Harriet Tubman in Pictures: Cultural Consciousness and the Art of Picture Books

Abstract

Picture books constitute a flourishing area in "culturally conscious" African-American children's literature. Yet, for all the considerable research that has been devoted to analyzing culturally conscious literature, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the art work in picture books created with black children in mind. 1 While "several important studies of visual representations of Black people in children's literature do exist," as Dianne Johnson observes, most of these "are studies of Black images in mainstream literature. Thus, their applicability to African-American children's literature is limited." Studies that focus on white children's responses to black characters usually ask whether the images that readers encounter are racist; studies of culturally conscious imagery, however, are concerned not only with the negative question as to whether the illustrations in books are racist but with the positive question about how such images speak to "the social, psychological, and spiritual needs of African-American children" (11). Ironically, very little of the scholarly work regarding culturally conscious imagery has looked at the pictures in children's books.

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