Show notes
What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine?
In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood
reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book
argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the
plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Sugar, sweetness, moral
instruction, and domestic comfort were all tied to systems of
enslavement and colonial trade, even as the violence behind them was
softened or erased in stories for young readers.
The book also
examines how ideas of white civility shaped childhood. White children,
particularly girls, were cast as symbols of innocence, refinement, and
moral feeling, while Black children were excluded from those same
protections. Through analyses of persecuted-heroine narratives,
missionary education, and colonial schooling, the study reveals how
children’s literature helped normalise racial hierarchy across the
British Empire.
Yet the project is equally attentive to
resistance and alternative ethical traditions. Afro-Caribbean oral
storytelling, including Anansi tales, songs, and folktales, emerges as a
powerful counterarchive. These traditions preserved histories of
survival, collective memory, and resistance that colonial print culture
often attempted to suppress. The discussion of the “Queen Mary” Fireburn
song, for instance, highlights how storytelling became a form of
ethical education and cultural continuity across generations.
One
of the book’s most striking contributions is its global scope.
Children’s texts on slavery circulated far beyond Britain and the
Caribbean, travelling to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East via
missionary and imperial networks. In translation and adaptation, these
works sometimes reinforced imperial ideologies, but they could also be
reshaped in unexpected ways by ‘local’ readers and writers.
Sugarcoated Ethics
asks readers to reconsider what children’s literature teaches us about
morality, empathy, and history. It challenges the assumption that
childhood stories are politically neutral and invites us to think more
critically about the ethical worlds children’s books continue to create
today.
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