Politics of reading: decolonizing children’s geographies

Abstract

This paper critically analyses interventions in politics of children’s geographical reading. Politics of reading encompass a twofold agenda: how and what people read. Academic critics have written more about the former; activists have expressed more interest in the latter. The role of activists is examined in the context of their interventions in children’s geographical reading in Britain in the 1970s, in particular with respect to the adventure genre. They acted through their capacities as gatekeepers (reviewers, review editors, librarians, teachers, parents and others); producers (including writers, publishers and booksellers); and translators (mediating between British readers and non-British writers). These individual and collective agents managed to suppress and modify some allegedly racist and/or colonialist texts and authors, and promoted postcolonial alternatives. They did so, however, by bracketing questions of interpretation and by mimicking rather than challenging power relations inherent in the contemporary scriptural economy. In each case, this marginalized the interests and imaginations of young readers, while also failing to anticipate the ways in which their actions and texts would be received and used by critics. The paper concludes by pointing to the need for more sophisticated engagements with politics of reading, which address simultaneously questions of what geographical texts people read and how they read them.