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 Article
Reading in color: children's book illustrations and identity formation for black children in the United States
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In her Coretta Scott King Award acceptance speech, Virginia Hamilton said,
"Literature gives us images with which to think" (684). This
is literally true for the illustrations which accompany much of children's
literature. In these post-modem times, meaning lies with readers, or,
in the case of illustrations, with viewers, who bring their experiential
past, including literary experience, to bear upon their understanding
of present circumstance. The late Israeli scholar Joseph Schwarcz has
proposed that illustrations have a psychological effect upon children,
that the illustrations which children encounter in literature teach them
how to deal with problems in their lives, how to model their lives, how
to become adults. Though Schwarcz couches his arguments in terms of psychological
development, he assumes some principles of visual literacy, a term which
Richard Sinatra defines as "the active reconstruction of past visual
experience with incoming information to obtain meaning" (57). Visual
literacy takes as one of its concepts the idea of schemata, which Piaget
defines as "mental image[s] or ... pattern[s] of action [which] become
a way of representing and organizing all of the child's previous sensory-motor
experience." (Sinatra 9). The illustrations children encounter in
their early literature, as sensory experience, can become important parts
of this schemata, part of the building blocks of their thinking, something
to which they will refer in their actions as they grow up, fulfilling
the role Schwarcz assigns them in the formation of identity. Schwarcz,
however, did not deal with the effect of illustrations upon identity formation
in children of minority cultures. In this essay, I shall apply some of
Schwarcz's ideas, as well as some ideas from the visual literacy school,
to the possible effect of illustrations on black(1) children in America.
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