The September 2008 issue of the American journal The Lion and the Unicorn, with its focus on South Africa, marked a critical occasion in the short history of the international reception and evaluation of South African literature for children. It promised to offer new perspectives on the cultural mirror provided by literature for children in post-transition South Africa: the revisions of national story and of the identity of the “representative child” that had occurred during this period. It reflected the increasing visibility of this literature in the global marketplace. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to correct a sometimes problematic historical record – and to revisit a cluster of critical texts on South African children's literature that provide an object lesson in the hazards of comparative cultural studies in the field.

Substantial critiques of recent South African youth literature are rare. The few that do exist are field-defining–and have disproportionately influenced the reception of this literature. “Passionate trans-cultural engagements … will often reveal more about the aspirations and grievances of the people doing the comparing than about the people compared,” Rita Barnard (2005, 404) remarks on the discourses of comparative history. Work on South African children's literature produced outside of the methodological constraints of comparative studies may indeed create such distortions.

American academic Donnarae MacCann's critical work in the South African arena reflects such passionately invested cross-cultural readings. Her scholarship in South African children's literature has had international visibility, and her status as a critic of racism in American books gives her opinions particular weight. Her books and articles – variously co-authored – have had a profound influence over the reception of important transitional South African cultural texts. Yet, for all of the productive energy and vitality of MacCann's broader contributions, her studies of South African children's books sometimes blur cultural boundaries and distort the telescopic lenses used in this transnational work.

In this chapter, we address the assumptions that undergird MacCann's analysis of South African cultural politics, especially as regards race relations – and begin to suggest the kind of comparative methodologies that might allow what Barnard (2005, 402) has called a “transactional cultural analysis, alert to the ways in which historical actors on both sides of the Atlantic have interpreted and misinterpreted each other.”