Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature.

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Bradford is a professor of literary studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches and researches principally in the area of children’s literature. Unsettling Narratives is a scholarly tome, one which does merit a place in academic libraries, especially collections which serve English departments with courses in children’s literature or Native Studies departments whose curricula include analyzing how Aboriginal peoples have been or are being portrayed in books and other print materials. However, Bradford’s work demands much from its readers, even those in academia. Firstly, in terms of her writing style, Bradford eschews simple sentences and, instead, favours dense, compound complex sentences which frequently require re-reading in order to extract meaning. Where a commonplace word would suffice, Bradford seemingly elects to use one that will send even graduate students in search of a dictionary. Content-wise, in addition to readers’ having to bring with them a knowledge of the methodologies and literature of postcolonial studies, they must also be familiar with children’s literature from four different countries to appreciate fully the book’s subject matter. Bradford’s focus is “on texts produced in English from the 1980s until the present” (the most recent children’s text included is from 2004) in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and she says, “My aim is to show how ‘politics of knowledge’ about colonization, relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and the projected futures of postcolonial societies inform contemporary children’s books.” One of Bradford’s principal conclusions is that “non-Indigenous texts are much more likely than Indigenous texts to recycle the unquestioned assumptions of dominant cultures and their ingrained beliefs and convictions about Indigenous peoples and cultures.” As appropriate to a scholarly work, Unsettling Narratives concludes with a long section of Notes connected to the chapters’ contents, a Bibliography and References section, with the former listing the children’s texts mentioned, and an Index. Recommended for academic libraries only.