Children’s Literature in Place 9781032409498, 9781032409511, 9781003355502

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Children’s Literature in Place

Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. This volume proposes a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. By making place studies a guiding principle, this book builds on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture to bring together and provide a comprehensive overview of how to study place in children’s and young adult literature. This volume provides a wide range of approaches and international perspectives of place in children’s literature, media, and culture and contributes to this growing and relevant field by showcasing various scholarly aspects and approaches to children’s literature, and the place of children’s literature in the context of international scholarship. Željka Flegar is an Associate Professor at the University of Osijek in Croatia, where she teaches and does research in English language and literature, media, and drama. She has published articles on the linguistic and narrative aspects of children’s literature and culture, adaptations, and popular media. She co-edited, with Ivana Moritz, the collection Children and Languages Today: First and Second Language Literacy Development (2019). Since 2020, Flegar has been a member of the editorial board of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Longwood University, USA (2021). Jennifer M. Miskec is a Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, USA, where she co-directs the Children’s Literature English Major Concentration and Children’s Literature Minor and teaches several children’s and young adult literature and culture courses. Miskec also leads children’s culture study abroad programs to Croatia and Serbia and to South Africa. Miskec’s scholarly work is primarily centered on studies of contemporary American children’s and YA literature. Miskec coedited, with Annette Wannamaker, a collection of essays on Early Readers, The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (Routledge, 2016). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia (2019) and a Fulbright Specialist at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2022).

Children’s Literature and Culture

Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor Philip Nel, Series Editor, 2011–2018 Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall, Current Series Editors

Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children’s Literature and Culture is the longest-running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture, in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. Children’s Literature and Culture offers cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race, picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature Danielle E. Price Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature Edited by Eleanor Spencer and Jade Dillon Craig Lying, Truthtelling, and Storytelling in Children’s and Young Adult Literature Telling It Slant Anita Tarr Children’s Literature in Place Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture Edited by Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Childrens-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/SE0686

Children’s Literature in Place Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture

Edited by Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec

Designed cover image: Cover Illustration from THE BOOK OF MISTAKES by Corinna Luyken, copyright © 2017 by Corinna Luyken. Used by permission of Rocky Pond Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-40949-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-40951-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35550-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix

Introduction: Children’s Places, Spaces, Literature, and Culture

1

ŽELJKA FLEGAR AND JENNIFER M. MISKEC

PART I

Place, Space, and Identity11   1 “Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle”: Place and Foreignness in The Unforgotten Coat

13

BEN SCREECH

  2 Skiing and Being Swedish: Taking a Cold Look at Winter Picturebooks

21

BJÖRN SUNDMARK

  3 Cows on the Cover: Dairy Queen and Regional Literature

31

RHONDA BROCK-SERVAIS

  4 John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces

39

MICHAEL J. MARTIN

PART II

Aesthetics of Place47   5 Confronting “Un-London”: Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes HEATHER K. CYR

49

vi Contents   6 Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World

59

CATHERINE OLVER

  7 A Sleuthing Place: Child Detectives and Their Offices

68

CHRIS MCGEE

PART III

(Dis)placement and Mobility77   8 “Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want”: The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence

79

CAROLINE HAMILTON-MCKENNA

  9 Whirlpooling Feminist Rage: Gang Rape-Revenge in Foul Is Fair and The Nowhere Girls

88

AMBER MOORE

10 A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People: Harriet M. Welsch’s Small-Town New York City

96

EMMA K. MCNAMARA

11 How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program in Three Easy Steps

103

JENNIFER M. MISKEC

PART IV

Place Attachment111 12 Making Home: The Queer Ecological Possibilities of Children’s Picturebooks

113

KATHLEEN FORRESTER

13 Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story: Country, Multimodality, and Living Space

122

MELANIE DUCKWORTH

14 Re-placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene: Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors

132

HATICE BAY

15 Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature MEGHAN M. SWEENEY

141

Contents  vii PART V

Spectrality and Memory149 16 Dearly Departed: The Arrival’s Spectral Refugee

151

KATHARINE SLATER

17 Someone’s Missing: The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law in Selected Children’s Picturebooks from the Philippines

162

JOSE MONFRED C. SY

18 Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark, and NineteenthCentury Notions of Adolescence

171

IVY LINTON STABELL

PART VI

Placing Readers179 19 Space, Place, and Readers: Understanding Setting as “Placing-in-Process”

181

MARGARET MACKEY

20 Child and Teen Demographics in Movement through the Fantastic Place of London

192

MADISON MCLEOD

21 Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation

204

SMILJANA NARANČIĆ KOVAČ

22 Canon Out of Place: Centering Lived Realities in Neurodivergent Middle Grade Literature

214

JENNIFER SLAGUS

PART VII

Virtual and Archival Spaces223 23 “The Ickabog Illustration Competition”: Showcasing Reader Responses and a Transnational Poetics of Place

225

ŽELJKA FLEGAR

24 Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature: From Mysterious Dusty Libraries to Cities Made of Books MARETTA SIDIROPOULOU

236

viii Contents 25 Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series 244 LANCE WELDY

26 An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations for Young People

252

ELIZABETH GARRI

Contributors261 Index269

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Fulbright Program for enabling us to work together in Virginia, USA, for six months to pursue this research project. In the spirit of the Fulbright Program, this place-based collaboration truly brought together scholars from different countries and backgrounds. We would also like to thank Jennie’s affiliation, Longwood University, for hosting Željka for the duration of her Fulbright stay; and the University of Osijek in Croatia for supporting Željka’s international exchange and academic collaborations. Many thanks to Children’s Literature Association for hosting the 2013 conference children’s literature panel on Croatia where we met and to the Croatian Association of Researchers in Children’s Literature that works to promote children’s literature scholarship in Croatia and abroad. There are many people who contributed to this project and provided us with valuable insights. Although the project was initially intended as an analysis of the more metaphorical and virtual landscapes of children’s culture, the intense changes in circumstances that have occurred since the original proposal in 2019 have prompted us to take a closer look at the specific and more diverse geographies of childhood and literature, both actual and metaphorical. Our gratitude goes out to our institutions, colleagues, friends, and families for adapting to new circumstances of culture, place, and change.

Introduction Children’s Places, Spaces, Literature, and Culture Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec

There’s a saying that pops up in different places that those who travel have stories to tell.1 According to John Zilcosky, author of Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, “Contemporary critics take this one step further, claiming that all narration is a form of travel, exemplified by metaphor’s etymological root in ‘change of place’” ­(Zilcosky 3). Surely, a need for a change of place—reading as travel—is what drives many people to literature. And reading literature models how we ­narrate our own life stories; as Karen Coats says in her article “The End?: ­Approaches to Closure in Early Readers,” “a proper story is not merely the recitation of things that happen one after another, but the shaping of experience into patterns that show relationships” (58). This is why a person’s vacation slideshow is an often-parodied nightmare—see Terry Pratchett’s Eric—but their carefully crafted retellings or strategically delivered Instagram post can be genuinely entertaining. Children’s literature in particular relies on the ability to provide “a change of place” as well as a sense of place because of its audience. In many cases, children’s literature provides a profound way of understanding place. The famous places of children’s literature are iconic, at least in part because of the nature of its kept audience, limited in autonomous movement as most kids are. This refers to both the setting and the cultural phenomena that extend beyond the printed page. Place enables us to look closely at the complexities of and changes in (children’s) literature and culture. Places are culturally relevant, in all their many public, private, and professional manifestations—and it is where we begin. Place studies is an exciting interdisciplinary field that combines environmental, educational, cultural, literary, and media practices of human culture. In Place: A Short Introduction (2004), human geographer Tim Cresswell argues that “place” is a space that people have made meaningful. While landscapes can be observed objectively, and spaces may be abstract, places are imbued with personal and cultural meaning and attachment (8–11). The places and spaces of children’s literature are varied and diverse. For some time, DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-1

2  Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec we have also been observing the plurality of places, spaces, and landscapes of literature, media, and culture that are constantly shifting and changing, and where boundaries are crossed and negotiated. It is those “seismic shifts,” as Siobhan O’Flynn points out in the epilogue to Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2013), and changes in cultural landscapes, that we would like more closely observed. Thus, our goal was to look into the possibilities of studying place in children’s literature and sort out the way various genres and forms contribute to this growing area of study. In this collection of children’s culture essays, we seek to answer questions pertaining to place, change of place, and story: What is children’s culture’s place in popular culture? How is children’s literature and culture influenced by and how does it influence the world? What are the new and emerging spaces and places of children’s culture? Are there places that were considered children’s culture that are no longer just for children? Are there places that don’t seem to be children’s places that demand a new assessment? Where, more than children’s culture, are questions of change of place—like movement and travel—more connected or more important? It is not surprising that the field of children’s literature has responded to considerations of place because the places of children’s literature and culture are so influential. In addition to classroom-based ethnographies and even tourism and leisure studies’ considerations of the child as experienceconsumer, many children’s literature-specific works have tackled the topics of places, spaces, and landscapes of children’s literature and culture, from broad examinations, such as those in texts like The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (1991, 1995, 2002) by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, to more specific approaches, such as Karen Chandler and Michelle Martin’s special issue of IRCL on Black Spaces in International Children’s Literature. Entire series and books are dedicated to specific topics, such as ecocriticism, landscapes, and the environment in Kenneth Kidd and Sidney Dobrin’s edited collection Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (2004), Experiencing Environment and Place through Children’s Literature (2011) edited by Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Philip G. Payne, and Alan Reid, and Suzanne Jane Carroll’s Landscape in Children’s Literature (2011). Concerns of nationality and identity can be found in texts like Clare Bradford’s Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007); The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations in Childhood (2013) edited by Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Björn Sundmark; and Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature (2011) edited by Terri Doughty and Dawn Thompson. Recent pieces bring up movement and mapping in Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present (2015) edited by Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, and Malini Roy; Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes (2017) by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer; and Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography (2018) edited by Aïda Hudson.

Introduction  3 Specific places, spaces, and landscapes have been explored in classic and modern fiction, fictional locations like Moominland (Sundmark), Druid’s Grove, and Narnia (Waller), and urban landscapes in Children’s Literature and New York City (2014) by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan. And of course, heavy-hitters like Margaret Mackey have given us great insight into fictional world-building and cognition in articles like “Placing Readers: Diverse Routes to the Cognitive Challenge of Fictional World-­ Building” (2019). Scholars have done well to explore place in children’s media, too, in works such as Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (2016) by Pamela Robertson Wojcik. With literary and media scholarship bringing forth a variety of perspectives, we continue to see new pathways and geographies being explored. In this book, we offer an overview or a tentative typology of place in children’s literature, but also the place of children’s literature in modern cultural and literary theories—intrigued by John Stephens’ observations on the place of children’s literature at the turn of the century in “Children’s Literature, Text, and Theory: What Are We Interested in Now?” (2000). It is our aim to build on the impressive body of international research on place in children’s literature, media, and culture—the already-existing studies on borders, displacement, exile, and diaspora; the environment, environmental activism, and environmental education; the Indigenous experiences and understanding of place and home; gender and imaginative geographies; maps and mapping; and identity and media. Here, too, we consider essays on literary and media phenomena as well as individual case studies focused on the places and spaces of children’s culture. Perhaps what makes us different, though, is both our theoretical underpinning and our scope. First, we make place studies our guiding principle, what Jennifer Case describes as “a promising interdisciplinary field … offering a shared forum for the interrelated study of natural, built, social, and cultural environments, individual and community identities, and human experience” that allows all aspects of considerations of place, physical, fictional, and virtual, and from many disciplines. Of course, what is inside of a piece of children’s literature is important here, the world-building, the setting. But place studies allow us to “zoom in” as much as “zoom out,” to consider what’s inside of the narratives of children’s culture, as well as how those narratives affect the world around us. While notable studies so far have focused on specific aspects of place, such as the more recent Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children’s Narratives (2022) edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West, or Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks (2023) edited by Torsten Schmiedeknecht, Jill Rudd, and Emma Hayward, we provide an overview of the possible ways to study place in children’s and young adult literature by using and categorizing a variety of perspectives and approaches.

4  Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec Children’s Literature in Place: Surveying the Landscapes of Children’s Culture is an edited collection dedicated to individual, international, and interdisciplinary considerations of the places and spaces of contemporary children’s literature, media, and culture, from content to methodology, in fictional, virtual, and material settings. In it, we propose a survey of the changing landscapes of children’s culture, the expected and unexpected spaces and places that emerge as and because of children’s culture. For this edited collection, we received submissions from very different parts of the world. Our fellow scholars who committed to contributing to this collection saw this topic as very relevant and applicable in their own contexts. They offered us an array of international perspectives on place and place scholarship, what is currently being done in the field in places around the world as well as what remains to be done in children’s literature scholarship worldwide. Overall, this collection is diverse, international, and cross-disciplinary in nature. While it does stay within literary and textual studies, it offers an array of topics and approaches situated in ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer and multispecies approaches, neurodiversity, adaptation studies, digital humanities, media studies, literary tourism and place-based learning, cognitive approaches, translation studies, and ideology criticism. Some of the places (re)visited in this collection are Indigenous places, spaces, and landscapes of America and Australia, the cities of London and New York, rural Wisconsin, Greek libraries, the spectral landscapes of the Philippines, “Croatian” Wonderland, the Wizarding World, young detectives’ offices, Englishness and foreignness, abandoned places, and winter landscapes and Swedishness. In doing so, our contributors looked at a number of literary genres—picturebooks, middlegrade books, young adult literature, realistic fiction, fantasy, nuclear fiction, and evangelical media—and also media landscapes through modern adaptations and cross-media practices. In the spirit of the worldwide Fulbright Program,2 we invited international, interdisciplinary scholarly collaborations, but also, in the spirit of this collection, academic conversations about aspects of children’s culture that don’t have an obvious scholarly place. Included here are issues of Indigeneity, ecocriticism, fictional and nonfictional places and spaces, mobility, displacement, and spectrality, concepts of home and place attachment, rural and urban spaces, and the role of illustrations, maps, and multimedia. We also acknowledge new places, spaces, landscapes, and geographies that contemporarily emerged and add to the academic conversations of place by including reader responses, digital humanities, virtual and archival spaces of media and popular culture, and more encompassing discussions of children’s culture from multiple perspectives of place. Although the collection offers an overview of texts, media, theories, and approaches, it also challenges and problematizes the commonly accepted theories of place, the landscapes of literature and childhood, and discussions on child

Introduction  5 agency and identity. Some of the chapters are in dialogue with one another and some of the concepts are expanded within the thematic Parts. The collection consists of 7 Parts and 26 chapters. To increase the dynamics of the text and include a variety of genres and topics, we opted for a shorter format of chapters. This also reflects the current media landscapes, their quick pace, and exchange of information. Mostly, however, in our discussions of children’s places as varied and transgressive, we wanted to get to an array of approaches and locations in an essential and precise way. In the context of social and cultural changes, we found joy in using place studies to “unlock” children’s literature by traversing the boundaries of book, genre, authorship, intended audience, aesthetics, modality, academic field, as well as assumptions about and perceptions of children’s literature. We found much sense in bringing home trends in children’s literature scholarship from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries, and in this way finding a venue for place-based exploratory studies of works for children, children’s culture, and children’s places. In her cognitive study of children’s poetry, Karen Coats argues that it enables us “to move from being bodies in the world to being bodies in language” (134). Although focused on a specific genre, Coats’s sentiment addresses different aspects of our aim and scope. We, too, seek to investigate both “bodies in the world” and “bodies in language” by exploring the gap between the physical immediacy of place and the cognitive embodiment of place. We are concerned, here, with the production and reception of children’s literature, but also the augmentation and extension of children’s literature into digital and physical environments. In this way, we hope to highlight the complexities of where children’s culture is and how it moves in and out of different kinds of spaces. In our first Part, “Place, Space, and Identity,” we explore Children’s Literature and/about/in real places. To begin with, we have a series of essays dedicated to the exploration of place as the location of culture, behaviors, and practices unique to a specific locale, and how that place is invoked in literature for young readers. In “‘Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle’: Place and Foreignness in The Unforgotten Coat,” Ben Screech considers how “the foreigner becomes a character trope utilized in part by authors to comment on, critique and suggest new ways of perceiving a specific place” in contemporary British children’s literature. Björn Sundmark pays special attention to seasons, sport, and Swedish identity in “Skiing and Being Swedish: Taking a Cold Look at Winter Picturebooks.” Rhonda BrockServais considers Wisconsin in her piece, “Cows on the Cover: Dairy Queen and Regional Literature,” both the way in which Wisconsin is often stereotyped as a ridiculous place, cold and full of cows, and the way skilled authors can construct a sense of Wisconsin as a real place, emotionally recognizable to locals. Michael Martin, on the other hand, takes on John

6  Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec Green’s YA novels and the way his characters utilize abandoned spaces in his piece “John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces.” Part II discusses the aesthetics of place, the way the physical landmarks and features are structured with(in) the narrative and how they are significant for meaning-making. In “Confronting ‘Un-London’: Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes,” Heather K. Cyr works with Svetlana Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia and presents the possibility of child agency in an urban environment by looking at landscapes of contemporary London and particularly statues as central characters in the story. Catherine Olver brings together narrative theory and the wonders of architecture in “Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World.” And finally, Chris McGee, in his article “A Sleuthing Place: Child Detectives and Their Offices,” delves into the creation and significance of young sleuth’s office spaces in children’s mysteries. Part III, “(Dis)placement and Mobility,” opens with Caroline HamiltonMcKenna’s “‘Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want’: The Contingent ­Mobilities of Literary Adolescence.” Hamilton-McKenna offers a timely investigation of how contemporary YA authors grapple with access, space, mobility, and teen culture. In a consideration of how the mistreatment of space and place speaks to larger ideological value systems, in “Whirlpooling Feminist Rage: Gang Rape-Revenge in Foul is Fair and The Nowhere Girls,” Amber Moore looks at how the raping of lands and bodies are often linked, and how pervasive rape myths are concerned with geography and place, as seen in contemporary YA assault narratives. In “A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People: Harriet M. Welsch’s Small Town New York City,” Emma McNamara uses urban and rural theory to consider Louise Fitzhugh’s New York City in Harriet the Spy by looking at the wellknown text that invokes a different kind of New York City. And finally, framed by the route of her longtime study abroad program and placedbased learning theory, in “How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program in Three Easy Steps,” Jennifer M. Miskec shares the secret of developing a successful short-term placed-based children’s culture study abroad program “with Place as a way of seeing, children’s culture as your text, and Global Citizenship Education as your pedagogy.” We then move on to studies of the Earth as our place, cultural ecology, and how the environment functions as a catalyst and metaphor for negotiations of power, identity, and place in Children’s Literature. In Part IV, “Place Attachment,” we look into considerations of “feminist and queer ecological understanding of home as a dynamic and relational place of making and unmaking” in “Making Home: The Queer Ecological Possibilities of Children’s Picturebooks” by Kathleen Forrester, who looks to contemporary picturebooks that explore the idea of home in a way that

