This book considers how contemporary British children-s books engage with some of the major cultural debates of recent years, and how they resonate with the current preoccupations and tastes of the white mainstream British reading public. A central assumption of this volume is that Britain-s imperial past continues to play a key role in its representations of race, identity, and history. The insistent inclusion of questions relating to colonialism and power structures in recent children-s novels exposes the complexities and contradictions surrounding the fictional treatment of race relations and ethnicity.
Postcolonial children-s literature in Britain has been inherently ambivalent since its cautious beginnings: it is both transgressive and authorizing, both undercutting and excluding. Grzegorczyk considers the ways in which children-s fictions have worked with and against particular ideologies of race. The texts analyzed in this collection portray ethnic minorities as
