Eldridge, Katherine
(2018)
Creating the White- and Euro-centric Children’s Literary Canon:
A Case Study of Clifton Fadiman’s Reception to The Black Arts Movement in Children’s Literature.
In: Undergraduate Celebration of Research Conference, April 20, 2018, Alumn Hall, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
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Microsoft PowerPoint (Poster for Archival Research on "Creating the White- and Euro-centric Children’s Literary Canon: A Case Study of Clifton Fadiman’s Reception to The Black Arts Movement in Children’s Literature")
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Abstract
This poster, which I presented at the Undergraduate Celebration of Research Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, is the culmination of my research as an undergraduate Archival Scholar Research Awardee (ASRA) in the University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library Special Collections. As an ASRA recipient, I initiated a project in the Fadiman collection, a collection of approximately 2,000 books with personal inscriptions and notes of the famed children's literature scholar Clifton Fadiman. I combed through the entire online archive to find books that were written by Black authors or featured Black characters during the era of the Black Arts Movement, the art- and healing-centered sister to the Black Power Movement (~1961-1976). I transcribed these notes onto an online database and through a preliminary textual analysis, I found four main themes to Fadiman's erasure of Black Arts Movement children's literature from his multiple canonical and critical works. I hypothesize that these four themes can be applied to all canonical and critical works that have systematically erased books featuring representations of Black characters and Black power themes, in which this erasure is due to: 1) The critic’s perception that the audience of children’s literature is largely White; 2) The critic’s assumption that this White audience cannot relate to books featuring Black main characters, themes, and Black aesthetic literary form; 3) The critic’s use of reflexivity of his position as a White critic as an excuse to not properly criticize books that feature Black characters and racial themes; and 4) The only books featuring Black characters and themes that are accepted into a canon by the White-centric critic are books that fall into classic British/American/ Euro-centric forms and aesthetics. I look at each of these four themes in this presentation by including examples and excerpts from my primary research in the Fadiman collection and in reading Fadiman's books, reviews, and treasuries.
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