Introduction  7 dismantles the hierarchy of humans over the rest of the natural world. And in “Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story: Country, Multimodality, and Living Space,” Melanie Duckworth looks closely at the destruction of nature due to nuclear disaster in Australian literature. In “Re-placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene: Carole Lindstroms’s We Are Water Protectors,” Hatice Bay considers children’s “non-innocent” dialogues with natural places and considerations of Indigenous land in the 2020 Caldecott winner We Are Water Protectors. Meghan Sweeney follows up with “Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature,” a broader consideration of water activist books, a category in which We Are Water Protectors is an example, and a “deep place attachment.” Part V explores spectrality and memory—the intangible, abandoned and absent aspects of place. In “Dearly Departed: The Arrival’s Spectral Refugee,” Katharine Slater asks readers “to reckon with the affective and material costs of geographic and emotional displacement: what it means to depart, to be unsafe, and to be expendable” in Shaun Tan’s new homeland. Jose Monfred C. Sy turns our attention to the spatialities of the Philippines under Martial Law. In his piece, “Someone’s Missing: The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law in Selected Children’s Picturebooks from the Philippines,” Sy looks at how contemporary picturebooks respond to the traumatic time of the Marcos and Duterte regimes, offering readers meaning-making strategies through its construction of presence and absence. Ivy Linton Stabell, on the other hand, looks outward, how children’s literature, memory, and spectrality influence physical, real-world places. In “Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark, and Nineteenth-Century Notions of Adolescence,” Linton Stabell begins with a discussion of literary tourism and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, a gravestone for whom was placed in Trinity Church graveyard in New York City. According to Linton Stabell, “The gravesite, created to attract tourists emotionally invested in the plight of this famous, if fictional, adolescent, produced an emblem of the unique dangers of later childhood.” Part VI, “Placing Readers,” brings together a variety of fields, disciplines, and approaches, such as cognitive studies, digital humanities, translation studies, and neurodiversity. To appropriately begin this discussion, in “Space, Place, and Readers: Understanding Setting as ‘Placing-inProcess’” we turn to Margaret Mackey’s theories of embodied cognition, which she uses to explore how “readers are placed; they are always somewhere when they read, and awareness of their own space is part of how they respond to the challenge of bringing written words to life in the mind.” Madison McLeod takes up a similar cause with her large-scale investigation of fantasy children’s and young adult novels set in London. In “Child and Teen Demographics in Movement through the Fantastic Place of London,” McLeod applies geospatial technologies, such as digital maps,

8  Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec Google maps, and ArcGIS, to re-explore the meaning of space, place, and a fantasy-London setting. On the other hand, in “Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation,” Smiljana Narančić Kovač analyzes the changes of the original places in the storyworlds of different translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Croatian and of Croatian dramatizations by looking at target spaces and places in translation. Finally, Jennifer Slagus offers a glimpse into how place works in the largely unexplored category of middle-grade novels in her article “Canon Out of Place: Centering Lived Realities in Neurodivergent Middle Grade Literature,” a category of children’s literature that has long languished in a liminal space. In our final Part, “Virtual and Archival Spaces,” we play with the idea of location and the places in which we find children’s culture. We consider where children’s literature and culture is found—bookshops, libraries, movie theaters, and theme parks—but also how those texts live in many places all at once, as with cross- and transmediated adaptations. In “‘The Ickabog Illustration Competition’: Showcasing Reader Responses and a Transnational Poetics of Place” Željka Flegar discusses cross-media reader responses to and adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s fairy tale The Ickabog, released online during the lockdown of 2020 and illustrated by children around the world. Then Maretta Sidiropoulou discusses how Greek children’s library spaces are shaped by the nature of reading in “Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature: From Mysterious Dusty Libraries to Cities Made of Books.” We move, then, into the adaptation/ mediation space as we think about storytelling across media, and the deliberate and psychologically significant choices artists make as they rework children’s literature. In his chapter, “Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series,” Lance Weldy contemplates the multiple meanings of “home” that are informed through virtual narratives in animated series like The Flying House that aired on CBN as an understudied subgenre of evangelical media produced for children in the 1980s. Elizabeth Garri takes to heart Christopher Myers’s call to action in his 2014 plea in the The New York Times “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature” in her article, “An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations for Young People” and discusses “diverse adaptations in youth culture, stories for young readers in which authors and other artists are making a concerted effort to rework the ‘classics’ into responsible cultural maps.” Place, Tim Cresswell explains, is both incredibly complex and deceptively simple. Thus, to explore “THE Place” of children’s culture is an impossible task—and a wonderful thing. Children’s culture is literally and figuratively everywhere, still in the traditionally child-centered and childfriendly places, like schools and playgrounds, and also in more adult-­ centered places, alongside of and one and the same as mainstream popular

Introduction  9 culture. Here we look closely at some of those varied and diverse places, as well as the places of children’s literature and media constructs. In doing so, we join human, cultural, and political geographers, sociologists, educators, as well as the children’s literature theorists who came before us, all of whom appreciate the emotional and intellectual value of place and let place give us a new way of reading (children’s) culture. As Julie Pfeiffer writes in her editorial introduction to Volume 38 (2010) of Children’s Literature, “I’m delighted to imagine the many readers of this volume— each sitting in a different place around the world—joined for the moment in the act of expanding their view of children’s literature and the world it inhabits” (vii). We, too, would like to add to and expand on the multiple ways of seeing the world in and through children’s literature, media, and culture by offering a number of perspectives from different disciplines and approaches; geographic, historical, and virtual locations; and genres. Notes 1 Technically, this phrase is an abridgement of a larger sentiment that offers a warning about “fish stories.” The Gaels, for example, say “An té a bhíonn siúlach, bíonn sé scéalach agus an té a bhíonn scéalach bíonn sé bréagach” or “He who travels is talkative (full of stories), and he who is talkative has a tendency to lie.” And German poet Claudius Matthias inserts a clever malapropism to make a similar point when he uses “verzählen” instead of “erzählen” in his poem “Urians Reise um die Welt”: “Wenn einer eine Reise tut, so kann er was verzählen.” Here, that one letter playfully turns “If someone goes on a journey, he can tell something” into “If someone goes on a journey, he can count something wrong.” Nonetheless, altered versions of both have been widely adapted as romantic, pro-travel sentiments. You can even get jewelry with just the first half of the Gaelic phrase printed on it. Since our project is focused on children’s fiction and its place in popular culture, we are more concerned with the idea of story than with truth, and so we embrace the misusage. 2 The Fulbright Program is the flagship US government-sponsored international educational exchange program which has been building a network of distinguished scholars, students, artists, and professionals worldwide for over 75 years. This proposed collection is the product of collaborations that began with Jennifer’s Fulbright to Croatia in 2019 and were brought to life during Željka’s Fulbright to the United States in 2021.

Works Cited Bradford, Clare. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. Carroll, Suzanne Jane. Landscape in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2011. Case, Jennifer. “Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction.” ASSAY: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, Fall 2017. Assayjournal. com. Accessed 20 Feb. 2022.

10  Željka Flegar and Jennifer M. Miskec Coats, Karen. “The End?: Approaches to Closure in Early Readers.” The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, edited by Jennifer Miskec and Annette Wannamaker, Routledge, 2016, pp. 57–70. ———. “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 2, Dec. 2013, pp. 127–142, https:// doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2013.0094. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. Cutter-Mackenzie, Amy, et al., editors. Experiencing Environment and Place through Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2011. Doughty, Terri, and Dawn Thompson, editors. Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Goga, Nina, and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, editors. Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes. John Benjamins, 2017. Hudson, Aïda, editor. Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. Jackson, Kathy Merlock, and Mark I. West, editors. Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children’s Narratives. MacFarland, 2022. Kelen, Kit, and Björn Sundmark, editors. The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations in Childhood. Routledge, 2013. Kidd, Kenneth, and Sidney Dobrin, editors. Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Wayne State UP, 2004. Mackey, Margaret. “Placing Readers: Diverse Routes to the Cognitive Challenge of Fictional World-Building.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 2019, pp. 415–431, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2019.0048. Nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. Pearson, 2003. Pfeiffer, Julie. “From the Editors.” Children’s Literature, vol. 38, 2010, pp. vii–x. Pratchett, Terry. Eric: A Novel of Discworld. 1990. Harper, 2013. Sachiko Cecire, Maria, et al., editors. Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present. Routledge, 2015. Schmiedeknecht, Torsten, et al., editors. Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks. Routledge, 2023. Stephens, John. “Children’s Literature, Text, and Theory: What Are We Interested Now?” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, Aug. 2000, pp. 12–21. https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2000vol10no2art1346 Sundmark, Björn. “‘A Serious Game’: Mapping Moominland.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 162–181, https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2014.0022. Waller, Alison. “Revisiting Childhood Landscapes: Revenants of Druid’s Grove and Narnia.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 34, no. 3, Sept. 2010, pp. 303– 319. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2010.a404266 Whyte, Pádraic, and Keith O’Sullivan, editors. Children’s Literature and New York City. Routledge, 2014. Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Rutgers, 2016. Zilcosky, John. Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey. U of Toronto P, 2008.

Part I

Place, Space, and Identity

1 “Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle” Place and Foreignness in The Unforgotten Coat Ben Screech As Rebecca Saunders argues in The Concept of the Foreign, the “consequential nuances” of foreignness are “rarely analyzed” (10). One of the aims of this chapter is to remedy this. In so doing, we will consider how literary representations of place perhaps inevitably impinge on authorial constructions of foreignness, in a case study text aimed at young readers— Frank Cottrell Boyce’s The Unforgotten Coat (20112). Foreignness as a theme appears routinely in a contemporary corpus of fiction for young people. It may, for example, be examined through the lens of race and racism, as in the Carnegie Medal-winning The Other Side of Truth (2000) by Beverley Naidoo, through culture and ethnicity, as in Trish Cooke’s So Much! (1994), or refugee and asylum narratives, of which Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy (2001) is a prime example. The foreign protagonist is frequently viewed in these texts as a liberatory figure, whose presence is shown to have a positive impact on the lives of the novels’ secondary characters and, as we will see, this is the case in this chapter’s primary text. This chapter draws on aspects of Postcolonial theory, engaging with Edward Said’s seminal writings in Orientalism (1978) which traces the emergence of the figure of the foreigner to Western attitudes to the “exotic” Orient. We will see how the foreigner becomes a character trope utilized in part by authors to comment on, critique, and suggest new ways of perceiving a specific place—in the case of this novel, suburban England. Prior to beginning this chapter’s textual analyses, it is necessary to further define “foreign” in terms of its use in this context as well as to introduce certain synonyms for the term that arise in the texts. The original derivation of the term can be located in the Latin “foras” meaning “outside.” This etymology is pertinent given the contemporary interpretation of the foreign as continually existing “relative to the inside, the domestic, the familiar, a boundary” (Saunders 3, my italics). Such a “relative” consideration of the foreign draws inevitably on negative definitions, for example, the manner in which foreignness involves not being part of an in-group, DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-3

14  Ben Screech not sharing a common language and not adhering to the host country’s customs. Foreignness is, as Saunders contends, “to be unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate, improper” (3). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, notions of power and hierarchy also appear in terms of definitions of foreignness. The psychologist Coco Owen describes how evocations of the foreign appear in discourse as the “not us we say it is” (180). This highlights the presence of an unchallenged voice (“we”) evidently in possession of the ability to decide what constitutes foreignness. Who, we might ask, is this “we”? On what authority does it delineate foreignness, and from where does this power (the right to speak, to make distinctions and to impose “boundaries”) arise? For Foucault, this is the privilege of a ruling elite, or “politically dominant class” (222), the “nationally” stable (306) individuals benefiting from “capital accumulation” and “legal status of property” (86). In Lacanian terms, Owen’s all-powerful “we” indicates those included in the “symbolic order” representative of the language, rules and dictates of a society. Conversely, the foreigner exists outside of such an order and, as we see in The Unforgotten Coat, has the power to disrupt it. The Unforgotten Coat is the story of Chingis and Nergui, two Mongolian brothers who arrive unannounced in a primary school classroom in Bootle, a suburb of Liverpool, having, they declare, “walked” from Mongolia “along the railway track” (Boyce 31). This claim is never challenged or refuted in the text and the question of whether they were accompanied on this epic journey by their parents also remains ominously unsolved. Indeed, the various “weird” (Boyce 25) tales Chingis and Nergui regale their new classmates contribute to the sense of exoticism that surrounds the brothers. Chingis and Nergui explain that they are fugitives from a figure they menacingly term “the demon” (30). This is ultimately revealed to be a metaphor for the immigration authorities who, throughout the novel, hound the two boys. As a result, their family is forced to live like “nomads” (30) to evade deportation. As the author explains in the afterword, The Unforgotten Coat was written to explore a newcomer’s perspective on a small, “culturally deprived” (104) English town (Bootle—a suburb of Liverpool). The novel is concerned with how the “presence” (Boyce 103) of these two foreign visitors has the potential to “enrich” (103) the lives of Bootle’s young inhabitants. Notably in the afterword, Boyce describes the real-life inspiration for the characters of Chingis and Nergui—a girl called Misheel he met at a primary school during an author visit: She was a refugee from Mongolia and she just lit up the room. The other children were touchingly proud of her and told me about the time Misheel turned up at the school disco in full Mongolian costume with

“Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle”  15 her elaborate headdress and fabulous robes … Her presence massively enriched their lives … There’s a line in the book about Xanadu being hidden in the heart of Bootle, and that’s what she seemed to be—a wonder of the world living among them. (103–104) Mongolia, the native home of the real-life Misheel and the fictitious characters Chingis and Nergui that she evidently inspired, acts as a place of Otherness in the text. It is juxtaposed throughout the novel by Julie, the narrator, with the humdrum surroundings of Bootle. The line regarding “Xanadu” to which Boyce refers in the passage above refers to Julie’s belief that there is a crucial missing part of her town that was “buried like treasure” (27), but due to the arrival of the brothers, is in the process of being revealed. Xanadu (also known as Shangdu) was the capital of the Kublai Khan’s Yuan dynasty in China. In the Western mind, Xanadu has become representative of foreignness, and of the stereotypical image of the Eastern/“Oriental” world. In 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem “Kubla Khan” which was inspired by historical accounts of the city. Some of the adjectives Coleridge employs in his evocation of Xanadu as a site of inherent foreignness include “holy,” “enchanted,” “incense-bearing” and “ancient” (254). Christopher Kaplonski describes how, in the Western mind, Mongolia, the site of the mysterious “Xanadu” referred to in the novel, has long been “associated with a degree of Otherness through [its] association with traditional ethnic costumes [and] dances” (177). Kaplonski also references Roland Barthes’ interpretation of ethnicity as a “boundary marker” (177). This relates to our previous discussion of the manner in which the concept of the foreign is inexorably associated with the human need to impose “boundaries” (Saunders 3) in order to delineate “in” and “outgroups.” Indeed, such notions of boundaries and their existence between, for example, East and West, foreign and native and power and powerlessness, are also central components of Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism. One of Said’s primary arguments in this work is that, throughout history, the West has consistently perceived the Eastern (“Oriental”) world as being inherently Other in the manner he describes in the following passage: The Orient and Orientals [are] stamped with an Otherness—as all that is different, whether it be “subject” or “object”—but of a constitutive Otherness, of an essentialist character. This “object” of study will be, as is customary, passive, nonparticipating, endowed with a “historical” subjectivity, above all, non-active, nonautonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself. (97) Western (or “Occidental” [252] to refer to the term used throughout Orientalism) attitudes to the “Oriental” Other inevitably involve, Said argues,

16  Ben Screech the denial of agency. Once again, note the use of negative prefixes (“­non”) in this regard. He describes how the West has historically maintained and exploited this powerlessness, with reference to the colonial policies of Britain during the heyday of its Empire. He continues to argue that the “Orient” is constructed “with Britain always in the master’s place” (215), through the eyes therefore, of the Western colonist. Citing both Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and The Order of Things, Said associates this dynamic with the Poststructuralist contention that Otherness is inevitably a construction of the powerful elite. To maintain control, Said argues, they engage continually in processes of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and the withholding of agency from those whose presence threatens to disrupt or curtail the power of the dominant order. Through the example of British rule in India (244), Said demonstrates how colonialism was dependent on such exclusive “boundary” mentalities, i.e., the Western need to “separate an [Occidental] ‘us’ from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West” (244). He also argues that the Otherness of the Orient from a Western perspective is due, in part, to its status as “something unknown and distant” (93). Developing this idea with reference to children’s literature, the critic Perry Nodelman establishes a link between the “mysterious unknowability of the alien Other” found in “constructions of the Orient,” and “the constructions of childhood found in children’s literature” (165). This is pertinent in relation to The Unforgotten Coat, in which Chingis and Nergui’s foreignness appears due, in part, to their fundamental “unknowability.” Indeed, from the moment they arrive in their new school, the brothers become objects of “exotic” intrigue to their classmates. In the following passage, Nergui impersonates a Mongolian eagle, fascinating his peers: “Where do you get eagles from? Eagles R Us?” “Everyone has eagles where I come from.” “Where’s that then?” “Mongolia.” … They kept telling him to make eagle noises … His sleeves were flapping loose and he did fully look like a bird. (15) For Said, the Otherness of the Orient stems from its “parading” of the “exotic and strange” (188–189). Foreignness and “theatricality” (188), he argues, go hand-in-hand, and this is certainly the case in terms of Boyce’s representation of Chingis and Nergui. The brothers, from their initial spectacular entrance at the beginning of the novel, clad in the “mad coats” Julie describes as “long, like dressing-gowns, with fur inside” (Boyce 9), “perform” their foreignness on the “theatrical stage” (63) of the classroom. In their discussion of Performing National Identity (2008), Manfred

“Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle”  17 Pfister and Ralf Hertel consider the “transactional” nature of “performing intercultural identit[ies]” (329) in which the performance of Otherness can be interpreted as a gift to the host(s), who in turn duly “perform their own national identity” (24) in an act of reciprocity. The “transactional” nature of foreignness is explored in the novel with Chingis employing Julie as a “guide” to his “new country”: “we need to find a good guide. You will be our good guide in this place” (Boyce 16). The brothers reciprocate by “enriching the lives” (53) of their classmates, who become increasingly enamored by Chingis and Nergui’s stories, personalities as well as what they learn of their home culture as the novel progresses. Such a “transactional” relationship is also explored in terms of the power dynamic that exists between foreign guest and host in the novel. Chingis and Nergui’s foreignness and therefore inherent lack of understanding of the various codes of conduct inherent to the institution in which they have found themselves (i.e., a primary school in the suburban north of England) means that they fail to comply with the fundamental rules around which this place is organized. This contrasts with their peers who have been conditioned by this environment into functioning within its governing “discourse”—the kinds of regulatory rules, bells and timetables that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish (1975). The power of the Other, Foucault suggests, is one in part, of social resistance. Moreover, however, their subjectivity presents a perspective from which certain actions contained within certain power relations may be interpreted as transformative and/or emancipatory. For example, discussing a situation in which the oppression of the Other appears inevitable, Foucault asserts that “we are not trapped [because] we are always in this kind of situation. It means we always have possibilities of changing the situation” (Sex/ Power 167). With this in mind, Chingis and Nergui’s status as outsiders in the place in which they find themselves is, at times in the text, presented as liberatory because of the power they have to “change their situation,” a power their classmates do not share. For example, at the beginning of the novel, Chingis engages in a “struggle for power” (Boyce 11) with the class teacher Mrs Spendlove. He challenges her authority by insisting Nergui is allowed to be enrolled in the same year-group, despite the obvious age-gap between the two boys: “[He] needs to go to a different class” Chingis looked up and said “No.” It was the second time he’d said no to her. Once might be a mistake. Twice was game on … We were witnessing a struggle for power. (Boyce 11) By uttering the word “no” (11), Chingis asserts his decision not to comply with the “discourse of truth” (Discipline 197) that Mrs Spendlove has

