Incurious: George and the Postcolonialists

“Schwartz-DuPre is dedicated to putting an end to the idea that Curious George is nothing more than an amusing story.”

Four pages into reading her twin daughters H.A. and Margret Rey’s 1941 children’s classic Curious George, Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre determined the “overt racism insisted a public response [sic]” and characterized the book as a “didactic colonial narrative, the story of African capture.” Freakish as this train of thought may seem, Schwartz-DuPre, the author of the 2021 book Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism, is hardly the first to develop it. June Cummins preceded her in a 1997 article titled “The Resisting Monkey: ‘Curious George,’ Slave Captivity Narratives, and The Postcolonial Condition.” Rivka Galchen, writing in The New Yorker, hears “resonances” with the Middle Passage in George’s ocean-liner crossing, even though—unlike the starved enslaved Africans crammed into ships’ holds—George enjoys warm dinners, complete with wine and cigars, a cozy bed and the run of the ship, where he gets into all kinds of trouble. But buyer beware! Both George and millions of enslaved Africans crossed the ocean on ships.

Most readers know the tale of the little monkey munching on a banana in a tree. Spotted by “the Man with the Yellow Hat,” who takes him back to the big city, George embarks on a series of charmingly chaotic adventures. If a clandestine narrative exists, it is that of an innocent bystander minding his own business until a talent scout discovers him, then turning him into a Hollywood star. Or it is the tale of an immigrant enjoying the American dream. After George’s initial sadness at leaving his jungle home, he sails over buildings with a purloined bunch of balloons, disrupts a circus, jumps into a pot of spaghetti, with which he decorates the kitchen, and flies a kite. Back home in the jungle, he did not get to do any of this.

However, according to Schwartz-DuPre, “Curious George fits neatly into the genre of colonial literature…The Man in [sic] the Yellow Hat upholds a colonial narrative by traveling to the ‘dark’ African continent, where he captures a brown figure.” Equating this small monkey with Africans seems predicated on a few notions. First of all, George is dark; black people are dark. Next, George lives in the jungle; black people live in the jungle. Then, George is taken from the jungle by a white man; black people were taken from the jungle by white men. And, finally, George is captured by a white man and crosses the ocean to live in America; this is what happened to black people. Schwartz-DuPre’s assumption that George the monkey stands for an African conforms to racist notions, to the history of black people being compared to monkeys by Europeans. If her theory is not absurd, it is actually “overt racism.”