Imagology and Children's Literature: Beyond Intellectual Parochialism

This chapter advocates a critical confrontation between postcolonial studies and imagology, two areas of academic inquiry that have so far largely ignored each other. Providing an overview of the development of imagology, including its applications to children’s literature, it explains why edward said is the elephant in the imagologist’s room. It then proceeds to argue how postcolonial and imagological perspectives can mutually enrich each other. Postcolonialism may gain a greater degree of empirical specificity by allowing itself to be contaminated, as it were, by imagology, while imagology may gain a greater level of theoretical sophistication if it would stop politely ignoring postcolonialism, a step that could help imagologists move beyond methodological nationalism.