18  Ben Screech constructed and therefore becomes the “powerful” party in this exchange. Following this, and subsequent other acts of passive resistance from Chingis, the long-suffering Mrs Spendlove relents and, with “normal” (Boyce 25) protocols long-since abandoned, Chingis “end[s] up with everything he wanted” (12). The “magic” (62) that Chingis and Nergui bring to this otherwise unremarkable part of England appears then to be inexorably associated with the boys’ status as what Starc terms “alien bodies” (141). Their foreignness is shown to be “enriching” (Boyce 104), a “gift” in this otherwise “culturally deprived” (104) area—particularly because, as Julie questions, “what other wonders of the world were in Bootle?” (62). This is not to say, however, that the boys’ classmates, including their “good guide” (17), Julie, are not engaged in the process of “absorbing” them into the “dominant culture” of this place. The brothers encounter notable challenges in navigating this process of integration, something for which the only “cure,” Foucault asserts, is for the individual to be “wrested from his pure subjectivity in order to be initiated into the world” (Discipline 175–176). Such “initiation” can be observed playing out in The Unforgotten Coat in, for example, the passage in which Julie describes how, as the brothers’ “guide” she “told them to lose their weird-looking coats and wear something normal” (Boyce 25). David Palumbo-Liu considers this part of a process of regulating Otherness, of ascertaining “how much Otherness is necessary to gain the benefits of being ‘exposed’ to the lives of others without creating too much distance from our selves” (35). Similarly, in her essay exploring the key question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), Gayatri Spivak argues that gaining agency in “mainstream” discourse is reliant on “submission” to a “ruling ideology” (68). As Julie realizes part-way through the novel, “The boys were … burying themselves in footie and insults, swearing and buzzwords. They were learning themselves ordinary … Soon they didn’t need a Good Guide anymore” (45). However, Chingis and Nergui’s foreignness continues to remain a pervasive factor in their relationship with their classmates. As the enigmatic brothers become more established in the school, their new friends become increasingly intrigued by them. In particular, their curiosity focuses on their home life, the details of which the brothers have hitherto taken great pains to avoid revealing. It becomes an object of considerable speculation as the children imagine the gloriously exotic contents that this “Xanadu” (52) inevitably contains. Julie decides to sate her own curiosity by paying Chingis and Nergui a visit. However, far from the “silks, samovars and horse-head fiddles” (53) she is expecting to encounter at their flat, it is a rather more mundane experience. The brothers live, not in the traditional Mongolian Yurt Julie imagines, but instead “on the tenth floor of Roberts Tower—the tower

“Xanadu Hidden in the Heart of Bootle”  19 block nearest the flyover” (52). The interior of Chingis and Nergui’s apartment disappoints Julie further, the exotic trappings she expected replaced by “a long-empty corridor, bare light bulb and a line of bags and suitcases, bulging and fastened, as if the family were about to leave” (55). Julie is faced then with the reality of what this family’s foreignness actually represents. It may be less associated, she realizes, with the spectacular and theatrical facets of cultural exoticism that the brothers initially appeared to symbolize, and more with the transitory nature of living in fear of pursuit and persecution by the immigration authorities that their status as “illegal aliens” has evidently imposed on them. Refugees, Glenn Burger argues, are inexorably associated with their status as “nomads” (15), a term Chingis and Nergui use to refer to themselves on various occasions in the text (16, 30, 58). “Nomads,” he explains, are characterized by their “intrinsic mobility, secrecy and hiddenness” (15), traits that are obviously shared by Chingis and Nergui. Even Nergui’s name, he explains, means “no one” (31) in Mongolian, and his omnipresent hat is evidently a disguise designed to dupe the “demon[ic]” (30) representatives of the immigration bureau. In addition to Nergui’s hat, Chingis’s eponymous coat plays a pivotal role in the narrative. In the second chapter, Julie describes visiting her old school as an adult, to have a last look, as she had “heard they were going to knock the school down” (19). While searching through a box of lost property, she comes across “[T]he unforgettable coat of Chingis Tuul … I wish I could say it looked like a bird, but it was more like a big hairy bat, just hanging there. I went through the pockets. And that’s how I found the pictures” (19). The symbolism of the coat itself, described by Julie as being like a “bird” and subsequently a “bat,” cannot be overlooked, these creatures re-­iterating the theme of “flight” from place-to-place that is clearly so pertinent in this text. However, in contrast to a “bird,” and comparably to the coat’s owner, a “bat” is a dark, mysterious creature indicative of hiddenness and unknowability. The coat’s contents, however, shed a particularly interesting light on how foreignness functions in relation to place in this novel. The pictures that Julie finds are revealed to be Polaroid photographs, initially appearing to feature scenes from Mongolia (e.g., a cornfield, an oil lantern, a bird of prey, and a samovar), but actually, as she eventually realizes, “cobbled together from bits of Bootle” (92). An interplay, therefore, exists between the notion of the foreign and the “local.” What constitutes “exotic” foreignness is purely, Boyce suggests, a matter of perspective. Even an unremittingly “ordinary” (Boyce 44) environment such as suburban Liverpool can be perceived as exotic and beautiful when viewed through what Michael Zimmerman terms “an alien gaze, or the ‘look of the Other’” (164), such as that represented by Chingis and Nergui in the novel. Zimmerman posits that the question that the native should

20  Ben Screech consistently ask themselves in respect to the foreigner is “what can we learn [from them]; personally, culturally, experientially and spiritually?” [my inclusion] (173–174). Similarly, for Foucault, an “encounter with the Orient” (Order of Things 592) may encourage the “dissolution of constraining subjectivity” (592). Arguably, such “dissolution” of singular, limiting perspectives could be interpreted as Boyce’s overriding project in The Unforgotten Coat. Works Cited Boyce, Frank Cottrell. The Unforgotten Coat. 2011. Walker, 2012. Burger, Glenn, et al., editors. Making Contact: Maps, Identity and Travel. U of Alberta P, 2003. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. Wordsworth Editions, 2003. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1975. ———. The Order of Things. Routledge, 2005. ———. “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.” Ethics: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, The New Press, 2001, pp. 163–173. Foucault, Michel Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ­edited by Collin Gordon, translated by Collin Gordon et al., Pantheon, 1980. Kaplonski, Christopher. Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia. Routledge, 2004. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., 2002. Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Owen, Coco. “Xenotropism: Expatriatism in Theories of Depth Psychology.” The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited by Rebecca Saunders, Lexington, 2002, pp. 179–222. Palumbo-Liu, David. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Duke UP, 2012. Pfister, Manfred, and Ralf Hertel, editors. Performing National Identity. Rodopi, 2008. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. Penguin, 2003. Saunders, Rebecca, editor. The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Lexington, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can The Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 66–111. Starc, Gregor. “Alien Bodies: Media Constructions of Otherness through Immigrants” Bodies”. Multicultural Dilemmas: Identity, Difference, Otherness, edited by Wojciech Kalaga and Marzena Kubisz, Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 141–151. Zimmerman, Michael. “Encountering Alien Otherness.” The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, edited by Rebecca Saunders, Lexington Books, 2003, pp. 153–179.

2 Skiing and Being Swedish Taking a Cold Look at Winter Picturebooks Björn Sundmark

Sports, such as cross-country skiing, play an important role in the construction of national identity and place. The “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s concept, feeds off—among other things—shared sporting events and experiences and includes spectator sports, physical education in school, and leisure time sports. The deciding factor is not primarily which sports a nation excels at, but which sports are privileged due to their perceived connection, historically and culturally, to the land and the people. Such sports engage cultural production broadly, through books, films, and other narrative forms. But they also help define place. It may seem counter-intuitive to think of a sports activity in terms of place, but it is only through activities and relations to people and the environment that spaces become meaningful and become places. Tim Cresswell writes that place “is as much about epistemology as it is about ontology” (18). Thus, the conjoining of an activity (skiing) with a specific (Sweden) place/ nation can be very suggestive; hence the title: skiing and being Swedish. The fundamental reason for the status of skiing as a national sport in Sweden and other northern countries is that it reflects the traditional living conditions in a sub-arctic geography. When cold and snow is a given during 4–6 months of the year, skiing assumes much more importance than as a mere “sport.” In wintertime, skiing was sometimes the only means to get from one place to another. Hunting, fishing, and forestry depended on it. And since both the local and national economy was largely based on forestry, where much of the work was carried out in winter, an able skier was someone who was useful not only to his family but to the local community and economy. For the Sámi population, skiing played an even greater role, since skiing was what enabled them to protect and oversee their reindeer herds (Lidström 22–25). Besides these fundamental socio-economic and cultural factors, skiing is also closely associated with mythologized historical moments. Gustav Vasa’s return from Sälen to Mora on skis in 1520, commemorated since 1922 with the annual Vasaloppet ski race, represents such an iconic moment DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-4

22  Björn Sundmark (Sundmark 122). One can also include legendary Scandinavian explorers over snow and ice, such as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Fridtjof Nansen. In other words, skiing is a sport rich with cultural and historical connotations. Yet, skiing is at the same time less of a sport than an idrott—a pan-Scandinavian word which can be rendered as “physical activity or exercise.” When Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen spoke at the ski games in the Holmenkollen ski stadium in Oslo in 1903, he expressed his distaste for the English sports-ideal: “Öv idraet, men sky sport og alskens rekorder” (“Engage in physical activity, but shun sports and all kinds of recordbreaking,”) (qtd. in Sörlin 181, my translation). Somewhat paradoxically, such un-sporting engagement in sport is regarded as more serious and existential than sports as recreational play. In Sweden, skiing is still primarily considered “vernacular sports,” rather than “institutional sports,” that is, it is traditional, popular, improvised, and unregulated, something you may do in your free time in winter (Robidoux 210–211). At the same time, skiing is not just fun and games; it is invested in the disciplining of body and soul; skiing should build both physique and character. Sörlin also notes that skiing was even seen as an antidote to the injurious effects of the division of labor in industrial society (181). In other words, skiing is both a critique of modern, industrial society, and an attempt to fuse nature, nation, and body (181). Indeed, skiing emerges as a whole complex—a discourse—in which the physical activity itself ties in with shared ideas of culture, identity, and nationhood. Nansen’s words point to skiing as a way of being rather than doing, of skiing and being in the north. I believe that this applies to Norway, Sweden, and Finland, but in somewhat different ways. Elsa Beskow’s Olles Skidfärd (Olle’s Ski Trip) from 1907 remains one of the most famous Swedish picturebooks of all time. The story is about Olle, who on his sixth birthday gets a pair of “real” skis from his father. Later, when there is snow, Olle goes skiing. He meets Old Man Frost who offers to guide him to the Winter King. On their way, they meet Mother Thaw, but Old Man Frost chases her away. Eventually, they arrive at the snow castle of the Winter King and are received in the throne room. The King takes a liking to the energetic and winter-loving boy, promises him a pair of skates, and invites him to look around in the castle. In the next room, Olle sees a group of Sámi men and women who are making ski shoes and knitting socks. In the next room, children are making mittens and skis and sleighs. They are very industrious and work quickly. They are in a hurry because they want to be ready before Christmas, and, as one of the boys says, “Swedish children wish to have such Christmas presents” (15, my translation).1 But then there is a break, and Olle witnesses and participates in all kinds of winter sports and games: downhill skiing, skating, building a snowman, going on a sleigh-ride, and having a snow-ball fight. Eventually,

Skiing and Being Swedish  23 however, Old Father Frost takes Olle home again; they put on skis and let a reindeer pull them along. The story’s coda is that on Christmas Day, Old Father Frost (presumably) has left a pair of skates for him on the steps outside the front door, and another present, a sleigh, for Olle’s little brother. The rest of the winter they are outdoors as much as possible. At first, they resist the arrival of thaw and Spring, but in the end, they realize that Spring—and even Mother Thaw—can be good too. Olle’s adventure on skis is on one level a journey of discovery, less monumental than Nansen’s journey across Greenland, perhaps, but nevertheless a quest into an unknown realm, into a winter wonderland and back.2 The Winter King himself endorses winter sports, strengthening the national-royalist connotations, and the king is himself vaguely reminiscent of the heroic figures of Nordenskiöld and Nansen, mustaches and all. It is certainly no coincidence that the palace is guarded by polar bears and that the king himself is flanked by two walruses, animals that belong outside Scandinavia, in the polar regions. The Sámi people that Olle meets also signify northern-ness. The skills and culture they possess as part of their way of life can be appropriated and commodified for recreational and playful purposes. One notes that Olle is regularly placed as a spectator (or tourist) rather than as a true participant in relation to the Sámi children. But Olle also enjoys a privileged position in relation to many other Swedish children, as is clear from the description of the skis that he is given as a birthday present—real skis (that cost money) instead of the old ones that his father’s foreman on the farm had crafted for him. Olle is also presented as a child who has time for recreation and things to play with, which indicates privilege at the time of publication. And Beskow’s lavish picturebook fantasy was of course originally aimed at precisely the affluent middle class, people who could afford to give away both skis and picturebooks. However, over time, the generally raised standard of living for the majority of the population meant that these conditions were shared by most Swedes, and the ideal of recreational skiing spread in the population. Thus, Olle’s Ski Trip has come to define, in part, what skiing and being Swedish means—play-recreation, national-heroic overtones, a generous dose of exotic northern-ness, and rosy-cheeked, healthy winter fantasy. In terms of place-making, Olle’s ski trip takes him to a place of fantasy: the palace of the Winter King, which turns out to be a winter playground and a repository of winter toys and sports utensils. The fantasy element (with mythic beings such as Father Frost) and the inclusion of non-­Scandinavian fauna (walruses and polar bears) makes the setting even more “northern” and wintry, but geographically unspecific. Olle’s Ski Trip combines some of the fundamentals of the discourse of skiing and being Swedish in its representation of skiing (see Figure 2.1), but the explicit historical connections are lacking, and the competitive

24  Björn Sundmark

Figure 2.1  Olle’s Ski Trip, cover illustration. Available in the public domain.

aspects are downplayed, which are also part of the discourse of skiing and being Swedish. Places are more than physical spaces. They are defined by relations to other people as well as to the environment. Cresswell mentions “the dimension of care” needed for space to become place (154). Places also have a temporal dimension; they exist in time. Places are chronotopes, to use Bakhtin’s terminology. Finally, they are dynamic and associated with activities, which could vary over seasons or time of day. When we

Skiing and Being Swedish  25 turn to Gustav Vasa and the Vasaloppet ski race, and the books that represent it, these features are foregrounded. Gustav Vasa’s adventures in the county of Dalarna—skiing and otherwise—is a fixture in Swedish history teaching. Artwork from different periods representing Vasa’s iconic flight and triumphant return on skis is a staple in history textbooks. Today the most influential remediation of Gustav Vasa’s ski adventure— and absolutely central to the discourse of skiing and being Swedish—is the Vasaloppet ski race. Primarily, it is a popular sports and media event, but it draws its symbolic strength from its historical and fictional connections. The first race was held in 1922 in commemoration of Gustav Vasa’s return. The course begins in Sälen and ends after 90 kilometers in Mora; some 15,000 skiers participate in the main competition every year. One of the outcomes of the race is that it acts as an annual reminder of the historical event. Beyond that, it may carry personal significance in case you participate in the race, or someone you know does (and the odds are good that you will know someone). Vasaloppet, with its motto inscribed over the finish line, “in the ski-tracks of our fathers, towards future victories,” is imbued with patriotism, but even more so with a general sense of “tradition,” both national and personal in nature (along the lines of, “my father finished the race back in 1965, and so will I”). To do Vasaloppet has become a test of masculinity and a long-standing coming of age ritual for men. Today, however, it is less gender-bound and has more to do with current ideals of fitness, health, and a contemporary quest for intense experiences. Its appeal also resides in its combination of popular vernacular skiing and professional, competitive sports. It is one of the few sports events, together with marathon races, where an amateur can theoretically compete with the elite. In the next picturebook analysis, we will see how Bertil Almqvist taps into the competitive Vasaloppet-discourse outlined above in the book Barna Hedenhös på vinterresa i Sverige (The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children) (1958). This picturebook was the fifth volume of 13 (1948– 1971) about the adventurous stone age family Hedenhös.3 In “the winter journey” the family decides to go north from their home on “Stockholmen” (“the log isle”) on the ice-covered Baltic up to Nämforsen, where one of their relatives has acquired fame as petroglyph cutter (Nämforsen has one of the best known petroglyph sites in Sweden). On their way, they also visit a stone age zoo and fight some ur-Vikings. The return journey takes them overland, since they also want to go to Ura—a pun on “ur” as in old and “Mora,” the town where Gustav Vasa held his rallying speech, and which is the goal of Vasaloppet. Almqvist’s picturebook thrives on language jokes and stereotypes such as these. Thus, the men of Ura wear the traditional leather apron, typical of the folk dress in Mora, they make clocks—and they ski! The manifold champion Ura-Nisse is inspired by the

26  Björn Sundmark

Figure 2.2 The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children, cover illustration. Available in the public domain.

real Mora-Nisse who won the race an unparalleled nine times in the 1940s and early 1950s (Figure 2.2). The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children may be set in the stone age, but more than that it is a narrative about the post-war period in which it was conceived. There is an air of optimism and technological

Skiing and Being Swedish  27 inventiveness that permeates all Hedenhös albums. The family lives in what is going to be the capital of Sweden, the center, and somewhat paradoxically for a stone age family, they represent progress and modernity more than anything else. In the winter journey, Ura/Mora represents the primitive and traditional—the roots—and its people are strong and good, if a bit backward. However, in the inevitable march of progress, the Hedenhös family are the future, whereas Ura-Nisse is an atavism, who can only rely on his strength. With their superior skills, and their skis made from birch bark, Ben, Sten, and Flisa (“Bone,” “Stone,” and “Chip”) show that technology beats brute force any day—especially on a warm day when the snow tends to stick to the skis. The places conjured up are real Swedish places—Stockholm, Nämforsen, Mora—and associated (anachronistically) with what these places represent today. Thus, the fantasy is securely located within a discourse of utopian Swedishness, even when it treats the most heroic and competitive of skiing traditions, Vasaloppet! Of course, these real locations are only meaningful as places if they are more than a view, a landscape, and a physical space. What makes them into nationally coded places is that they are perceived as meaningful (Cresswell 17–18). Another children’s author and illustrator who has engaged humorously with skiing and winter sports is Finland-Swede Tove Jansson. In the novel Moominland Midwinter (1957), she makes a memorable portrait of the winter-sport-obsessed Hemulen. The Hemulen is a health freak, happily selfcentered, and sure of himself. But he is not competitive, and when forced to it, he can help others. He saves the little creature Salome, who loves his horn music. And, unwittingly, he rescues the dog Ynk from the wolves at the end of the novel. In some ways, he is a parodic progeny of the explorer he-men of the 1880s, and the health and fitness prophets of the early twentieth century, as in this first encounter, “The Hemulen was doing gymnastics down by the river. ‘Isn’t the cold wonderful?’ he said. ‘I’m never in such good shape as in winter. Won’t you have a dip before breakfast?’” (100). His ambitions to teach the Moomintrolls and the other creatures of Moominvalley about winter sports fail, however. He is regarded as a curiosity, when winter-bathing, and when Moomin gives in to the Hemulen’s entreaties and tries downhill skiing, it becomes a frightening and humiliating experience: Now the bridge came rushing at him up the hill. Moomintroll stuck out one leg to save his balance. The other leg went skiing on. The guests gave a cheer and were beginning to find some fun in life again. Nothing was up anymore, and nothing was down. Nothing existed but snow and misery and disaster everywhere. Then, finally, Moomintroll found himself hanging in the willow-bushes by the river. His tail was trailing in the icy water, and the whole world was filled with skis, and sticks and new, hostile perspectives. (105–106)

