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- Title
Imperial Innocence: The Kawaii Afterlife of Little Black Sambo.
- Authors
Kalnay, Erica Kanesaka
- Abstract
This essay argues that the Victorian racial imaginary of Helen Bannerman's 1899 children's book Little Black Sambo lives on in the kawaii , or "cute," aesthetic of postwar Japan. While studies of Victorian children's literature have drawn attention to the ways in which these books reflect and reproduce the racial ideologies associated with British imperialism, I contend that Victorian "imperial innocence" continues to haunt children's culture far beyond the temporal and geographical boundaries traditionally ascribed to the period. After World War II left Japan subject to the American occupation, Little Black Sambo became a runaway bestseller, prompting anti-Black racist imagery to proliferate in kawaii commodities. By tracing the book's afterlife in kawaii , I illustrate how Victorian children's fantasies have been transmuted into flexible signifiers of racial forgetting.
- Subjects
STORY of Little Black Sambo, The (Book); BANNERMAN, Helen, 1862-1946 -- Characters; SAMBO (Fictional character); RACISM; FICTION; VICTORIAN (Literary period)
- Publication
Victorian Studies, 2020, Vol 62, Issue 4, p565
- ISSN
0042-5222
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.2979/victorianstudies.62.4.01