Just babbling to myself and my reader. Article in yesterday's Newsday re a new deluxe edition of Little Black Sambo. I'm of two minds, since I spent years reading noncanonical fiction by women who sometimes were the first writers to really grapple w/issues of race: Fanny Trollope and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example. And yes, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is unquestionably racist, so obviously so that I sometimes forgot to belabor it, which is easy for me to do as a white person. But if we considered it in terms of the audience and its rhetorical purpose, the portrait of Tom as a sort of feminized Christ figure seems less a reflection of Stowe's racist attitudes and more about a preacher's daughter and wife cannily addressing her white racist congregation (to put it incredibly simplistically). So then: we're confronting an artifact, a politically and artistically significant historical document, as well as a novel. Which leaves us with what for Little Black Sambo? Does it achieve significance as a beloved children's story? It's been forgotten, an artifact, not part of the continuity of classic children's literature the way Alice in Wonderland is. Would it be okay if we reprinted an edition? Why is it worse because it was "sumptuously illustrated" (as it seems to me it is worse) for this new edition?

Here's an excerpt from the article:

But Kirkus, the Manhattan-based book review, made the book an Editor's Choice for 2003, saying, "The most controversial children's picture book in history is richly resurrected with truly sumptuous illustrations in a gorgeous oversized format." Kirkus said the illustrator "replaces the stereotypical" and champions "a handsome, tawny-skinned Sambo."

Franceschelli, the publisher, points out that his re-release has replaced the stereotyped images of earlier editions with images of a heroic boy who is brave and crafty.

The book is illustrated by Christopher Bing, who won a Caldecott award for drawings he rendered for another favorite tale, "Casey At The Bat."

Bing, who lives in Lexington, Mass., became enamored with the tale of Sambo while growing up in Florida, and began drawing illustrations of it 20 years ago while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. He could not be reached.

Franceschelli said the book offers an opportunity for readers to enjoy a story about a heroic black child, rather than focus on racial imagery.

"If we don't look back at what has happened, if we can't confront this creatively, we are doomed to repeat this."

The last comment strikes me as pretty fatuous: we're going to be doomed to repeat what, exactly? And what does "confront creatively" me? Is it an ironized version of Little Black Sambo? Do we need to confront this particular work creatively? We're not talking about reinventing Shylock for each generation: some works cast longer shadows than others.