28  Björn Sundmark The only one who wants to learn is Little My: “Seen what he’s got?” she cried. “They’re called skis! I’m going to get myself a pair exactly like them at once” (100). Little My soon surpasses the Hemulen and then goes her separate way. The others avoid the Hemulen as far as possible. The only time the Hemulen manages to strike a chord with the Moominvalley creatures is when he arranges a snow-ball fight. Both Little My’s enthusiasm and Moomin’s “hostile perspectives” add important dimensions to the discourse of skiing. For some, it is exciting and fun, for others it is difficult and hard, maybe even a misery—but still an inevitable experience. Moreover, Jansson’s critical stance towards winter sports in general with its connotations to ideas of the “healthy” outdoors life is in itself an affirmation of the nature of that discourse. The Hemulen is too much, in every respect, but he has some redeeming qualities. When Jansson revisits the winter setting, and part of the basic storyline, in the comic strip Moomin’s Winter Follies (1959), the Hemulen has been replaced by an even less likeable character, Mr Brisk. If the Hemulen is modelled on the heroic lifestyle skier who is uninterested in results and medals, Mr Brisk is the embodiment of the competitive skier. He shares with the Hemulen a passion for winter sports, but the essential goal for Mr Brisk is winning. If he cannot win, his sense of purpose is lost. When Mymble, who has fallen in love with him, turns out to be the better skier, he wants to kill himself. The comic strip episode discussed here is called “Moomin’s Winter Follies” in reference to the “foolish” winter sports activities that they engage in, especially the competitive “winter games.” The original title, however, is “den farliga vintern” (“the dangerous winter”), which points to the more general dangers of wintertime. But perhaps also to the danger of taking winter frivolously by seeing it as good for your health or as a prerequisite for winter games. Jansson’s message is that winter is dangerous and must be taken seriously. That too is a Nordic experience. Therefore, it is probably not a coincidence that it is down-hill skiing that is the main target of Jansson humor rather than the more serious and practical cross-country skiing. Nevertheless, Jansson’s critique of both competitive and lifestyle-oriented winter sports, including all kinds of skiing, is also a valuable complement to the discourse of skiing in a Nordic context. In this chapter, I have mainly examined three types of winter picturebooks and one illustrated book. Each of the types highlight certain aspects of what I call “skiing and being Swedish.” (I am aware that many of the observations that I make in that context would be equally valid in relation to other Scandinavian countries as well.) First, we have recreational skiing or skiing as play and fantasy. Olle’s Ski Trip by Elsa Beskow is the model text in this category with its mix of winter fantasy and the healthy

Skiing and Being Swedish  29 outdoors life. Then we have competitive skiing, an aspect that is often toned down or subverted in children’s books. The second text under scrutiny, The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children, does precisely that; it subverts both the element of competition and the underlying patriotic theme. Next, two texts by Tove Jansson were examined: Moominland Midwinter and the comic “Moomin’s Winter Follies.” Again, the sporting ethos is critiqued in the one, while the parodic edge is directed towards the cult of the outdoors and health fanaticism in the other. The identified categories are not always clear cut but tend to blend and blur. Conceptually, in these books, the action (skiing) takes the skier across the setting—the snowy, Swedish winter landscape—to different significant places: the palace of the Winter King (Beskow), Mora (in the Vasaloppet narratives), and a ski slope in Moominvalley. Together, these places and activities combine to produce a discourse about skiing and being Swedish. Skiing in Sweden, just like hockey in Canada or football in Brazil, evokes not just a sense of a particular sport but appeals to an imagined community—a nation become place. Cresswell writes, “With this place [the nation-state] … comes all the paraphernalia of national ideology and belonging—flags, anthems, passports, money, and more. For a nation to hold its inhabitants together it must act as place—a field of care” (154). The culturally coded activities that we engage in constitute that very “field of care,” one where we can ski and be—or do other things! Notes 1 Olles skidfärd is unpaginated, but counting from the first page of the narrative, the quote appears on p. 15. 2 Fridtjof Nansen’s The First Crossing of Greenland (“On skis across Greenland” would be the literal translation of the original title) was published in 1890. It is possible that the excitement felt in both Norway and Sweden (Norway in Sweden was in union 1818–1908) over Nansen’s feat can have inspired Elsa Beskow’s children’s ski fantasy. 3 The name “Hedenhös” means “in ancient times”; “heden” is the same word etymologically as English “heathen.”

Works Cited Almqvist, Bertil. Barna Hedenhös på vinterresa i Sverige. Bonnier, 1958. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 2016. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Beskow, Elsa. Olles skidfärd. 1907. Bonnier, 1960. Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Wiley & Sons, 2014. Jansson, Tove. “Moomin’s Winter Follies.” Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol 2. Drawn & Quarterly, 2007, pp. 7–27.

30  Björn Sundmark Jansson, Tove. Moominland Midwinter. 1957. Translated by Thomas Warburton, Sort of Books, 2017. Lidström, Isak. På skidor i kulturella gränsland: Samiska spår i skidsportens historia. Diss. Malmö Studies in Sport Sciences, vol. 39, 2021. Nansen, Fridtjof. The First Crossing of Greenland. 1890. Translated by Hubert Majendie Gepp, Cambridge UP, 2011. Robidoux, Michael A. “Imagining a Canadian Identity through Sport: A Historical Interpretation of Lacrosse and Hockey.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 115, no. 456, Spring 2002, pp. 209–225. Sörlin, Sverker. Kroppens geni: Marit, Petter och skidåkning som lidelse. Weyler, 2011. Sundmark, Björn. “Snowy State: The Children’s History of Sweden.” Nordic Utopias and Dystopias: From Aniara to Allatta!, edited by Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen, and Marie Lassén-Seger, John Benjamins, 2022, pp. 111–130.

3 Cows on the Cover Dairy Queen and Regional Literature Rhonda Brock-Servais

In the novel Dairy Queen (2006) by Catherine Gilbert Murdock, I recognize not only the physical landscape of my home state, Wisconsin, but also its social and cultural characteristics. Perhaps for the first time ever, I found my home culture richly, warmly, and resonantly reflected in a YA text (although I was almost 40). Put another way, Catherine Gilbert Murdock has written a story that captures the “concord of sensibilities,” to borrow Ralph Ellison’s phrase, of my Wisconsin identity. Murdock has crafted the rural Wisconsin setting—and the place’s influence on her characters—­ delivering a sense of the region and demonstrating how region is so much more than setting. Dairy Queen demonstrates how regional literature is not a simplistic description of place but fiction “contributes to discussions of difference and identity” (Foote 39). American literary regionalism has fallen in and out of popularity since the late nineteenth century, although only since the later twentieth century has there been critical examination. On its face, it’s devoted to “elaborating the meaning of places and of the people who inhabit them” (Foote 27); however, critics point out that a variety of ideological work is done by the genre. Sometimes a regional piece works to wrench an area free from “popular, overpublicized representations regarding identity” (Kowalewski 8); sometimes it aims to manifest the values or the “communal psychology” of a region (Holman 13). The key to the definition of regional literature is that it joins people to place, usually people from places outside noted, urban coastal areas. Thus, regional writing is “an object lesson in how national literary traditions are constructed through powerful, ideological mechanisms” (Foote 25). This further explains my strong reaction to Dairy Queen; not just because I recognized the place, but because I recognized the people. I felt included or, in the vernacular, seen. In contemporary realistic YA novels, Wisconsin is often a ridiculous place where teens are sent or dragged by adults. The teens, then, are thrown back on their own resources to discover their inner strength and abilities … among the cows and people who love them. Tom Lutz, in his DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-5

32  Rhonda Brock-Servais work Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value, describes this sort of work: “literary authors purvey a patronizing pastiche of parochialisms to an audience that finds pleasure in its own superiority to the quaint backwaterish provincials represented” (25); what one might call the “Green Acres Syndrome.” The novel Wurst Case Scenario by Catherine Clark illustrates Green Acres Syndrome as applied to Wisconsin. The narrator, Courtney Von Dragen Smith, a young woman from Denver, considers herself quite sophisticated (she is a vegan, has a navel ring, and is concerned with global environmental issues), is beginning her freshman year at Cornwall Falls College in rural Wisconsin, a place she declares a “land of total disasters” (153). While the novel makes some passing nods at local culture—for instance, the Friday night Fish Fry and ­Bowling—for a reader from the area, there are absences. Regional terms one might expect do not appear, like “pop” for soda (relevant as she works at a fast-food place). Even the name of the town is problematic. Wisconsin is infamous for difficult to pronounce place names taken from the languages of the Menomonee and Potawatomi indigenous peoples—­ Milwaukee, ­Kinnikinnick, Waukesha, and Oconomowoc, for example. Here, though, what Courtney calls “Cornball Falls” is in fictitious Wauzataukie, ­Wisconsin, that is at best a playful jumble of linguistically similar syllables, at worst culturally insensitive mocking. Aside from the problematic use of setting, in Wurst Case Scenario, Wisconsinites are more or less uniformly presented, so there’s a lack of complexity with regard to people. Her roommate Mary Jo, naïve and cornpone, is a blond woman from a dairy farm with six brothers, each larger and blonder than the other; Mary Jo has cow pajamas and keeps the dorm fridge exclusively stocked with cheese and sausage. There are native folks who Courtney considers “cool” and with whom she tries to connect. Of course, these people are presented as pretentious and/or pretenders, unable to truly transcend their Upper Midwest roots. First, there’s Thyme, who claims to be from the north of Chicago, but is from Sheboygan, which is the north of Milwaukee (so she’s technically, geographically accurate). Second, one of Courtney’s co-workers is Mark, a young gay man, who becomes Marc (with a C), and then Marque (with a QUE). Third is Ben, an African American man who calls out the narrator when she complains to him about being an outsider. Courtney’s obliviousness to those around her also raises an important question: clearly the novel is supposed to be humorous—this is given away immediately by the title. Where most of the humor lies is problematic. The snarky narrator directs most of her comments outward at the people and the place. Kim Harris, reviewer for School Library Journal, points this out as one of the book’s key faults, saying, “the main character’s whiny nature and the sketchiness of the rest of the cast make involvement in the story difficult” (Harris). In short, Wurst

Cows on the Cover  33 Case Scenario is a fish-out-of-water story, where the author seems unfamiliar with the land on which she has tossed her fish—which is especially ironic since author Catherine Clark lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Quality regionalism avoids simplicity in favor of the complexity of place and the people who interact with it: “American regionalism is steeped, like strong tea, in the details of particular places” (Kowalewski 7). Yet, it also needs to transcend concerns of particular people and place and contain something recognizable to outsiders. Garrison Keillor has made a career of lovingly mocking the regional character of the Upper Midwest in his long-running, nationally syndicated series A Prairie Home Companion (1974–1987). Author Peter Straub (from Milwaukee, Wisconsin) likewise riffs on the regional character of the Upper Midwest in an essay titled “Mom,” describing the character of the region in a way that is very much in line with Keillor’s: [These are people who] avoid complaint, lamentation, rebellion, and display of sullenness in favor of steady ongoing acceptance, because they do not believe anyone but a fool ever imagined that life was supposed to be easy. They avoid introspection and self-analysis because they believe that kind of thing can only make you feel worse instead of better. They do not believe that anyone should ever suppose himself or herself superior to anyone else, because sooner or later someone else is going to notice, and then you’ll look stuck up. They believe conversation to be a tricky business, riddled with booby traps and other opportunities to make yourself look foolish, and therefore should be confined to the weather, gossip, stoic accounts of recent ailments, [and] tales of grandchildren. They distrust any display of emotion. You know how you feel, so the last thing you ought to do is talk about it or even worse act like you’re a big deal and put it on display. Act nice, be a good neighbor, do your job without grousing about it, don’t expect too much, be grateful for whatever you have. (178–179) But laughing from a knowing and loving place is not the same as punching down. Like Keillor and Straub, the Dairy Queen series presents the regional culture of the Upper Midwest as complicated, varied, and sometimes problematic, all without losing its sense of humor. In this, Dairy Queen is similar to other (adult) regional fiction that is both “fascinated and repelled by life in rural Wisconsin (Knoepfle 128–129). Narrator, D. J. Schwenk, is an insider; she is from a family dairy farm in Red Bend, Wisconsin (a place that actually exists). Her life in an isolated farm and the unending duties it imposes are shown to have shaped her whole family. As a rule, midwestern realism is dominated by middle and lower class characters (Holman 50).

34  Rhonda Brock-Servais Her personality, in particular, slots quite neatly into each of the characteristics that Straub points out, but at the same time she struggles because of some of these characteristics: avoiding complaint and an acknowledgment that life is not easy, avoiding introspection, avoiding looking stuck up, avoiding unnecessary conversation, and avoiding emotional displays can cause difficulties in interactions and self-image. The first two characteristics Straub enumerates (avoiding both complaint and introspection) are best illustrated by D. J. thinking of herself as a cow. Early on, an angry, young man tells her, “Don’t you see how you live? You do all the work they expect you to do and you don’t even mind. It’s like you’re a cow. And one day in about fifty years they’re going to put you on a truck and take you away to die and you’re not even going to mind that either” (Murdock 25). This observation stays with D. J. although she actively fights contemplating it for quite some time as she finds the thoughts painful. However, she does begin to see that perhaps taking on the farm work herself without discussion or requests for help was perhaps not the best choice she could have made for herself—as a result, she had to drop out of sports and has failed Junior English. As she considers what it means to “be a cow,” her thoughts are wider than herself. Is her mom a cow who works two jobs with long hours to make the mortgage payment? Were her brothers cows, two guys who are both talented football players and who moved onto playing in Division 1 university athletics programs? After a long and broken up period of consideration, D. J. ultimately decides to prove that she is not a cow by going out for the boys’ football team. When Straub warns of the dangers of being “stuck up,” he’s talking about the Scandinavian concept of janteloven—roughly meaning “don’t show off” or “be humble” (Beers 80). In the century between 1825 and 1925, over 3 million Scandinavians settled in the US, primarily in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, establishing themselves “firmly in the fabric of the Upper Midwest” (Gordon). The central concern of the third book in the Dairy Queen series, Front and Center, foregrounds D. J.’s ­discomfort with the idea of being in the spotlight. Her initial dislike of Brian (the young man of the cow comment, who eventually becomes her boyfriend) is caused by what she sees as showing off on his part. Later on, after she has tried out and made the boys’ football team, she asks the coach if she could not play defense at their first scrimmage (where Brian will be quarterbacking for the opponent). He responds, “What makes you think you’re playing?” She is mortified at her presumption, “Meaning, here I was telling him what to do after two weeks of practice when there are guys who’ve been on the team for years who don’t get to play. So in a way I was twice as embarrassed that I’d sounded so full of myself” (Murdock 233). Avoiding conversations is the central focus of this first novel in the series and is tied very closely to avoiding emotional displays. Wisconsin comedian

Cows on the Cover  35 Charlie Berens comments on this trait in his Midwest Survival Guide when talking about the stages of childhood development: a baby at five to seven months “shows emotive facial expressions,” while the same baby at 8–11 months “learns to hide emotive facial expressions” (185). As this is a cultural attribute, D. J. isn’t the only one who follows these unwritten rules of behavior—her parents, her brothers, and her friends all behave in a similar fashion to greater or lesser degrees. Featured prominently on the book’s back cover is the line (again from Brian), “When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said” (Murdock 225). While the family’s refusal to communicate about major issues is central to the plot, this cultural characteristic is not presented as purely negative, but rather a matter of degrees. While issues need to be confronted, the text points out the benefits of holding one’s tongue—it gives a person time to consider what needs to be said and what might be unhelpful or even hurtful. When D. J. is called a “dyke” by the opposition at her first game, not reacting verbally allows her to channel her anger into helping the team win. Additionally, not talking shows a comfort level and emotional connection between two people. Some of the book’s most meaningful conversations between people are short and lack obvious emotional content. Those people who talk too much or incessantly about themselves are perceived as shallow, as D. J. initially sees Brian (or as the locals no doubt saw Courtney of Wurst Case Scenario). Because she is accustomed to minimizing emotional displays, when one does happen, as when D. J.’s best friend Amber begins to cry, D. J. recognizes the seriousness of the situation. In a regional culture of choosing one’s words wisely, it follows that actions are valued over words. Charlie Berens describes it like this: “You might have heard about this ‘love language’ thing—how people like to give or receive via acts of service or physical touch, some other crap we forget. Midwesterners give and receive love via Acts of Service. Period” (185). Throughout, what is truly important is not what the characters say but rather what they do. When Brian apologizes, he never says, I’m sorry; rather, he shows up at the farm and begins doing work; hard work, particularly physical work, is a valued trait in the literature of the Midwest (Holman 19). When D. J. wants to show him how special their time together is, she turns the heifer field into a football field, complete with chalk lines and marker flags. Finally, to demonstrate his support for his sister, her older brother Bill sneaks away from college (with his roommate) to watch her play in her first scrimmage game. Unlike the humor in Wurst Case Scenario, which is aimed outward at locals and consists primarily of mockery, D. J.’s humor is usually inwardly focused, often ironic and full of word play. For instance, she writes, “So I gave this a lot of thought, trying to figure out how to handle it in a real Oprah kind of way, and finally I decided to throw a brick through his

36  Rhonda Brock-Servais window. Ha ha, just kidding” (Murdock 223). And, “Mom had brought a good computer home from school because ours is so old it could probably use Dad’s walker” (227). And, “[the football announcer just] couldn’t help but point out that I was Win and Bill Schwenk’s sister just in case, you know, there was someone in the crowd from Iceland or someplace” (243). The editor of Wisconsin Folklore writes that there exists in the state character a “fascination with the pleasures and horrors of small-town life” (Leary 14). This is evident throughout the Dairy Queen series and guides much of the action and humor; Holman points out that mid-western humor often has a satirical edge. Regional books for the young can be part of the discussion of literature of diversity which can include any number of things: ethnicity, religion, ability, or family structure, or, less often, class. In discussions of literature of diversity for young readers, Rudine Sims Bishop’s concept of mirrors and windows is often invoked, with windows being a way for a reader to look in on someone different from herself and develop empathy, and with mirrors being a way for the reader to receive validation. Bishop argues that for those children who historically had been ignored—or worse, ­ridiculed—in children’s books, seeing themselves portrayed visually and textually as realistically human was essential to letting them know that they are valued in the social context in which they are growing up. (9) Holman writes that a regional text “is able to maintain a ‘we’ vs. ‘they’ awareness while at the same time showing that in fundamental and important ways ‘we’ are ‘they’ as well” (11). Thus, regional writing provides both mirrors and windows, allowing insider readers to see their own place as valuable and outsiders to understand how another place might be different yet similar “not merely a geographical setting, but rather a nexus of values, beliefs, and customs that make a special location” (Holman 4). Literary Regionalism and Place Studies Regarding regional literature, Lutz comments that local color allows a text to turn “its attention to both local and more global concerns, most often achieved through a careful balancing of different groups’ perspectives” (30). As D. J. learns about herself and the people around her, one of her biggest lessons is that her issues are not hers alone, they are shared, if not throughout people around the nation, then certainly throughout people within Wisconsin. She realizes that her version of small-town Wisconsin is not only limited but also inaccurate because she comes to understand that all people are, in some sense, cows, struggling with what is expected and with their personal desires. In this, the book is typical of the YA genre as

Cows on the Cover  37 it attempts to share a universal adolescent concern but it does so through a second genre that is “efficient at discussing the mediating the place of social and cultural difference” (Foote 27). As an interdisciplinary field, Place Studies can fold in any number of academic areas including Cultural Geography, Environmental Studies, Education, and Philosophy; it is a “shared forum for the interrelated study of natural, built, social, and cultural environments, individual and community identities and human experience” (Case). Literary regionalism is an important contributor to the Place Studies discussion. To be fair, there probably aren’t many Wisconsinites out there in the vast reading public, but that makes books like Dairy Queen even more valuable. The editor of Cultural Identity in America writes in the Preface that “who you are and where you come from are, after all, fundamentally intertwined” (Derrik vi). Further, Masha Kabakow Rudman argues that “when any segment of society is excluded from its literature, the implication is thereby conveyed that the group is without value” (219). Stories such as these, where the place and its people figure prominently, where authors invoke local color to tell their stories, demonstrate “a commitment to finding a language to express … cultural variation” and that is very much in keeping with the values of Place Studies (Foote 28). Works Cited Beers, David. “ZipUSA, 58102: The Fargo That Wasn’t in the Movie.” National Geographic, vol. 24, no. 5, 2003, pp. 124–130. Berens, Charlie. The Midwest Survival Guide. William Morrow, 2021. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Reflections on the Development of African American Children’s Literature.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 5–13. Case, Jennifer. “Place Studies: Theory and Practice in Environmental Nonfiction.” Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, Fall 2017, Assayjournal. com. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023. Clark, Catherine. Wurst Case Scenario. Harper Collins, 2001. Derrik, Kate. “Preface.” National Geographic Learning Reader: Cultural Identity in America, edited by National Geographic Learning, Cengage Learning, 2012, pp. vi–vii Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. Random House, 1964. Foote, Stephanie. “The Cultural Work of American Regionalism.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, pp. 25–41. Gordon, Scott. “How Scandinavians Transformed the Midwest, and the Midwest Transformed Them Too.” Wiscontext.org., 4 Nov. 2016, https://www.wiscontext.org/how-scandinavians-transformed-midwest-and-midwest-transformedthem-too. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023. Harris, Kim. “Wurst Case Scenario: Book Review.” School Library Journal, vol. 47, no. 10, 2001, p. 152.

