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I've had a like-dislike relationship with Babar books since I first became aware of just what colonialism entails, and our nation's history with it. Casual readers of children's books may miss the political overtones of many of the books they read their children, but stories about a civilized, suit-wearing foreign king ruling over a nation of unenlightened monkeys is kind of hard to miss.The saga is not an "unconscious instance of the French colonial imagination," Mr. Gopnik writes, "it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination." Jean de Brunhoff knew precisely what he was doing. Invoking the colonial world of the 1930s and France's mission of civilizing subjugated peoples, he was also satirizing that world, celebrating some things while being wary of others, knowing the need for civilization while also knowing the costs and inevitable failures that accompany it. [Link]
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I remember loving them when I was a kid, but I also remember my parents talking to me about the stories a bit more when I was older. I haven’t reread them recently though. I did plan on getting them for my daughter, but I intended to talk about the issues it presented when she was old enough.
I was recently looking for some Kipling and was running in to an issue that it has been edited or just isn’t available for similar reasons. There are valuable lessons and good stories there, but you also need to address the time in which they were written with open eyes.
People are editing Kipling now? Yikes! New books (even kids’ books) are full of things to disagree with too-- isn’t raising questions and challenging us to think about new ideas (both good and bad) part of the *point* of reading books? Isn’t the fact that you can disapprove of (or even hate) some parts of a book but love other parts a valuable thing to learn? I would think a child old enough to pick up on the more controversial themes in these books would be old enough to talk them over, too. If they’re too young, their parents are presumably reading aloud to them and are aware enough to skip/gloss over the problematic parts until later. Good books are *meant* for thinking and talking about, not for being edited down to utter blandness.