Building Citizens: The Patriotic Child
In new nations and those undergoing radical transition, books for young people become unifying civic tools. In his ubiquitous spellers, Noah Webster introduced a distinctly American English language—freed from what he described as the clamor of British aristocratic affectation—to generations of the young republic's schoolchildren.
Revolutionary Russia's state-run publishers enlisted artists and writers to create picture books that embellished guideposts of good civic behavior with aesthetic delight. The long-smoldering Irish republican independence movement sparked a revival of interest in Irish fairy tales, in which the poets William Butler Yeats and James Stephens played leading roles.
Paperbacks in comic-book format proved wildly effective in familiarizing Occupation-era Japanese children with Western cultural ideals and postcolonial India's youth with their nation's labyrinthine cultural heritage. Currently, postcolonial French West Africa is in the early stages of a process that Webster would have recognized: the effort to craft authentically African children's books that, as the Cameroon-born artist Christian Épanya has said, "speak" to African children.