Colonialism in Children's and Young Adult Literature in the Caribbean

Abstract

One of the tools of the European colonial project in the Caribbean has been formal education. In this dissertation, I aim to explore the deracination effects of European colonial education on Caribbean societies, especially on enslaved Africans and indentured Asians and their descendants. Through formal education, Caribbean children have consistently been exposed and indoctrinated through European children’s literatures to accept the ideology of European cultural, religious, and racial superiority and their own inferiority. However, contemporary Caribbean writers are providing Caribbean children with counter texts that celebrate, uphold, and promote Caribbean cultures, spiritualities, and histories that offer reparative narratives. Engaging interdisciplinary postcolonial and literary theories, I will examine selected Caribbean children’s literature and explore how they help reverse and reshape the psychological, social, religious, cultural distortions suffered by Caribbean society through the use of racist Eurocentric literature in formal education.