term changed is racist and can be considered derogatory; however, I also think that it’s good to talk about these things with children in context – especially in the context of good, classic literature. We don’t need thought police – we just need to be thoughtful and present with our kids.

I suspect somewhere in there is a critique of publishers who would rather reprint old books that they know sell well (with new “updated” covers or illustrations, perhaps) rather than really support new authors and the creation of new fiction of high quality.

But there is also the issue of historical literacy. How many of them know anything about the historical situation in the Congo? Or even that TinTin is a Belgian comic book and that the Belgians were the colonial power in the Congo, something that is likely to affect the representation? (Most people seem to think it is French.) I think your account here demonstrates the importance of teaching children to really grapple with historical context. But this is something missing from a lot of elementary social studies education, I think. And something many parents have never thought about.

And then there is the reduction of “literacy” to some instrumental ability to decode words on a page to be able to speak them out loud with a bit of surface comprehension thrown in. The sort of literacy that you discuss here, the sort that involves really grasping with multiple meanings and the inability of the author (or the censoring editor) to control the meanings of a text completely are absent from much of the education debate more broadly, and certainly absent from education policy. In fact, much of the backlash against both PC and the teaching of education theory to trainee teachers is about denigrating the very academic disciplines and inter-disciplines that are engaged in that kind of complex reading of texts. The straw “women’s studies prof” that gets brought out in public debates doesn’t look much like any of the many women’s studies profs that I actually have met in real life.

But, and this happens even within women’s studies, that brings us back to the rather tricky political problem of how we engage in these debates without falling back into debates about censorship. And sometimes, folks who have no interest in censorship are accused of it precisely because their interlocutors are incapable of seeing the problem in any other terms. To raise questions about certain representations becomes, to some audiences, to demand censorship.

A tricky problem indeed. But your contribution seems like part of the solution.

I also wonder about introductions or appendices or something in new editions to provide that contextual knowledge for parents who would like to have it.