Courtney Weikle‑Mills, "Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
New Books in African StudiesPlay episode
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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