Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has been widely read within the United States since its publication, as a watershed work that combines popular psychoanalysis and the children’s picture book format. Dahlov Ipcar’s Black and White (1963), published during the same year, was composed as an allegory of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.’s historic speech in 1963 that called for desegregation. This book was unique for its political message in the picture book format during this period and has been recently published again after in a second edition.
While Sendak and Ipcar capture two different zeitgeists of the 1960s, the two picture books share their reliance on a ‘wild’ dreamscape of the main characters as central elements in their respective plots. The kinds of people, landscape, and the working of time in the dreamscape’s ‘wild’ places are pictured to be different from those of the protagonists. How does the idea of a dream help characters move from one time and landscape to another? How does the picture book format aid the depiction of the difference and movement between landscapes? Does this narrative have commonalities with other literary or popular cultures of depicting difference or similarities between groups of people?
Engaging these questions through scholarship on American ideas of wilderness, post-colonial critiques of literary classics, anthropological work on descriptions time, and contemporary American legal scholarship on the contextual construction of race, Smruthi Bala Kannan attempts a political critique of the two picture books. Underscoring a disconnect that Wild Things and Black and White exhibit with the historical events and political discourses outside of the United States in the early 1960s, Kannan investigates the political significance of relegating peoples and places who are unfamiliar to the modern north-West to a timeless and ‘wild’ ‘elsewhere’ and reproducing such narratives across generations.
About the presenterSmruthi Bala Kannan
Smruthi Bala Kannan is a graduate researcher of Childhood Studies in Rutgers University-Camden. She is interested in the experiences of children in school and the popular narratives of the school-going child in colonial and post-colonial contexts with a particular focus on South Asia. The relationship between language education in school and the medicalized interpretation of the child’s body are her current areas of research.