Authenticity

Before we get into the main part of this lesson, I'd like to discuss briefly the issue of authenticity. This issue takes a couple of different shapes. For one, as an outsider to a culture, how do you know what's being presented is authentic? For another, can someone from outside the culture make an authentic book about that culture? In other words, can white authors and illustrators write and illustrate books about black characters authentically?

Some white illustrators frequently illustrate books about black characters; Rachel Isadora, Chris Raschka, Ann Grifalconi, and Ezra Jack Keats come to mind. There have been some spectacular arguments on these questions. Two books you might want to look at are Jake and Honeybunch Go to Heaven written and illustrated by Margot Zemach and Big Sixteen written by Mary Calhoun and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

Zemach, Calhoun, and Hyman are all white and they each stated (forcefully in some cases) that their books were based upon extensive research into black culture; yet, African American critics (and some white critics) roundly condemned the two books as not just wrong, but offensively wrong. The issue becomes even more difficult when we are looking at illustrated versions of folktales. Often illustrators try to place the tale within the cultural and historical context from which the story was collected. There are hot debates in anthropology over whether even an anthropologist who spends months studying a culture can get it right. International students from Korea and China are constantly showing me illustrations from American-published Korean and Chinese folktales that get the details wrong (we'll save the issue of translation for the myth and folklore class) in the illustrations. For example, wedding gowns are drawn in the wrong color, and clothing and artifacts from different dynasties are mixed. Illustrations in American Indian folktales and West African folktales are often romanticized, sometimes in excess.

This is an important topic, one you many wish to explore in more depth.