- Jen Harrison
Diverse Pooh: Positioning Pooh and Perspectives on Pooh from Around the Globe
When I first saw the CFP in a ChLA newsletter in 2016 for someone to pull together a Winnie-the-Pooh centennial collection, it was a temptation I couldn’t resist. As an Anglo-Indian-Caribbean child, I spent half my childhood in a UK still nostalgic for a golden past and half in a US steeped in Disney culture. Therefore, Winnie-the-Pooh in all of his many guises had been a central figure in my childhood and the first one that popped into my head when I thought about topics for my PhD. At the time the CFP came out, my own children were just at the age of wanting to watch and re-watch the Disney film, and a year later, we would visit family living in Ashdown Forest and take a walk across Pooh Sticks bridge. (We would also spend a delightful few hours meeting children’s literature legend Nick Tucker, drinking tea, and eating biscuits in his beautiful garden while the children romped through his house, but that’s a story for another day.)
With my cultural roots spread out across so many continents, Pooh for me had always been a delightful escape from the complexity of belonging neither here nor there, and being neither one thing nor another. I placed my CFP inviting chapter submissions for the volume with excitement, wondering what new perspectives I would see from around the world, especially from those whose experiences of Pooh were likewise shaped by complicated cultural lenses. I was not disappointed by the results, but I was certainly surprised at times.
If you have ever compiled an edited collection, you’ll know that the final product rarely looks much like the initial proposal. Chapters and authors are selected, shuffled, dropped, and reshaped according to the needs of the whole collection, so that what you hoped to create when you began and what you actually have when you are finished are often quite different. Nevertheless, one goal that remained constant as the Positioning Pooh collection came together was for it to contain voices from as diverse a selection of disciplines, career-levels, cultures, and perspectives as possible.
In the end, we were able to include pieces from three of the five continents and two from non-English-speaking cultures. Jonathan Tsang Chun Ngai’s chapter on the Pooh ride in Hong Kong Disneyland and Ivana Milković and Nada Kujundžić’s fascinating chapter on the publication and translation history of Milne’s books in Croatia are two of the highlights of the volume, while Donna Varga and Megan de Roover’s chapters on Pooh in Canadian contexts offered a refreshing step outside of the US/UK monopoly on Pooh in English-speaking contexts. And, naturally, those chapters from inside that US/UK context were themselves rigorous and thought-provoking in their application of new approaches and their re-examination of old ones.
Despite these gems, however, there is so much more I would have liked to see within the volume. How is Pooh thought about and received in postcolonial contexts – in Africa, India, or South America, for example? How far into the cultures in these areas does the arm of the Disney corporation reach? Pooh has been translated into countless other languages, but are those translations read widely? And what about his reception among minority and immigrant populations within English-speaking and Western countries and contexts? How – if at all – is Milne’s nostalgic, dreamy text, so firmly associated with the English upper-class of nurseries, Harrods, and afternoon tea, received by children who have had no experience of these things? These are important questions for a twenty-first century exploration of Pooh, but we could not answer them, because the submissions just were not there.
This may say something about the current state of children’s literature scholarship. Writers interested in researching diversity, equity, and inclusion in children’s literature seem shy of approaching classic texts like Pooh – there is just so much work to be done elsewhere. Pooh and other texts might feel like relics of a less diverse scholarship past – foci to be moved on from. Yet, these texts continue to be kept current by Disney media and marketing and form a part of the global experience of childhood. Diverse scholarship is sorely needed to temper the uncritical dissemination of classic texts and their reworkings through popular media like Disney.
Positioning Pooh has turned out to be a fantastic volume, with steps in the right direction. If you are a scholar working on diversity in YA and children’s texts, please read it – and then, think about what you can add to the conversation. I can’t wait to see the conversation grow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Jen Harrison earned her PhD in children’s literature from Aberystwyth University in 2009. Since then, she has taught children’s literature, creative writing, academic writing, and business writing at a variety of institutions, including Aberystwyth University, Birkbeck College, and East Stroudsburg University. Jen’s academic research focuses on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and multimodality in children’s and YA fiction and non-fiction. She currently works as a dissertation coach and children’s book consultant; you can learn more about her coaching work at www.readwriteperfect.com.