#synthesis 1

video: https://vimeo.com/230468946

The perspective of authors exploring the impact of Asian American representation added to those exploring Eurocentricity. Scholars researching representation provided context on why changing a character’s history or location is harmful and why an authentic portrayal of racial minorities is so important in children’s literature. Nasara challenged the perspective of authors like Joyce, establishing that getting rid of “the characters’ contexts reveal[s]... the cultural imperatives of whiteness as it is wedded with neutrality” (240). So, she argues that writing characters without their cultural backgrounds is harmful because it creates “whiteness” as a neutral baseline. When Harlin and Morgan explored authenticity in children’s books, they determined that “when “outsiders” write about Asians, they often miss aspects of what is authentic to those who are native to Asia” (189). Non-Asian authors fail to connect to Asian American audiences and may delete or change what is really central to the cultures they write about. This finding may explain why Eurocentric authors remove ethnic contexts, as they may be “outsiders” to the culture and do not understand the importance of what they are excluding. This outsider label applies to Joyce, a White American, who had control over the “d]esign, story, and casting” (Joyce) in Rise of the Guardians. Nasara also goes beyond removing a character’s racial background, and claims that “distortion[s] in the retelling of history is one way that black characters are rendered invisible or whitewashed in children’s books” (244). So, “retelling” the history of a community is a form of “whitewashing. She also found that in one of Joyce’s other books, having a white main character altered perceptions of the book’s setting of New Orleans, a mainly Black community (243-4). I argue that not explicitly keeping Toothiana as South Asian rewrites the people of the Himalayas, where she is from. So, changes to a character’s setting, or even having a central character be white in a diverse community, can dictate how that book conveys race. I believe this connects to Thakore’s research, which shows that each generation of South Asian immigrants had different opportunities and representation in American television. She found that history and location were deeply tied, as South Asian representation changed from “Indians in India… [to] Indian and South Asian characters in an American, usually urban, environment” (Thakore 152). So, the setting shifted from India to America, to a modern environment that reflects a connection between more South Asian characters and modernisation. I believe that Nasara established that a character’s race in a story can shape the environment, and Thakore adds to this by saying that this environment can shape representation. Additionally, authors like Joyce may believe that it’s beneficial to remove race to protect children from racism. However, this view is naive because children “encountering painful situations [around race] is inevitable… [and] the child who is a member of the targeted group sustains deeper wounds” (Nasara 242). So, because children are bound to see the constructs of race and racism, the only group that is protected from the removal of race in children’s books is white children. They do not have the “deeper wounds” from racism in everyday life, and are not challenged by opposing views in their books. Harlin and Morgan give additional support to this idea, and add that a child’s learned racial intolerance can be swayed by children’s literature with representations of minorities. They argue that teachers must be responsible “because children’s books transmit values and are more than just resources to teach reading” (Harlin and Morgan 189). So, novels with stereotypic representation of Asian Americans and other minorities can impact a child’s view, perpetuating the “deeper wounds” (Nasara 242). This eliminates the idea that Eurocentric authors may have that erasing racism is harmless or that it may have no impact on children.