Abstract
In her book Children’s Literature and the Posthuman, Zoe Jacques presents a critical look at children’s literature through the lens of posthumanism. She contends that philosophy can emerge from children’s literature and applies both humanist and posthumanist ideals to selected texts to illustrate instances of the presence of a posthuman agenda. Jacques offers as a primary purpose for the book the reader to consider the complexities of hierarchical relationships resultant in the “ideological separation of the human, animal, natural and artificial” (5), and to carefully consider “where these representations might be said to align with the agendas of posthumanism” (6). She does not disappoint. Jacques beautifully executes the representations of posthuman concerns in children’s literature, and successfully exposes tensions between the natural world and humanity, thus drawing into question commonly accepted boundaries that arrange the world hierarchically, where humans are considered superior beings with the right to dominion over all else—over everything deemed “Other.”
Jacques’s text is an argument in three parts: animal, environment, and cyborg. In each, she explores examples of children’s texts, such as Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (1964), and Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883), all of which reveal the complexities of the socializing effects of children’s literature and challenge humanist ideals with posthuman messages. In so doing, the author highlights opportunities for the construction of new identities, and new understandings of self occur as humanity’s position of authority within the ecological hierarchy is decentered.
Jacques purposely employs a narrow selection of children’s fantasy from the Western canon to demonstrate the complex manner in which authors destabilize the anthropocentric humanist ideals via posthuman theory. However, Jacques asserts that when fantasies are edited for children, the philosophical challenges are diluted or removed completely, thereby diminishing the significant lessons on interspecies relations that are critical for children’s learning as they grapple with identity formation and humanity’s place in the world. She calls on readers to pay attention to the posthuman concerns in these texts as essential for children’s understanding that there is no hierarchical difference between humans and animals. The texts Jacques selects are sites for the subversion of humanist ideologies, citing complexities of relationships between humans, machines, and nature. Throughout the book, the author cites evidence from children’s fantasy that challenges human agency, ownership, and authority over inhuman forms, and further asserts that the agency of animals, the environment, and the cyborg, as characterized in children’s literature, proves oppositional toward human dominance and destruction.
Throughout, Jacques asks the reader to wrestle with humanist and posthumanist representations of identity, and proves again and again that texts such as those examined in Children’s Literature and the Posthuman offer children the opportunity to question traditionally accepted categories of human identity and encourage new understandings and connections within relationships between the human and non-human. It is this perspective that is the book’s greatest strength. Jacques’s attention to the socializing effect of children’s literature and posthuman challenges to humanist ideals creates a space for the empowerment of children to construct their own sense of self and being, and to define themselves in relation to others and the non-human world.
Philosophically, the book is insightful and, theoretically, Jacques delivers exactly what she promises. The author makes and substantiates powerful claims regarding children’s socialization and identity formation via fantasy texts, and very clearly articulates a legitimate concern over the exclusion of philosophical challenges from children’s fantasy because they are deemed too difficult for them to understand, or are somehow otherwise inappropriate for children. But I ask myself: To what end? Practically speaking, the text’s density and reliance on primarily very early Western representations of children’s fantasy renders it an unlikely choice for educators who remain in practitioner positions. The tragedy in this is that the issues to which Jacques draws attention could drastically improve learning opportunities for children. It seems to me that work such as this would be most beneficial to those who are actually teaching children—those who are actively engaged in shaping the attitudes and beliefs that inform the construction of identity, and who, on a daily basis, play an active and powerful role in the socialization of young children. Yet this text is out of reach and impractical for many, if not most, teacher practitioners.
As a former teacher of young children, I was intrigued by Jacques’s assertion that philosophy could emerge from children’s literature. I was delighted by the possibilities of this text for what I initially perceived as a potential for transforming learning spaces for the very young by offering practitioners critical insights into curricular implications that could deeply impact the readings of and lessons learned from fantasy texts. However, I quickly realized that this text is not intended for use by classroom teachers. I find this disappointing and unfortunate. Further, while I recognize the author’s deliberately narrow limits in her selection of texts, and wholeheartedly acknowledge that these selections firmly establish the theoretical stance of the work, I wonder how well her assertions may hold up when applied to the wider scope of children’s literature, including more recent texts and texts that lie outside the traditional Western canon.
Although I do wish that there was greater potential for the practical application of her work, I find it compelling and thoughtful, and have no doubt that scholars of posthuman theory, as well as those of children’s literature, will find Jacques’s work not only a valuable research tool, but also an instructional text.