38  Rhonda Brock-Servais Holman, David Marion. A Certain Slant of Light: Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction. Louisiana State UP, 1995. Keillor, Garrison. A Prairie Home Companion. Minnesota Public Radio, 1974–1987. Knoepfle, John. “Crossing the Midwest.” Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America’s Literary Heritage, edited by John Gordon Burke, ALA, 1973, pp. 78–174. Kowalewski, Michael. “Contemporary Regionalism.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, pp. 7–24. Leary, James P. “Introduction: On Wisconsin Folklore” Wisconsin Folklore, edited by James P. Leary, U of Wisconsin P, 1998, pp. 3–30. Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Cornell UP, 2004. Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Dairy Queen. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2007. ———. Front and Center. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2011. Rudman, Masha Kabakow. Children’s Literature: An Issues Approach. Longman, 1995. Straub, Peter. “Mom.” Sides. Cemetery Dance, 2007, pp. 175–197.

4 John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces Michael J. Martin

Speaking with John Green in 2008, Jayme Barkdoll asked him about his juvenile reading interests. Green responded by sharing a list of works he read during young adulthood (when he was 12–13 years old through his first year of college) and concluded, “When I was a freshman in college, I read Infinite Jest. That was revelatory for me. Infinite Jest and Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine made me feel like literature was not a cold, dead place” (68). Green’s response is intriguing in that his phrasing lends to literature a much greater aura. For Green, these books were not simply something to hold or consume (an object) but were instead an arena to inhabit. Furthermore, in employing a term like “place” and bringing literature out of the realm of object and into the realm of being, Green emphasizes the impact that an understanding of place, and its relative term space, can have on one’s engagement with literature. In the following pages, I will clarify the nuanced difference between space and place and then display how Green complicates the understood value attached to place and space in Looking for Alaska (2005) in order to highlight the theme of this work. Distinguishing between space and place may seem a trivial task, but as the work of Yi-Fu Tuan and the later work of Tim Cresswell display, such linguistic and conceptual distinction is enriching. In the broadest sense, “[p]lace is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (Tuan 3). Although the two seem to be separate ideas, in order to comprehend the greater idea of both place and space, it is important to understand that the two points speak to and enlarge one another. “From the security and stability of place,” writes Tuan, “we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes possible for location to be transformed

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-6

40  Michael J. Martin into place” (6). Tim Cresswell continues the conversation and remarks that the difference between space and place lay in the idea of “meaning”: Space, then, has been seen in distinction to place as a realm without meaning—as a ‘fact of life’ which, like time, produces the basic coordinates for human life. When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place. (10) Interestingly, whereas the language Tuan uses to separate the two concepts would place the notion of space (freedom) above place (stability), Cresswell’s description flips the value of the two realms; for Cresswell, space is about the absence of meaning, whereas place is about the presence of meaning, thus giving place more value. When applying these ideas to Green’s writing, readers are encouraged to pay attention to Green’s setting(s), see how he bridges the world of place, and finally note that such complication highlights the theme of his work. Writing specifically about Looking for Alaska, Jayme Barkdoll and Lisa Scherff believe that Green builds more than simply a surface level coming-of-age novel; he envelops his readers with a vivid collection of magnetic characters, beautiful settings, intriguing facts, and powerful dilemmas that provide readers with an authentic and unique window into the lives of teenagers struggling to make sense of themselves and the world around them. (67) Lizze Skurnick, speaking with Margaret Talbot about John Green’s work more generally, comments that Green’s writerly approach to YA topics “is a bit tamer than that of YA authors from earlier eras,” but insists that his works are known to still embody a distinct and sophisticated point and lesson (Talbot 64). In the case of Green’s oeuvre, the sophisticated point may slightly alter, but always revolves around the individual’s struggle to make sense of self as connected to environment. As such, Barkdoll and Scherff’s point about “beautiful setting” being present in his Looking for Alaska gains greater weight and encourages readers to explore the contrasting venues of the peopled place and abandoned space. Specifically, the following discussion focuses on an interpretation of the protagonists’ bedrooms and displays how such locations can easily be misinterpreted as a peopled and thus meaningful place. Then, the discussion will move to Green’s use of the abandoned space where meaning is said not to be found. The accompanying analysis will display, however, that Green questions places and brings meaning to spaces, making them into venues that bridge the place/ space divide and thus hold the distinct and sophisticated point of the novel.

John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces  41 Returning to Tim Creswell’s understanding of place, he argues that the “most straight forward and common definition of place” is “a meaningful location”; furthermore, this location moves beyond the notion of a space because it has been made meaningful by a person or people who are attached to it (7). In the case of the teenager, the most direct space that they make into place is the bedroom. Through design and decoration, the young adult’s personal place becomes an embodiment of their identity. Green’s characters, however, bring unrecognized conflict and thus false meaning to their place. In turning to Looking for Alaska, readers first encounter Pudge and the Colonel’s dorm room. Pudge has come to Culver Creek seeking his “great perhaps” and the Colonel has come seeking that education which will serve as his first step out of the lower socio-economic world that he inhabits with his mother. In the case of each, their contributions to the room décor, supposedly, advertise how each sees himself and his world. Pudge has brought almost nothing to his new boarding school beyond his clothes, a stack of biographies taken from his father’s library, and a map of the world which he tapes to the wall (Green 6–8). Pudge’s room additions advertise a want for exploration and adventure, but they do so in a false sense. Pudge reads about the lives of others, focusing on their last words in hopes of discovering their—not his—great perhaps, and he has brought a map of the world to suggest a want for adventure and experience, but he has come to a school that he only knows about through his father. Although the Colonel has come to Culver Creek to better his socio-economic future, he wants to make clear that he despises the wealth and sense of privilege that is embodied by the Weekday Warriors. This spite is embodied in the furnishings the Colonel adds to the room. First, he brings a leather couch that he describes as a “damn nice couch” with “some cracks,” but Pudge notes it is “30 percent baby blue faux leather and 70 percent foam” with “more than a few cracks” (12). The irony of the Colonel’s verbal description as compared to Pudge’s physical description is not lost on readers, or on the Colonel. To fill out the sitting area, the Colonel then takes Pudge’s footlocker and spells out COFFEE TABLE on it with duct tape. On the surface, these objects mock the civilized and wealthy living room—what young adult truly needs a coffee table?—but the fact that the Colonel insists that they are in the room and defined also highlights his unacknowledged want for that which he despises. In the case of the map or the couch and table, neither Pudge nor the Colonel are aware of how their contributions display a false understanding of their own identity and the internal conflicts that make up their respective identities. Alaska is the one individual in the novel who would seem to understand the conflicts that come with identity formation and acceptance, for she understands that the labyrinth that everyone looks to escape from is a labyrinth of suffering. If identity formation is the labyrinth of adolescence,

42  Michael J. Martin then one must accept that identity formation is a form of suffering because identity is ever changing and contradictory. As Alaska appears to be aware of this fact, it would make sense that her room would speak to such awareness, but it instead remains sparse and banal. During Pudge’s first visit, readers are only told of the “gigantic stacks of books that lined her walls” and then “overflowed into waist-high stacks” all over the room (15); on the night they hook up, readers are told of a dozen white tulips in a vase that are now in her room (130); finally, when the Colonel and Pudge are cleaning her room, there is a mention of her books, the condoms that were hidden under her mattress, and the fact that she kept all her school papers (154). Furthermore, while Alaska is the character so focused on meaning and understanding, she is also a disseminator of false meaning. During a conversation with Pudge, she insists that rooms speak to one’s identity and what one cares about. While Pudge looks around and only sees a dorm room, Alaska responds, “You’re not looking, Pudge. When I go into your room, I see a couple of guys who love video games. When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books” (83). For all of Alaska’s depth, this interpretation makes it clear that she sees only the surface, and sometimes not even that. In Pudge and the Colonel’s room, she misses the map, couch, and table, but sees the game system. She misses the important objects that could speak to conflict and identity, only seeing objects that speak to activity. In her room, she only sees the books, not the fact that room remains so sparse. So, in these rooms, as Cresswell suggests, meaning is placed and meaning is found, but is that meaning true? This defined space may offer Tuan’s sense of security and stability, but the security offered is a false security that “protects” these individuals from self-definitional conflicts. Opposite of these peopled and thus controlled places, Green incorporates into the novel the abandoned space: derelict buildings which become central to the work’s point. As already expressed, the sophisticated point of the novel is the need for Green’s characters to acknowledge that “suffering” and conflict exists in and partially define one’s identity and thus environment, and that one way to navigate that suffering is to openly acknowledge and work to embrace it. And, while their chosen and defined places do not display such acknowledgment, the openness of the abandoned space does allow for such freedom. After the pre-prank, the culprits spend the weekend camping in the abandoned barn on campus; “a dilapidated leak-prone structure that looked more like a long-abandoned log cabin than a barn. They still stored hay there, although I don’t know what for. It wasn’t like we had an equestrian program or anything” (101). In terms of meaning, the barn seems to inhabit both space and place, respectively. On the one hand, it refuses definition in that it is one thing (a barn) while looking to be another (a cabin) and remains abandoned and thus undefined by the individual. At the same time, it serves a purpose,

John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces  43 holding hay, although said purpose seems to be unnecessary—why does a school need hay if no horses? On this weekend, those staying here continue to bridge space and place. In playing Alaska’s game of “Best day/Worst Day,” Pudge and the Colonel take steps towards directly acknowledging their own conflicted identity while Alaska again fails to see her identity. In this “game,” each individual tells the story of the best day in his/her life and then the worst day; the “best” story in each category wins. It is a game invented by Alaska and one, though not explicitly, focused on identity. When defining a best or worst day, the individual defines how s/he sees the world and self. In the Colonel’s case, his “Best Day” story speaks to his conflict with wealth. He acknowledges that his best day has yet to happen but will happen when he purchases a house for his mother, a house “in the middle of Mount Brook, with all the Weekday Warriors’ parents” that will be “like picket fence and two stories and everything” (116). Throughout the novel, the Colonel has struggled with his relationship between being poor and wanting to be wealthy. This has already been shown in how he decorates his room, but is also evident in his dating life. At the start of the novel, the Colonel is dating and yet constantly fighting with his Weekday Warrior girlfriend. While he wants to be of the world of wealth, he still feels separate and thus mocks it (as seen in the furniture) or treats it bad (as seen in his relationship). However, when in the barn, the Colonel’s story openly acknowledges and accepts this conflict without demeaning it. In his “Worst Day” story, he will solidify his acceptance of conflict. The Colonel’s “Worst Day” connects with his father’s leaving. In his story, the Colonel tells about how his mother kicked his father out of the house due to issues of infidelity and abuse. All of this happened when the Colonel was at school, and his mother initially told him only that his father had left—not about his transgressions. The Colonel explains that on that day “I kept waiting for him to call and explain it, but he never did. He never called at all. I at least thought he would say good-bye or something” (117). Throughout the novel, readers learn of the Colonel’s desire to know the truth and find answers to any problem; his desire for a sense of simplicity over complexity in the world. In fact, when investigating Alaska’s death with Pudge and struggling to come to any solid answer, the Colonel insists that they keep looking. “‘The point is that there are always answers, Pudge.’ … ‘There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough’” (158). Importantly, this conversation happens in their dorm room; their defined place. Yet, as already shown, the defined place offers unrecognized or false truths about its inhabitants. Inside his room, he can lie to himself and insist that answers can be found. In the barn, however, he comes to accept his own want to be part of the world of wealth and that there may not be answers to all of life’s conflicts and confusion, especially as tied to identity.

44  Michael J. Martin For Pudge, this same self-awareness emerges only within this abandoned place. Pudge’s dorm room map and biographies suggest a want for adventure and a great perhaps, but the fact remains that he took no steps toward his own great perhaps. However, he now displays his awareness of a need for action and a letting go of the past. In his “Best Day” story, Pudge summarizes the simple events (walking, having coffee, waking up with a girl) that had happened on the day after the pre-prank and says, “I mean, I didn’t do anything… . Whatever. Great day. Today. Best day of my life” (115). Pudge has actually discovered a “great perhaps.” In taking part in the pre-prank and allowing himself to just be, Pudge has realized that a great perhaps can be any moment if you just embrace it. This connects to his “Worst Day” story in that this story is about a junior high peer who had peed on Pudge’s gym clothes, clothes the coach made him wear during class or suffer the consequence of failing the course. While a traumatic experience, he now reaches a different understanding, “That was the day I stopped caring what people did. I just never cared anymore, about being a loser or not having friends or any of that. So I guess it was good for me in a way, but that moment was awful” (117). In telling his story, Pudge realizes that even the pain of that day may have had a lesson of sorts that would lead him to the possibility of a best day; in learning to not worry, Pudge will come to accept himself and see possibility in the world, which is a great perhaps. In the case of Alaska and her stories, any meaning that had become attached to this derelict space is lost. When telling her “Best Day” story, the delivery and development are as banal as her own room. This is Alaska’s entire “Best Day” story, “Best day of my life was January 9, 1997. I was eight years old, and my mom and I went to the zoo on a class trip. I liked the bears. She liked the monkeys. Best day ever. End of story” (115). The Colonel calls the story lame and Pudge sees it as “Alaska’s intentional vagueness” (115). In her “Worst Day” telling, Alaska loses some of the vagueness. This story is about the day after her best day, the day her mother died. As Alaska tells it, she had come home from school and was in another room when her mother screamed. Alaska ran to find her mother shaking on the floor and she stayed with her for an hour until her dad came home. He found them on the floor and asked why she did not call 911. While her friends question that her father seemed to blame her, she defends his reaction, “‘Yeah. I was a little kid. Little kids can dial 911. They do it all the time. Give me the wine,’ she said, deadpan and emotionless” (119). At this point, Alaska’s two stories do not lead to any epiphany but highlight that she is stuck in a moment in time. Pudge believes that they help him to understand her, but Alaska does not see how these stories impact her identity or her own conflicts.

John Green’s Peopled Places and Abandoned Spaces  45 Although Alaska is the one within the game to show no movement, it is through her game that Pudge and the Colonel bring meaning to this abandoned space. And, though Alaska fails to do so, it is necessary for readers to recognize the contrast between the different story sets. In the case of Pudge and the Colonel, they may not directly call attention to any great epiphany to arise in the barn, but the reader is aware of their move to outwardly accepting the conflicting sides of their own personalities. They show the potentiality to take steps towards identity formation. However, when outside the barn, as we see in the Colonel’s later insistence that answers are always possible, the characters display a continued hold to a false or less complicated identity. In contrast, the fact that Alaska’s stories span a two-day period, she displays within the barn that she is trapped in a moment of her identity. In the context of the novel, Alaska’s actions and how she designs her own places disallow for any great movement and remain purposefully vague. As shown here, John Green is aware of the need for both place and space in YA literature. Space, by definition, does provide freedom, but place provides definition and rest. In a sense, adolescence is about both, a need for definition and freedom, for exactitude and inexactitude. This becomes the distinct and sophisticated point about adolescence that is being made in Looking for Alaska and in many of Green’s other novels. Identity is evolving and the way it evolves is when it has the freedom outside of place to transform. In Looking for Alaska, it is the abandoned space that allows for such freedom and self-identification. As important as the barn and the abandoned space is in this particular novel, it is a concept that remains important in most of Green’s works and in his own memory. On a YouTube video posted on August 6, 2010, John Green provides a virtual tour of Indian Springs, Green’s alma mater that served as the inspiration for Culver Creek. As he walks the campus, Green tells viewers that he was really interested in seeing only two places on the campus: the original smoking hole and the abandoned barn. When he gets to where the barn was located, there is now only an empty field. In an odd twist of events, that once abandoned space that came to hold such meaning for both Green and his characters has become physically non-existent. But, for John Green and his memory, that open field still holds the memory of the barn, and the barn holds memories of his past, and that past still defines part of who he is and his struggles. Works Cited Barkdoll, Jayme K., and Lisa Scherff. “‘Literature Is Not a Cold, Dead Place’: An Interview with John Green.” English Journal, vol. 97, no. 3, Jan. 2008, pp. 67–71.

