Irony and the child

Abstract

In Irony’s Edge (1994) Linda Hutcheon examines a controversy around an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1989-90, entitled ‘Into the Heart of Africa’.1 In her discussion Hutcheon regards the ‘irony’ deployed by the exhibition as the source of the outcry that met it, the problem being, it is argued, that the irony was either not read or understood by many visitors to the exhibition, or it was regarded as utterly inappropriate. In two of the illustrations of the problem, children, as potential audience, are made reference to; once in the service of Hutcheon’s own critique of the exhibition and once when she gives an account of some of the arguments made against it at the time by a protest group calling itself the Coalition for the Truth about Africa. The furore around the ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ exhibition has been much discussed since,2 and is not itself my concern here, rather my primary interest in Hutcheon’s discussion of the controversy is in the way the child is figured in relation to claims about irony.3 Having said that, one of the issues that comes up forcefully in the analyses of the controversy, the question of the construction of race in putatively ironic terms, will be addressed more than once in this chapter, specifically in relation to the claimed effects of such constructions on children in the debates around whether Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be required reading in schools in the US.