Chapter 10 Beguiling Bygones and Relapses into Barbarism: Censoring Old Children’s Literature in the Netherlands
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Abstract
Taking a look at articles and opinion pieces from Dutch newspapers covering the ongoing debate around controversial race and gender depictions in literary classics, this chapter scrutinizes where the practice of altering old children’s books originates from, and works out opinions and reasoning behind it. The analysis is aimed to find out which modes of thinking cause many to view the controversial choice of censoring old children’s books as justified. It further demonstrates that such justification is stimulated by hierarchical thinking expressed through a teleological outlook on history. It motivates historical othering, a practice very similar to regarding children as other in comparison to adults, which causes old children’s literature to be especially vulnerable to this type of logic. The analysis reveals that people still largely view children as passive readers, easily influenced by what they read and unable to engage in equal dialogue with a text. This contradicts the statements of certain scholars and opinion makers who argue that children do not necessarily adopt the images present in a text, or the subject position it proposes.