Globetrotters and Exotic Creatures: The Imaginary Others in Dr. Seuss

Abstract

Over and above the linguistic pleasures he offers, there seems to be something exotic, a play of the foreign and the familiar, in Dr. Seuss`s picture books. Drawing on Christina Klein`s concept of ＂Cold War Orientalism,＂ this essay attempts to situate or contextualize the Asian or exotic others in three of Seuss`s books of the 1950s. They are If I Ran the Zoo (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953), and On Beyond Zebra! (1955). It seeks to consider how exoticism may be utilized as a textual strategy for self-identification in the three books, and how the exoticism deployed is connected with the cultural politics of Seuss`s times. By attending to the cultural politics of the Cold War, the essay recognizes that Seuss`s books are products of historical and social circumstances, demanding a further understanding of the contexts surrounding textual representation. It suggests that Dr. Seuss not only appropriates exoticist codes of cultural representation but also converts them into tropes representing new experiences for the children who learn to read.