46  Michael J. Martin Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction, Blackwell, 2004. Green, John. Looking for Alaska. 2005. Speak, 2007. ———. “Looking for Alaska at My High School.” YouTube, 6 Aug. 2010, www. youtube.com/watch?v=cdjmNPlePVE. Accessed 1 Aug. 2022. Talbot, Margaret. “The Teen Whisperer.” The New Yorker, 9 & 16 June 2014, pp. 60–68. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

Part II

Aesthetics of Place

5 Confronting “Un-London” Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes Heather K. Cyr In this chapter, I focus on the statue characters of Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart trilogy to argue that fantasy can offer child protagonists agency within an urban environment, and I question the ways in which children read and negotiate landscapes that are often seeded by a particular kind of nostalgia embedded within the texts. Working with Svetlana Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia, I contend that works of fantasy for children that reject a simplified idea of nostalgia challenge both the child protagonist and the reader to see the spaces and places around them critically. To make this argument, this chapter focuses on the landscapes within the streets of contemporary London featured in Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart trilogy, comprising Stoneheart (2006), Ironhand (2007), and Silvertongue (2008), especially the statues that emerge as central characters in the text. The two child protagonists, George Chapman and Edie Laemmel, are plunged into “Un-London,” a layer of the city where the statues are alive and a foe called the Darkness is threatening humans and statues alike. The fantasy operates contiguously with consensus reality. At first, the fantastic operates unseen by most humans within London’s landscape; the living statues are an animate expression of the city itself, but only a few, including George and Edie, can see that they are alive. Later in the series, the fantastic takes over as the rest of London is frozen under a spell and the children navigate the city peopled only by its factions of statues—“spits” and “taints”—whose uneasy truce erupts into war. In this story, London’s statues become more than static wayfinding points of an urban map; the living statues must be encountered and read by the characters as they attempt to end the war between the statues, break the spell, and restore time, encouraging the protagonists to engage with space and place in critical ways. Here, among all of London’s prolific statuary, it is crucial that Fletcher’s text privileges statues representing unexpected layers of that city’s deep palimpsest. George and Edie must decide which statues to trust and which to avoid, highlighting two contending ways of engaging with history: one DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-8

50  Heather K. Cyr that relies on nostalgia for a return to a hegemonic vision of the past and one that approaches history deftly and critically, offering agency to form a new future. Boym identifies the first as restorative nostalgia, an uncritical “invented tradition—a dogmatic, stable myth that gives you a coherent version of the past” (Boym xvii), which I suggest is prevalent in much of children’s fantasy. The restorative nostalgic children’s fantasy looks to the past to tap into nostalgia that may not be for those places—as they are fantasy spaces—but for childhood itself. The second type, which she refers to as reflective nostalgia, is “a positive force that helps us explore our experience and can offer an alternative to an uncritical acceptance of the present” (xvii). Boym suggests that “reflection on nostalgia might bring us to redefine critical modernity and its temporal ambivalence and cultural contradictions” (31). By bringing all the layers of the past together at once, employing statues that question the traditional mode of commemoration, and replacing pastoral spaces with urban ones, Stoneheart embraces reflective nostalgia and rejects restorative nostalgia. Rather than presenting London from a single angle, Stoneheart invites the protagonists and readers to examine the city and its past from a variety of perspectives. Instead of the reconstruction of a lost past, reflective nostalgia can present readers and child protagonists with “an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias” (xviii). It can be a dual reading, a critical examination of the past that allows for an understanding of the present; in fact, George and Edie’s engagement with the London landscape, and, in particular, its statues, is less about recovering a longed-for lost world and more about building a new future. Stoneheart starts at the Natural History Museum, a space that has been specifically ordered for the inclusion of children, but George, bullied by his schoolmates and feeling isolated by his father’s recent death, feels neither welcome nor safe. He quickly leaves the ostensibly child-friendly space of the museum, and in his frustration, he damages a frieze on his way, pulling him into Un-London where the spaces become distinctly unlinked from childhood. After being chased by one of the museum’s pterodactyl statues, he is saved by the Gunner at sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger’s 1925 Royal Artillery Memorial, a place that the Stoneheart novels return to again and again. The memorial, which honors the soldiers of the Royal Artillery killed in the First World War, is at the apex of Hyde Park Corner, a small park that serves as a convergence point between two of London’s largest green spaces, Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens and the block of green space that includes Buckingham Palace, Green and St. James’s Parks. Garden and park spaces often demarcate boundaries for children, as Susan E. Honeyman explains, “Most friendly childhood spaces draw from and continue the pastoral tradition of modernity; which idealizes and romanticizes the wild (ironically) as a safe retreat for those weary of

Confronting “Un-London”  51 civilized constraints” (Honeyman 117). However, Hyde Park Corner is no peaceful park, garden, or retreat. It is an island surrounded by traffic, the place where several major thoroughfares merge, and “the busiest junction in London, a sea of traffic grinding around a roundabout full of thick monuments and thin grass” (Stoneheart 26). Neither walls nor greenery shut out the urban space around it, and George is immediately overwhelmed by both the dangers and secrets of the city as well as its banality: “This is London. Lot of life, lot of death, lot of everything” (Stoneheart 127). Critics have examined this pervasive urban/rural binary in the relationship between children and landscape in literary, popular, social, and political discourse. In “Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism,” geographer Owain Jones examines a number of British social geographical studies on the current “great anxiety about the fate of childhood” (17), arguing that, when it comes to children, the West’s symbolic constructions of urban and rural are intensely entrenched, deeply problematic, and in need of re-evaluation within several disciplines, including his own. The studies he considers show that British adults are likely to consider the rural landscape as the only place for “real” childhood experiences, and he highlights particular examples of the symbolic relationship between nature, innocence, and rural locations as well as “how the urban is seen to deny these essential ingredients of childhood” (19). Literary critics point to similar formulas. Sandra Dinter writes about Tom’s Secret Garden, an example of this impulse to move children into a “natural” world: “Drawing on Romanticism’s claim for an instinctive bond between children and nature, [Philippa] Pearce’s text presents urbanity as an unsuitable environment for children because it alienates the child from what the Romantic imagination constructs as its natural habitat” (Dinter 225). Honeyman picks up on this critique to suggest that, much like the adults in Jones’s surveys who believe children should live in a pastoral setting to ensure they have a “wholesome” childhood, adult authors like Pearce place fictional children in bounded pastoral spaces for “their own nostalgic indulgence” (117). Just as the child is constructed, so the spaces and places they inhabit are equally constructed. Indeed, London is often figured as the antithesis of the pastoral impulse. In “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature,” Jenny Bavidge’s focus is on how childhood is tied to idyllic imaginings of rural spaces and figured as at odds with simplistic conceptions of the dangers of the urban spaces. She says, “Children are largely excluded from accounts of the city, either literary or theoretical, and when they are present their roles are strongly circumscribed, especially given the powerful cultural association of childhood with the rural and natural” (323). Indeed, the notion of escape that accompanies a fantastic journey was, for more than a century, generally synonymous with escape from the urban into a pastoral world. Many of the genre’s most famous child protagonists are whisked away from

52  Heather K. Cyr London to begin their adventures. When London is represented in relation to childhood, according to Bavidge, it is often represented in a flattened nostalgic form, which conjures Boym’s restorative category. Bavidge points to “the statues of Paddington Bear and Peter Pan and the recently erected signpost to Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross in London …[which] establish a geographical correlative to the children’s canon” (324). As Boym explains, “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for place” like those recounted by Bavidge; however, our obsession with what she calls “landmark literature” (Bavidge 25) is “actually … a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams” (Boym xv). Although Stoneheart’s statues are inextricable from ideas of memorialization, the books steer away from this sort of carefully ordered and socially sanctioned “blue plaque theme” (Bavidge 325) in both its choice of statues and spaces. Stoneheart goes out of its way to reject spaces typical of what Bavidge calls “landmark literature” (325). The text’s outright rejection of the familiar children’s statues, particularly the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, is a signal that George and Edie will not journey into any of these well-known, comfortingly delineated child-friendly London spaces. In a notable episode at the Royal Artillery Memorial, Ariel, the somewhat mercurial flying sprite statue from the top of the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, draws attention to the absence of one famous statue made specifically for children: “There is a boy who lives over there, a babyish boy in a babyish park who thinks he too can fly. … He is an odious coxcomb of a boy. And he flies with all the grace of a thrown turnip” (Ironhand 121). Peter Pan is neither mentioned here by name nor is his statue a character in the trilogy. While Ariel is certainly immature (and more than somewhat spiteful) in her description of the “babyish boy” in Kensington Gardens— forcing George and Edie to treat her advice and reports skeptically, her prideful boasts do more than offer the protagonists a reason to doubt the exact veracity of her words. They draw attention to Fletcher’s strategy of choosing both statues and landscapes that are unexpected in the context of children’s fantasy. Rather than focusing on a statue specifically for children in Kensington Gardens, Fletcher’s novel focuses on statues like Ariel and Bow Boy (Anteros from Piccadilly Circus). Both of these statues can fly, like Peter Pan, but each represents the “adult” spaces of London: the massive, imposing bank and the blaring lights of Piccadilly. Unlike Kensington Gardens with its bounded and curated “natural” spaces for children, the Bank of England and Piccadilly are distinctly un-childlike and distinctly urban spaces. By highlighting statues like Ariel and Bow Boy—as opposed to Peter Pan or Paddington Bear—statues who dwell in these metropolitan, adult spaces of London and have no connection with the postcard nostalgia of a “child’s London,” Fletcher makes a case for the appropriateness and appropriation of London’s palimpsestic depths for his child heroes.

Confronting “Un-London”  53 The refiguring of history and landscape in the text can be best illustrated by two of its principal statues, the Queen and the Gunner, who each represent a layer of the historical palimpsest that refuses to be flattened by nostalgia. Both these statues offer testimony that speaks to London’s status as a fluctuating zone of multiple perspectives, and both undermine a monolithic, hegemonic or nostalgic version of London. The Queen is the defiant Boadicea, part of “an impressive double equestrian statue” (Ironhand 54) situated on a plinth on Victoria Embankment. While Boadicea lived in the first century CE, the sculpture of the Queen and her daughters was created by Thomas Thornycroft in the Beaux Arts Romantic style in the 1850s and was unveiled in 1902 (Figure 5.1). The statue looks like an allegorical Victory: “[a] regal woman in a simple shift dress, flowing cloak and a small spiky crown [standing] in a chariot, her right hand holding a business-like spear, and the other hand languidly urging her two surging chargers forward” (Ironhand 54–55). But her “victory” is more complex than that of the typical triumphant and non-specific Victory statue so popular across Europe. The Queen is both an insider and an outsider. She is the oldest “monarch” featured in statues within the city, the legendary leader of the Celtic Iceni tribe, and the terrifying queen who, in popular lore, burned Roman Londinium to the ground to avenge the rape of her daughters by Roman soldiers: “They call me red

Figure 5.1  The sculpture of Boadicea and her daughters created by Thomas Thornycroft and unveiled in 1902 overlooking Westminster, London. Photograph by the author.

54  Heather K. Cyr because I swept down on this city in vengeance for the wrong done to my daughters, and when I and my army turned our backs on the smoking ruins and hied us homewards, my arms were red to the elbows with the blood of London …” (Ironhand 57–58). She’s not necessarily a comforting figure, but her allegiance to Edie and George brings her fierceness to their cause. Her statue in Westminster is a reminder of the more turbulent parts of London’s history, and, as a tribal leader who fought to destroy a colonizing imperial force, her statue is a more than somewhat incongruous symbol of the British nation (situated as it is looking towards the Houses of Parliament), yet she takes a leading role in the war against the Darkness throughout Ironhand and Silvertongue, arguing with other less competent statues, and taking precedence not because she is the most liked or mythologized but because she suffered for her land. She reprimands a rather foolish and snobbish Richard the Lionheart (the statue that resides outside the Palace of Westminster), and he is quickly brought to heel by Boadicea: “Bar our way one moment longer and I shall take your sword and thrash you with it until you bawl like the great baby you show yourself to be!” (Silvertongue 110). Boadicea takes it upon herself—she “ALWAYS willed it so!” (Ironhand 59)—to protect the less privileged, an often-invisible layer of the historical palimpsest. She suggests that London’s less triumphant layers are essential to understanding its truth, providing Edie, who has always felt like an outsider, an essential role model for the road ahead, her statue a waymarker for courage in the face of the overwhelming city. Stoneheart’s Gunner acts a kind but honest father figure for George and Edie, ultimately knowingly sacrificing himself to potential destruction on their behalf. Andelys Wood examines Stoneheart’s World War One statues, pointing out that the figures represent ordinary soldiers rather than generals or allegorical models: “Besides their association with World War One, they all share an attitude of enduring hardship, of getting on with things” (Wood). The Gunner explains to George that he is part of a family of soldiers and a family of statues made by soldier and sculptor Jagger whose gritty realist creations play a large part in the text: “[T]here’s Jaggers all over London. Jagger did well out of the war. People liked what he done, making us look like heroes, but nothing crowing about it. Made us look like men who knew about mud and dying first, then made us look like heroes after” (Stoneheart 49). This attitude is central to the Gunner’s persona and to the lessons he imparts to George: an attitude of endurance and sacrifice that is most poignantly seen in Jagger’s sculptural style. Indeed, it is the Gunner who fully represents the complex connections between the art of statuary, characterization, and the novels’ larger narrative strategy of realism. George must enact the lessons on sacrifice when he decides to take the Gunner’s place to save him (if statues are not on their plinth at midnight, they will become lifeless). As he steps up to his duty to the Gunner,

Confronting “Un-London”  55 George—marked as a “maker” himself—discovers that Jagger’s intentions flowed into the Gunner’s making, meaning that every night the Gunner (and now George) relives episodes of the war, only to awaken conscious of his role as a memorial for those brutal experiences. The Gunner explains, “For them that had lost sons and husbands, we looked like the men they wanted to remember them as, the men they hoped they’d become before the bloody generals sent them out to be butchered by the Boche” (Stoneheart 52). As opposed to restorative nostalgia, which “is not simply ‘forgetting of reality’ but a psychotic substitution of actual experiences with a dark conspiratorial vision” (Boym 43), the Gunner’s relationship with the past is instead attuned with reflective nostalgia which “is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude” (49). The Gunner—and now George because of his bravery—cannot forget or rewrite history as commemorated within London’s streets. In fact, the realism of the Gunner (and all of the novel’s World War I ­soldiers) is best understood not as nostalgic evocation of heroism, but rather as a refusal to derive nostalgic comfort from history. Jagger’s bronze soldiers are solid figures with grim faces dressed in their heavy gear and tin helmets (see Figure 5.2). The only faceless figure is the supine corpse of a dead soldier at the end of the memorial, draped in a greatcoat (that poignant symbol of the soldier), the soles of his hob-nailed boots facing the park path. The inclusion of the shrouded body of a soldier is very rare among British memorials and Jagger argued against opposition that said it would be too unseemly and distressing for public art (National Heritage List). As Jagger put it, “‘I got to love Tommy in the trenches and I’ve tried to show him as I knew him—not as he looked on parade at home’” (qtd. in GlavesSmith 52). Jagger’s statuary, like Fletcher’s fantasy, is devoted to uncovering what lies beyond the often-celebratory façade of memorialization. The Gunner tells George, “people liked what [Jagger] done” (Stoneheart 52) because of the truthfulness of the statues. In this way, Jagger’s bold artistic style re-inscribes how war memorials channeled mourning and how art could contribute to the public conversation about sacrifice and its evocation in public space, a theme that Fletcher continues by making the Gunner George’s support and guide as George makes the difficult decision not to give in when offered an easy way out and a return to his comforting childfriendly home. Fletcher rejects this nostalgic ideal, instead focusing intensely on the contradictory and rich multifaceted temporal and geographical dimensions of London’s urban spaces. In particular, Fletcher’s alignment with Jagger’s sculptural realism, the Gunner’s steadfastness, and Boadicea’s fierce sacrifice represents history as the “living warp and weft of the city itself” (Ironhand 225), and that history is more complex than a singular “dogmatic,

56  Heather K. Cyr

Figure 5.2 The Gunner from Charles Sargeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial (1925) in Hyde Park Corner, London. Photograph by the author.

Confronting “Un-London”  57 stable myth” (Boym xvii) of London’s identity. Ultimately, this blending of contiguity with fantasy, a breaking down of traditional fantasy boundaries, is a trend in recent children’s fantasy literature because it can offer a more complex treatment of coming of age that depends less upon metaphorical lessons about the supposed nature of adulthood and more upon concrete discoveries about the flaws of consensus reality. Stoneheart offers George and Edie the opportunity to critically excavate London’s layers of myth and story, allowing them to realize that endurance and sacrifice can lead to self-knowledge. This deep engagement with the layers of London in the Stoneheart trilogy moves against the currents of nostalgia often identified in the settings of children’s literature. In his work, Jones argues that “there is a need to re-conceptualize both the nature of childhood and the nature of the urban in order to make children’s use of urban space less symbolically suspect” (27). One of the places where that reconceptualization can—and, indeed, should begin—is within children’s literature, in particular children’s fantasies, where world building’s reimagining of place and space is so central to the story. Works Cited Bavidge, Jenny. “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 4, no. 3, Dec. 2006, pp. 319–330. EBSCO, https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280601005682 Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Dinter, Sandra. “Spatial Inscriptions of Childhood: Transformations of the Victorian Garden in The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, and the Poison Garden.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 217–237. ProQuest, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2015.0030 Fletcher, Charlie. Ironhand. Hodder Children’s Books, 2007. ———. Silvertongue. Hodder Children’s Books, 2008. ———. Stoneheart. Hodder Children’s Books, 2006. Glaves-Smith, John. “Realism and Propaganda in the Work of Charles Sargeant Jagger and Their Relationship to Artistic Tradition.” Charles Sargeant Jagger: War and Peace Sculpture, edited by Ann Compton, London: Imperial War Museum, 1985, pp. 51–78. Historic England. “Royal Artillery Memorial.” National Heritage List. Historic England, 2014, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1231613. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023. Honeyman, Susan E. “Childhood Bound: In Gardens, Maps and Pictures.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, June 2001, pp. 117–132. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029449 Jagger, Charles Sargeant. Royal Artillery Memorial. Hyde Park Corner, London: Portland Stone and Bronze, 1925.

58  Heather K. Cyr Jones, Owain. “Naturally Not! Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism.” Human Ecology Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2002, pp. 17–30. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/24706879 Thornycroft, Thomas. Boadicea and Her Daughters. Westminster Pier, London: Bronze, 1885. Wood, Andelys. “The Stones of London: Public Art in Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy.” The Literary London Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, Sept. 2011, n.p. http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-london-journal/archive-of-the-literary-london-journal/issue-9-2/the-stones-of-london-public-art-in-charlie-fletchers-stoneheart-trilogy/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2023.

6 Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World Catherine Olver

Architecture “gives a conceptual and material structure to societal institutions,” writes the architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (45). Buildings, whether historic landmarks or contemporary workplaces, make visible the administrative and financial powers that structure societies and impress their authority upon individuals. They “are both places themselves and central parts of larger places” (Cresswell 119). Architectural descriptions therefore contribute to how children’s fiction constructs “new worlds to express alternate visions of national and cultural power” (Cecire et al. 11). But how do novelists translate architecture’s ways of conveying authority onto the page? Like all literature’s “imaginative geography” (Hudson), fictional architecture invites readers to imagine, to visualize places. Some readers don’t visualize and others focus on characters’ appearances not settings, but most readers “import a known setting” (or several) from other books, visual media and lived experiences, and “align[] this mental imagery with the specifications of the author” (Mackey, Spaces 144–162; “Placing” 421, 425). Visualizing is a dynamic collaboration between text and reader, affected by the author’s perceived authority. Given that both illustration style and readers’ “views as to the authority of the text” influence how much they adjust their mental pictures to match illustrations (Aggleton 91), could certain descriptive techniques emphasize the text’s authority? This chapter argues that descriptions of architecture in children’s books communicate power by authoritatively specifying what to imagine. To examine literary architecture, we will revisit J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World. I apologize to readers who are understandably reluctant to revisit a world that does not give everyone an equal place. However, the Harry Potter novels demonstrate two powerful ways of enacting architecture’s authority through precise description: ostentatiously controlling the focalizing character’s gaze and increasing orientational and numerical specificity. By restricting readers’ room to imagine, the text mimetically conveys how certain places limit individuals’ freedom.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-9

60  Catherine Olver Harry enters the Wizarding World in Diagon Alley, which is full of ­ ossibilities and the freedom for individuals to pursue them. Unfortunately, p not everyone is welcome. The spell preventing Muggles noticing the Leaky Cauldron introduces how architecture exerts control by directing gazes: “Their eyes slid from the big book shop on one side to the record shop on the other as if they couldn’t see the Leaky Cauldron at all” (Rowling, Stone 58). Yet the sightline of Diagon Alley directs eyes toward the unknown: [T]hey were facing an archway … on to a cobbled street which twisted and turned out of sight. “Welcome,” said Hagrid, “to Diagon Alley.” (61) Imaginative geographies in children’s books often present a “young protagonist’s adventure from the known to the unknown” (Hudson 21), and Rowling’s “diagonally” pun celebrates moving in unusual directions rather than straight, predictable lines. The street’s twisting sightline draws attention to various shops as Harry walks, not to one authoritative building. Harry’s gaze jumping between shop windows reflects this non-hierarchical architectural arrangement (Stone 62). Since “the image a focalizer presents of an object says something about the focalizer” (Bal 106), his jumping gaze simultaneously indicates his interests and freedom to pursue them. Gaze movements thereby communicate the exclusivity and intriguing possibilities of Diagon Alley—and the whole Wizarding World. Contrastingly, Gringotts Bank directs visitors’ movements carefully, establishing control through precise directions combined with disorientation. Its architecture directs Harry’s eyes by drawing them high, then toward the entrance: They had reached a snowy-white building which towered over the other little shops. Standing beside its burnished bronze doors, wearing a uniform of scarlet and gold, was— “Yeah, that’s a goblin,” said Hagrid quietly as they walked up the white stone steps towards him. (63) Harry’s interrupted thought emphasizes that his eyes and Hagrid’s are drawn to the same point. Their converging gazes underscore how the bank’s architecture acts upon visitors, leading them to see and move in prescribed directions. The goblins bowing them through the doors stresses that visitors’ movements are controlled, and a message warns visitors against going where they shouldn’t (Stone 64). Lighting disorients Harry first: he is “surprised” by shifting from the white marble hall to a dark “stone passageway lit with flaming torches” (64), recalling Edmund Burke’s comment that buildings evoke the sublime when people “pass from the greatest

Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in Wizarding World  61 light, to as much darkness as is consistent with the uses of architecture” (147). Railway carts ensure visitors go only where they are taken while also disorienting them: as he is “hurtled through a maze of twisting passages,” Harry fails to remember the turns (Rowling, Stone 65). This mode of transport baffles visitors’ eyes, encouraging them to close them so they aren’t “stung as the cold air rushed past” and to mitigate the motion sickness from which Hagrid suffers (65). Whereas Diagon Alley’s twisting sightline suggested exciting possibilities, Gringotts’ twisting passages limit visitors’ freedom and knowledge. The architecture’s dual method of directing then challenging Harry’s sight hint that authoritative places in the Wizarding World hide many secrets behind official facades. Also mixing precision with disorientation, numerical descriptions communicate that Gringotts Bank controls wizards’ finances. Harry starts counting but there are “too many doors to count” and “about a hundred more goblins … and yet more goblins” (64). Similarly, Harry’s vault contains wealth beyond his expectations and numerical comprehension, so he perceives “mounds of gold coins. Columns of silver. Heaps of little bronze Knuts” (65). Hagrid’s explanation of Wizarding money is so oddly precise that it’s baffling, “Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it’s easy enough” (65). Is it? I’d rather avoid that shopping arithmetic! The vault containing the philosopher’s stone is precisely numbered, 713, but that makes its one “grubby little package” more mysterious (66). The Gringotts description invokes precise numbers only for multitudes or challenging arithmetic to make things uncountable, communicating a financial institution that only its goblins truly understand. The architecture of the Ministry of Magic, the center of governmental authority in Wizarding Britain, expresses power by impressing visitors and directing characters’ movements. Boundaries construct imaginative geography by differentiating places (Hudson 4). Entrances are therefore important architectural features, contrasting light and dark or juxtaposing “different sized spaces … to impress the visitor” and “symbolizing the transition between the secular world outside and the religious world within” places of worship (Conway and Roenisch 62). The Ministry’s enormous, bright atrium is impressive after the “tight fit” and “darkness” in the telephone-box visitors’ elevator (Rowling, Phoenix 116), symbolizing moving from Muggle London to Wizarding Britain. Wizards enter from fireplaces on the left and exit on the right (117), demonstrating how habits of movement in different places, especially public transport, help construct nationhood (Edensor 93). Furthermore, the atrium’s linear architecture makes the “hundreds of witches and wizards” arriving for work symbolically embody united purpose as it channels them “towards a set of golden gates at the far end of the hall” (Rowling, Phoenix 117). This architecture authoritatively organizes visitors’ and workers’ movements.

62  Catherine Olver Harry’s gaze movement along the floor to the atrium’s end and then its ceiling (only a smooth transition looking into the distance) encourages readers to construct a mental image following artistic conventions of linear perspective: They were standing at one end of a very long and splendid hall with a highly polished, dark wood floor. The peacock blue ceiling was inlaid with gleaming golden symbols … The walls on each side were panelled in shiny dark wood and had many gilded fireplaces set into them. Every few seconds a witch or wizard would emerge from one of the left-hand fireplaces with a soft whoosh. One the right-hand side, short queues were forming before each fireplace, waiting to depart. (Phoenix 117) Renate Brosch theorizes that readers picture in detail “when fictional acts of seeing force readers to shift from action-oriented visualization to object visualization” (255). Readers can’t be forced to visualize. Nevertheless, the architecture makes Harry stare, which prompts readers to visualize specifics, in a chain that highlights institutional and textual power over individuals. Linear perspective, colors (peacock blue and gold), and light (polished floor and gleaming symbols) invite readers to picture the atrium as it would be shown in a painting or postcard, which frequently “inscribe civic buildings … into a narrative of nationhood” (Hornstein 75). By directing the focalizer’s gaze, the description emphasizes the Ministry’s architectural and governmental authority. Orientational specificity is unusual in fiction’s descriptions of place. Monika Fludernik finds that orientational descriptions (enabling readers to map objects’ positions) are very rare in narratives written before the nineteenth century (463), occasional in nineteenth-century narratives (471), prominent in modernism, then ridiculed in postmodernism (472). Harry looks down then up, left then right in the atrium; the syntax highlights how the architecture organizes his gaze by separating the directions into different sentences. Readers like Matt and Riya in Margaret Mackey’s studies find the “cognitive labor” of detailed, consistent visualizing accurate to the text “an enjoyable challenge” (“Placing” 430, 425; Space 131). However, when do descriptions become too confusing to be enjoyable and instead give readers the uncomfortable feeling they are failing to follow the author’s authoritative instructions? Unlike the “comfortable” experience of mentally mapping Hogwarts gradually, from many descriptions, Matt acknowledges that new settings, especially ones the text doesn’t spend “much time developing,” are difficult to picture (“Placing Readers” 428). Picturing gets “stronger” as characters and imaginary geography grow familiar (Aggleton 86). Rowling’s description of the Ministry’s layout is highly specific, detailing the departments situated on each numbered floor,

Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in Wizarding World  63 but underdeveloped as Harry hardly explores (Phoenix 119–120). It is therefore likely to feel overwhelming for visualizing readers. Deictic directions abound, sometimes enough to disorient visualizers whose imagery is mostly spatial, like my own (see Mackey, Space 157). Harry checks in “at a desk to the left” (Rowling, Phoenix 118); he turns “left” to the courtroom (124); and to reach Mr Weasley’s office turned left, marched along another corridor, turned right into a dimly lit and distinctly shabby corridor, and finally reached a dead end, where a door on the left stood ajar, revealing a broom cupboard, and a door on the right bore a tarnished brass plaque reading: Misuse of Muggle Artefacts. (122) The Ministry’s orientational descriptions are difficult enough that they may make readers consciously aware of their attempts to visualize accurately, such that the authority of the text over their picturing helps readers experience how the Ministry building authoritatively organizes workers. When Harry revisits the Ministry under Death Eater control, architectural features reinforcing power appear prominently, along with the textual techniques communicating them. In Phoenix, the atrium’s statue of wizard, witch, centaur, goblin, and house-elf intimated problematic hierarchies as the nonhumans were sculpted “looking adoringly up at the witch and wizard” (117). Now the room contains a “vast sculpture of a witch and a wizard sitting on ornately carved thrones, looking down at the Ministry workers” (Hallows 198). The statues’ gaze directions embody the fascist authoritarian regime, as do their thrones of muggles “in their rightful place” (199). Harry enters a courtroom so high-ceilinged that its sightlines give the accused “the claustrophobic sense of being stuck at the bottom of a deep well,” as if already imprisoned (213). Many deictics specify the courtroom’s location, and the interior is also described precisely: Dementors stand “in the corners furthest from the high, raised platform” where the interrogators sit, with Umbridge’s patronus pacing the platform’s edge (211–213). Since readers struggle to visualize places in detail and hold in mind those places’ relation to each other (Mackey, Space 148–149; see also Brosch), Rowling’s detailed, orientational description may make readers aware of their effort visualizing this place—appropriately, since Harry must remember his exit route and strategically survey the courtroom, ready to fight his way out. Described gaze directions and orientational specificity capture how the Ministry’s architecture oppressively reinforces control over its citizens. Domestic architecture in the series reflects dynamics of authority in different families. The precisely numbered address in the famous first sentence— “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say

64  Catherine Olver that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much” (Stone 1)—warns readers that the Dursleys consider their house a symbol of their social place in the world and won’t tolerate anyone out of place. Garden fences are the first physical feature mentioned, followed by the window through which they fail to see an owl and the walls at which Dudley throws cereal (1–2). Mentioning boundaries invokes the home-as-sanctuary topos in children’s literature (Carroll 19). Privet Drive does provide sanctuary, protecting Harry from Voldemort (Rowling, Order 737). However, highlighting its boundaries also foregrounds the confining control of the parents in this family. Visiting Ron, Harry notices the contrast, “The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasleys’ house burst with the strange and unexpected” (Chamber 35). The Burrow draws Harry’s gaze upwards but jumpily, as he sees that “extra rooms had been added here and there,” making it “crooked” (26). A sign directs visitors’ eyes to the door but is “lop-sided,” and Harry ends up looking at “chickens … pecking their way around the yard” (26). The description is not orientational, omitting left or right and giving vague numbers (“several storeys high,” “four or five chimneys,” “several” chickens). This house grows to accommodate a growing family, rather than being carefully planned. Exemplifying how names construct places (Tuan 688), “The Burrow” evokes a sprawling natural home inhabited by many lively, free children. Its architectural description suggests a family in which the parents aren’t concerned with asserting their authority. The architecture and description of Malfoy Manor proclaim the family’s aristocratic values. Sightlines as visitors approach the house are carefully curated: the lines of hedge and driveway draw eyes past the “impressive wrought-iron gates” and a “handsome manor house grew out of the darkness at the end of the straight drive,” which directs visitors’ eyes and feet “towards the front door” (Rowling, Hallows 9–10). Such a “processional route” reinforces “the significance of a major building” (Conway and Roenisch 201). Deictics imply that the residents keep everything strictly placed. Brambles on the left of the lane contrast with the “neatly manicured hedge” on the right before visitors turn right into the driveway and raise their left arms (with their Dark Marks) to pass through the gates (Rowling, Hallows 9). “Naming is power,” Yi-Fu Tuan reminds geographers (688), and the name Malfoy Manor carries associations of authority over the surrounding people and land. The landscape and house are visually designed to stress that authority. Hogwarts’ architecture is ideologically complex. As a school, it exercises authority over its students but values individuals’ growth. It baffles the eyes—most distant views of the castle are vague, set at sunset, at night, or in driving rain—but invites students in (Rowling, Chamber 63; Prisoner

Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in Wizarding World  65 65, 311; Goblet 116). The staged first sight of the castle both exerts authority over the first years and suggests they will grow here: Perched atop a high mountain on the other side [of the lake], its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers… . It towered over them as they sailed nearer and nearer to the cliff on which it stood. “Heads down!” yelled Hagrid as the first boats reached the cliff; they all bent their heads and the little boats carried them through a curtain of ivy. (Stone 92) “Heads down” is a delightfully appropriate instruction for new students, as if exhorting them to focus on work and avoid trouble. The children crane their necks looking up, embodying this place’s power over them, then acknowledge the castle’s authority by bending their heads to enter. Nevertheless, the abundant ivy and the castle “perched” atop the rock like a bird imply growth and freedom. Its “many towers and turrets” (indicating varied sizes and shapes) create “a diversified contour,” in the words of the Adams brothers, which gives architecture the “movement” that “hill and dale, foreground and distance, swelling and sinking have in landscape” (162). With “windows sparkling,” blending into “the starry sky,” the castle appears almost a natural growth. Contemporary architectural theorists like Kenneth Frampton and Christian Norberg-Schulz would admire the building’s integration in its natural surroundings (qtd. in Cresswell 121). Is Hogwarts overwhelming? Those towers are too many to count at a glance, and inside are precisely “a hundred and forty-two staircases” (Rowling, Stone 107). Yet such numbers challenge the children to keep exploring and discovering new things—architecture fitting this school’s ethos. Since some stairs “led somewhere different on a Friday” and “it all seemed to move around a lot,” the castle is challenging to navigate; nevertheless, these movements convey that the place values freedom. Hogwarts is described with little orientational specificity, rarely mentioning left and right or compass directions. The exception is the Great Hall, which specifies house table positions, since these separations reflect different values embodied by the students (97–98). Mostly, though, readers discover Hogwarts’ layout gradually, and their gradual mapping builds a sense of belonging to the place (see Mackey, “Placing” 427). This is an authoritative place that gives characters room to explore and readers room to imagine. In the Harry Potter novels, architecture conveys authority. Indeed, Rowling associates grand, planned architecture with authoritarian values rather heavy-handedly, but her writing cleverly translates architectural authority onto the page via two types of descriptive precision. Firstly, places direct Harry’s gaze precisely (or thwart his sight). Secondly, descriptions

66  Catherine Olver specify orientations and numbers more in places tightly controlled by authorities and less in places where individuals are freer. These narratological techniques ostentatiously prescribing what readers should imagine may help readers feel tensions between individual freedom and institutional or parental authority. These techniques aren’t limited to the Harry Potter series. When the children first see Neverland in Peter Pan, they point to different things, embodying the freedom to follow personal interests, and the description uses “there” repeatedly rather than orientationally specific words such that readers may imagine the island’s layout however they please (Barrie 57). Sightlines and numerical specificity are prominent in the opening of Northern Lights to introduce how Lyra “plays with both the authorities of her world and their symbolic spaces” (Cecire et al. 6). The description numerically specifies tables and chairs in Jordan College’s Hall and highlights power through gaze directions as young Lyra looks up at portraits of Masters “hung high” and back at the kitchen to check she can’t be seen (Pullman 1). Do children’s literature descriptions widely use readers’ freedom to imagine a place from various details, rather than being told its exact layout, to convey characters’ freedom there? Does “[e]xhaustive description … generate suspicion” and discomfort (Fludernik 472)? We’ll have to ask readers. Since readers are visualizing places “created within the imaginative geography of the author” (Hudson 2), descriptions detailed enough to make them feel the author’s authority may well emphasize that place’s power over individuals. Acknowledgement I would like to thank Emma Baillie, PhD Candidate in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, for her imaginative comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Works Cited Adam, Robert, and James Adam. The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam. Dover, 2013. ProQuest, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail. action?docID=1909152 Aggleton, Jen. “Pictures and Picturing: Mental Imagery whilst Reading Illustrated Novels.” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 53, no. 1, 2023, pp. 79–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2022.2081669 Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. U of Toronto P, 1988. Barrie, J. M. The Annotated Peter Pan, edited by Maria Tatar, Norton, 2011. Brosch, Renate. “Experiencing Narratives: Default and Vivid Modes of Visualization.” Poetics Today, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp. 255–272, https://doi. org/10.1215/03335372-3868527

Room to Imagine? Authoritative Architecture in Wizarding World  67 Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, 1798. ECCO, data.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/ view?pubId=ecco-0364300400 Carroll, Jane Suzanne. Landscape in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2011. Cecire, Maria Sachiko, et al. “Introduction: Spaces of Power, Places of Play.” Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present, edited by Cecire et al., Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–17, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315610108 Conway, Hazel, and Rowan Roenisch. Understanding Architecture: An Introduction to Architecture and Architectural History. Routledge, 2005. Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Berg, 2002. Fludernik, Monika. “Description and Perspective: The Representation of Interiors.” Style, vol. 48, no. 4, 2014, pp. 461–478, https://doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.461 Hornstein, Shelley. Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place. Ashgate, 2011. Hudson, Aïda. “Introduction.” Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography, edited by Aïda Hudson, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019, pp. 1–22. Mackey, Margaret. “Placing Readers: Diverse Routes to the Cognitive Challenge of Fictional World-Building.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 2019, pp. 415–431, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2019.0048 ———. Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections. Bloomsbury, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350275980 Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley, 2012. Pullman, Philip. Northern Lights. Scholastic, 2008. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, 2007. ———. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Bloomsbury, 2019. ———. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury, 2003. ———. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury, 2015. ———. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Bloomsbury, 2017. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 81, no. 4, 1991, pp. 684–696. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2563430

7 A Sleuthing Place Child Detectives and Their Offices Chris McGee

Often the first step to starting your own detective agency is setting up a good detective office. In Ivy and Bean Take the Case (2013), seven-year-old Bean is inspired to be a detective when she watches a movie called Seven Falls with her mother, an old noir film “about a guy named Al Seven” who “was so tough he talked without moving his lips, and some of it was bad words” (8). Bean cannot stop thinking about how there are mysteries all around her, how private investigators ask questions about things adults don’t want children to know, and how glamourous the lifestyle seems to be. Most importantly, it is the hard-boiled office that interests Bean the most, something she sets right out to establish. “Al Seven had a cool office with his name on the door,” Chapter 2 begins, and “Bean could do that, easy-peasy. She began with the desk” (17). Bean takes a board, sawhorses, an old chair, and a telephone (that she slammed “down a few times to test it” [20]), finds some old file folders, and puts up a sign that reads “Bean P. I.” Bean sits behind the desk, puts her feet up, and squints. Although her office is technically outside, without a door with her name on it or a secretary to let in clients, Bean has established a place from which to conduct her business, a space invested with meaning to which she has become attached that separates her from both adult interference and the child clients that will approach her for business. As Tim Cresswell writes, “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way, it becomes a place” (16). For Bean, and for countless other child sleuths, the detective office has a significance of its own. The magnifying glass, the fingerprint kit, or the deerstalker hat will always remain some of the most recognizable signifiers of a detective role play for budding child sleuths, but the office is where one receives customers, returns after a day of detecting, and stores casefiles, a place made meaningful, as Cresswell puts it, as “a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world” (18). Many of the earliest young detectives did not have an office per se since they were always on the move. As Arthur Prager says of the Hardy Boys in particular, “One of the boys’ most outstanding characteristics was high DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-10

A Sleuthing Place  69 speed mobility” (114). The Hardy brothers are remembered for their motorcycles and boat, Nancy Drew for her roadster. In their wake, most contemporary child sleuths go to where the action is or simply operate out of their bedrooms. This alone should suggest that detective offices are somewhat of a rarity in children’s lives due to the resources necessary for one and the specialized space required, both granted by or borrowed from adult sources. This essay nevertheless examines several detective offices where sleuths are allowed to carve out their own spaces, with individualized flair, in mimicry of the adult ones. These spaces (and at times lack of spaces) reflect the worldviews of the mysteries themselves. John G. Cawelti insists that the setting of a mystery is absolutely essential to its execution. A locked room or an isolated country house, he argued, “furnishes a limited and controlled backdrop against which the clues and suspects so central to the story can be silhouetted. It abstracts the story from the complexity and confusion of the larger social world” (97). The contrast between the scene of the crime and the outside world “constitutes a symbolic representation of the relation between order and chaos,” he writes, emphasized even further when we move from the “serene and rational order of the detective’s apartment” (97). By solving the crime, the detective “brings the threatening external world under control so that he and his assistant can return to the peaceful serenity” of the apartment or detective office, for reflection and wrapping up (97). But the setting of investigation, as much as the scene of the crime, is just as important. No doubt the most famous detective space of them all is embodied in Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s 221 B Baker Street. “In his stories,” Zach Dundas reflects on the famous apartment, “Holmes and Watson sat by that fireplace, awaiting the clients who would come to tell them their peculiar and often deadly problems” (xii). Sherlock, as the prototypical armchair detective, was often able to solve crimes without even getting up; he was also able to run chemical tests, meet clients, plan strategies, disguise himself, exit and return, and stage explanations for Watson and his readers. Cawelti describes the “peaceful serenity” of the detective apartment or office, and for child sleuths such a Sherlock-type space takes on another layer. Jerry Griswold describes how “visions of the snug place abound in Children’s Literature” (5) fictionalized and dreamy “bastions of security and comfort” (6), “womblike enclosures” (9), enclosed, small, simple, and well designed (10–11) spaces. He writes that the “child’s retreat to a tent of blankets or a position under the table can be seen as an active assertion of me and mine” (13), a place of ownership in which “the child rehearses individuality” (14). Feelings of ownership and coziness often conflate in the child’s detective office. My fondest memories as a child reader are of the Headquarters in The Three Investigators books featuring boy sleuths Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews. Their Headquarters was

70  Chris McGee an area that lay hidden in the Jones Salvage yard run by Jupiter’s uncle. The books describe this space as “a fascinating spot for any boy” because of the variety of items, the privacy, the secret entrances, and a long fence painted by local artists. Jupiter has rigged several spots of the fence to swing up as secret entrances if pushed in the right places, leading to tunnels and back entrances into the workshop with a functioning printing press. “Jupiter had, bit by bit, arranged piles of junk in the yard so that they hid the workshop from sight,” creating a true sense of privacy (8). Throughout the series the most memorable entrance remained the small pipe which led to the Headquarters proper which, as we learn, “was a thirty-foot mobile home trailer” that was “badly damaged in a wreck,” long since forgotten until the boys “equipped the now well-hidden trailer as an office, laboratory and photographic darkroom, with several hidden entrances” (27). For the Three Investigators, their Headquarters is a place of independence and privacy, perhaps even more than Holmes’s apartment that welcomes visitors to seek his help. As Alan Pickerell notes of the Headquarters, “Few clients are invited into this sanctuary, since that would violate the group’s secrecy and privacy elements” (139). Unlike many of their counterparts in earlier series fiction, however, the boys set out to establish an agency for profit; they use the printing press to create business cards and their phone to set up a network of contracts. Among their proudest features is a telephone and speaker “put together from the parts of an old radio. This made it possible for them to hear” any calls from clients (54). The boys fill the trailer with a filing cabinet, microscopes, an old desk and chairs, and low hanging lights straight out of an old noir film. The offices of juvenile sleuths typically feature such a slew of technology for investigations to take on an aura of adult respectability. These sleuths mean business because they have the technology to solve any crime. In Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Ronald R. Thomas traces the interconnections between detective fiction and the forensic devices of the nineteenth century—the fingerprint, crime photography, the typewriter, the phonograph. He explores the “production and dissemination of narratives that established the authority of a class of experts that could read someone’s bodies like a text with the precision of a machine” (5). “Detective fiction’s emphasis on the scientific aspects of criminal investigation” (5), as he describes it, shows up in the many devices in the child sleuth’s office. The Three Investigators present themselves as professionals because of their desk, lamp, and telephones, and as sleuths thanks to details such as their microscope. In the case of the Hardy Boys, especially in later iterations of the series, the boys have set up a laboratory in their attic with a short-wave rig. “The boys’ radio gear from their station,” we learn in The Short-Wave Mystery (1966), “included a receiver, a transceiver with VOX hookup, a signal generator, and a phone patch.

A Sleuthing Place  71 The transmitter for the main rig was mounted on a relay rack next to the table” (6). Impressive at the time to be sure. All of this “reminds readers,” as Carol Billman notes, “that the boys are not just playing at being private eyes: they are working on their father’s important cases” (92), albeit from a sanctuary that allows them to feel uniquely professional in their own right. Perhaps no office evinces these two essential elements, privacy and professionalism, more than 12-year-old Matt Stevens’ basement office in Jack D. Ferraiolo’s The Big Splash, an ode to hard-boiled crime fiction set in a middle school. Matt works cases out of basement below his first-floor apartment, a place only he and his mother have access to. “It wasn’t a big basement,” Matt narrates, however, “it was big enough for me to carve out a space of my own. I set up shop by the furnace, which helped to keep things comfortable when the weather turns cold” (60). There is a separate door to the outside, a phone with its own number, “an old wood desk and matching chair; a beat up but comfortable sofa with a faded floral slipcover; a couple of lamps; and an old-fashioned radio that needed quite a bit of elbow grease to get it working again. It was my own office: a little dark, a little musty, and totally private—crucial for a business like mine” (60). George Grella wrote of the hard-boiled sleuth, “Finding the social contract vicious and debilitating, he generally isolates himself from normal human relationships” (106). His office, for one, is just such a refuge, while also a place of business. It reflects the world he inhabits. “Like the classic story,” Cawelti writes of the hard-boiled detective story, we usually begin with the introduction of the detective, but instead of the charming bachelor apartment of Holmes and Watson, or the elegant establishment of Lord Peter Wimsey, the hard-boiled detective belongs to the dusty and sordid atmosphere of an office located in a brokendown building on the margins of the city’s business district. (144) Matt’s office is appropriately spare, grimy, and hidden away. Dependent on jobs to help his working mother, he fills his office with castaway junk from affluent members of the town, stating, “Rich people apparently have a different definition of junk than I do. To me, junk is something that doesn’t work anymore; to them, junk is something that doesn’t match the new pillows they just bought” (The Quick Fix 63). Matt, in other words, reclaims adult public spaces to carve out his detective office. In a similar fashion, sixth-grade detective Mac Barrett uses a public restroom for his office in Chris Rylander’s mash-up of mafia and hard-boiled genre conventions, The Fourth Stall. In this series, Mac has set up a desk in the “East Wing Boy’s bathroom” of his middle school, “fourth stall from the high window” (1), where he can conduct business and meet with

72  Chris McGee clients. The stall has been abandoned due to a cherry bomb explosion many years before. It has become, Mac narrates, “the perfect place for my office. Mostly because it was in the farthest reaches of the school’s East Wing where there are no classrooms,” and especially “secure and private due to an arrangement I had with the school janitor” to keep his own keys. Only one client is allowed in at a time and Joe, Mac’s strongman, guards the door, “forming lines and regulating the flow of kids” (5). For both Matt and Mac, hard-boiled sleuths running a delicate business, reclaiming this space provides them with the privacy necessary in order to meet clients and appear professional. “Can children manipulate malleable space to their own ends?” asks Danielle Russell. “The answer will determine whether they are mere consumers of space—passive recipients of adult demarcated space—or producers of specific spaces” (17). In a way, this can be simply a form of performative play, as with Bean’s signifiers of the detective office (the desk, the sign, the hat, the desk). For the day, Bean wants to play at being detective and she uses her family’s front yard to set up her shop. And yet, since many of these sleuths outside of Bean solve actual cases, such sleuthing can function beyond mere play. In Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present, the editors write in their introduction how children’s literature is “often preoccupied with questions of size and stature: questions that are themselves related to space,” and given this, “it is no wonder that so many works of children’s literature suggest alternate spheres in which the child’s size, strength, and power is far greater than in reality” (3). They go on to say, “play may become a means of immediate resistance or an opportunity to practice scenarios for later life, suggesting the blurred line between playing and reality” (3). Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones describe how the professional status of the sleuth “tends to indicate, above all else, competence and independence, dramatizing the fantasy of both having access to the material economy and possessing the ability to act independently and ethically within it” (32). This makes sense since child sleuths typically lack the resources necessary to act independently, let alone solve cases as the adults are able to. In their book, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the HardBoiled Tradition, Walton and Jones pay particular attention to the double meanings of their term agency, not simply “how any given novel details the process of setting up a business as a female private eye,” but how the novel “confronts in an entertaining and accessible medium questions of women’s agency in general” (4). Establishing an agency, in other words, which necessitates a place of operation, a front door with a name on it, a desk, a waiting room, a filing cabinet, is itself a precursor to agency itself. Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series, for instance, concerns the many cases of Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola as she navigates adult and, in particular, wealthy male power. By the end of the first novel she decides that

A Sleuthing Place  73 she will turn professional and open an office since she can “go places and accomplish things Sherlock Holmes could never understand or imagine, much less do” (209). Knowing that she cannot take cases herself, Enola opens an office offering the consultation of a Dr. Leslie T. Ragostin, a male Scientific Perditorian persistently away but with a young secretary ready to take notes. Walton and Jones remark, “Women writers of detective fiction strategically talk back to a genre that has often demeaned, trivialized, and even demonized women. The genre itself, however, offers an attractive position from which to investigate agency” (94). Thus, at the start of the second novel, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady, Enola’s agency (her office) is the visible space for her agency (her ability to operate in a male society). She receives clients, takes notes on behalf of Dr. Ragostin, sits in a wooden chair behind a desk, and is as much of a detective as her brother, albeit one that has to operate on the margins. Later she retreats to a place of privacy, a “decrepit house cramped between smut-coloured tenements” where she is a lodger (26), a place she describes as “ideal for concealment” where she can take off her “bust enhancer, and the frills, facial inserts” she must adopt to be in proper society (27). One space offers her professionalism, the other privacy. Privacy and professionalism are just two ways of talking about the broader things they provide: the space required to solve, and the tools required to solve. And this can take on a lot of different shapes. Occasionally, it is privacy that matters more than anything else. Perhaps a more unusual example might come from the Harry Potter series where the Gryffindor common room serves as a sort of office for Ron, Hermione, and Harry, a place where the three can repeat conversations they have overheard, pour over clues, and plan strategies for spying on professors. They come and go as they please, but most students and faculty are locked out. It is a place out of earshot from adults they might suspect. Yet it isn’t until the last book, The Deathly Hallows, that the trio get a place that might more properly be called a sleuthing place, Grimmauld Place, reclaimed from adult authority and made truly their own. Harry reflects that, once they have had to leave it, it was their best headquarters. “Gloomy and as oppressive as it was, it had been their one safe refuge: even, now that Kreacher was so much happier and friendlier, a kind of home” (271). More than just a home, it is the perfect office. It is familiar. When they arrive, it is “just as Harry remembered it: eerie, cobwebbed, the outlines of the house-elf heads on the wall throwing half shadows up the staircase” (169). It is guarded, since, as a liminal space between two muggle homes, only certain people can even see it. As Mr. Weasley explains, after the death of Dumbledore, each of the people in the Order were now secret keepers able to recognize it, but the house remains booby trapped even to those like Severus Snape. Members of the Order like Mundungus and Lupin visit, but only on the

74  Chris McGee trio’s terms. It is filled with all the clues they need. Grimmauld Place was, after all, the site of the last discovered Horcrux. It also contains the house elf who took part in hiding it, the location of Lily Potter’s last surviving letter, Sirius’s bedroom, as well as the very bedroom of the figure (R.A.B.) that they are pursuing. It features a sort of murder/clue board in the shape of an old family tapestry, a means for the sleuths to spy on the adult world via a painting of Phineas of Nigellus Black who “was able to flit between his portrait in Grimmauld Place and the one that hung in the headmaster’s office at Hogwarts” (228). The sleuths are served food by a house elf and are free to come and go via invisibility cloak. It is in almost every possible way the most fantastic sleuthing office, one where Harry unsurprisingly will typically see Ron and Hermione “pouring over a sheaf of scribbled notes and hand-drawn maps that littered the end of the long kitchen table” (225). For the remainder of the book, they will never find a place as secure. In other words, while most child sleuths move around freely, go places where mysteries are happening, and spend their time hunting for clues, occasionally, they can establish spaces that operate as temporary offices. At other times, these offices can be more formal, providing a vital combination of professionalism and privacy that allow the child sleuths an agency from which to establish agency. Yi-Fu Tuan argues that space implies a certain freedom, while places offer security. The detective offices of Matt, Mac, Bean, and the many others described here offer both freedom and security, the kind of sleuthing place the child detective needs. Works Cited Arthur, Robert. The Secret of Terror Castle. Random House, 1964. Barrows, Annie, and Sophie Blackall. Ivy + Bean Take the Case. Chronicle, 2013. Billman, Carol. The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory. Ungar, 1986. Cawelti, John. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. U of Chicago P, 1976. Cecire, Maria Sachiko, et al. Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present. Taylor and Francis, 2016. Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Dixon, Franklin W. The Short-Wave Mystery. Grosset & Dunlap, 1966. Dundas, Zach. The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Ferraiolo, Jack D. The Big Splash. Amulet Books, 2011. ———. The Quick Fix. Amulet Books, 2012. Grella, George. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks, Countryman Press, 1988, pp. 84–102. Griswold, Jerry. Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2022.

A Sleuthing Place  75 Pickerell, Alan. “The Power of Three: Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators ­Series.” The Boy Detectives: Essays on the Hardy Boys and Others, edited by Michael Cornelius, McFarland & Co., 2010, pp. 132–142. Prager, Arthur. Rascals at Large, or, the Clue in the Old Nostalgia. Doubleday & Company, 1971. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, 2014. Russell, Danielle. “Introduction. Contested Territory: The Spatialization of Children’s Literature.” Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature, edited by Danielle Russell, UP of Mississippi, 2022, pp. 3–26. Rylander, Chris. The Fourth Stall. Walden Pond Press, 2012. Springer, Nancy. An Enola Holmes Mystery #1: The Case of the Missing Marquess. Puffin, 2006. ———. An Enola Holmes Mystery #2: The Case of the Left-Handed Lady. Puffin, 2007. Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge UP, 2003. Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. U of California P, 1999.

Part III

(Dis)placement and Mobility

8 “Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want” The Contingent Mobilities of Literary Adolescence Caroline Hamilton-McKenna Adolescence, like childhood, is an elusive and fluid space, discursivelyregulated and bound by contradictory ideals, expectations, and anxieties (Marshall, “Innocence”). Some of the less favorable constructions depict a tenuous peripheral time of transition, surveillance, and abjection. Perceived as not-quite-adults but more independently mobile than younger children, real-world youth are frequently marked by boundaries of ­exclusion—branded as “out of place,” at-risk, or inherently transgressive figures within public and civic spaces. By contrast, more romanticized representations of adolescence afford youth a liminal, makeshift strain of untethered teenage freedom—a last gasp of play and juvenility before the constraints and burdens of adult responsibilities.1 Either way, universal figures of “youth” are routinely characterized as moving through, occupying, and engaging in everyday worlds in distinctly non-adult ways—figuratively and physically segregated from adult spaces and places of maturity, work, and citizenship. Notions of such discrete youth spatialities are further reinforced in stories for and about adolescents—fictional portraits that tend to create and sustain normative adolescent boundaries along White, middle-class, and heterosexual borders (Marshall). A reading of peripatetic teenage protagonists immortalized in works such as The Catcher in the Rye and Harriet the Spy, for instance, might reveal the capacity for White, affluent youth to navigate urban landscapes with comparative ease and little if any lasting consequences. The privileged and defiantly adolescent mobility of such protagonists is further underscored by the implied provisional quality of their oppositional relationship to adult spaces. As Holden Caulfield notes, “I’m just going through a phase right now. Everybody goes through phases and all, don’t they?” (Salinger 15). Notably, literary scholars have long argued that children’s and YA fiction offers a rich site through which to explore, question, or dispel dominant narratives of youth identity and belonging (Glenn, “Theories”; Lockney; Spring). Many have approached fictional youth mobilities through frames DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-12

80  Caroline Hamilton-McKenna of cosmopolitanism, nomadism, and flânerie,2 recasting young characters as global, agentic cartographers who embody a sense of hope, wonder, and possibility for the future (McCulloch; Tribunella). Infusing a cultural geography lens with a cosmopolitan framework, Jenny Bavidge details how Fitzhugh’s exemplary child-flâneuse in Harriet arguably allows for a more expansive reading of the child-city relationship. By offering a counternarrative to traditional associations of children with nature, Bavidge notes, Harriet playfully distorts geographies of childhood—rescripting the city as a space for opportunity, self-actualization, and a cool, detached form of childhood agency. Yet spatial analyses of fictional youth on the move also risk essentializing adolescent mobilities as oppositional and individualistic navigations, divorced from adult spheres. Equating young protagonists’ independent movement and engagement with freedom, progress, and empowerment, such readings often distinguish young characters from systems of power that discriminate and oppress. As Heather Snell argues, cosmopolitan illusions of affluent globetrotters—as “innocent signifiers of worldliness” (254)—can obscure literary endorsements of global imperialism. Moreover, Ebony Thomas writes, uncritical readings of mobile characters can bifurcate urban youth into the privileged global elite and the economically challenged, working-class locals—reifying narratives of who belongs, and where (17). But what if adolescent spatiality and movement were reconsidered in YA texts—presumed not as an unsettled, detached period of transition or freedom, but rather, as geographers of youth argue, a complex negotiative process, enmeshed in political, social, and cultural life? Emerging scholarship on identity and literary geographies has specifically employed cultural geography frameworks to more critically examine the interplay of youth identity, space, and place in literature—investigating how fictional representations reckon with broader assumptions about the “entwined, contingent, and fundamentally political” spatiality of youth (Pini et al., “Rural” 464). In what follows, I build on existing scholarship and my collaborative explorations of spatiality and YA fiction (HamiltonMcKenna and Rogers) to more deeply examine the complex and often contradictory youth mobilities represented in contemporary texts for and about young people. Using Dana Czapnik’s 2019 novel The Falconer as my guide,3 I argue that Czapnik’s teen protagonist offers a map beyond dichotomous adolescent spatial abstractions and ideals—a revised cartography of the privileges and inequities encountered by diverse youth as they slip in and between borders of public and private worlds. Particularly during this era of intense spatial inequity and unsettling global change, Czapnik’s text demonstrates how liminal adolescent mobilities and “in-betweenness” is not always symptom of exclusion, or powerlessness; it is a complex and differentiated spatiality, rife with contradictory freedoms and constraints, and interrelated with structures and systems of power.

“Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want”  81 Unlike other theories of subjective becoming in space and place,4 the combined feminist geography and critical mobilities lens I employ here aims to focus my analysis on the “negotiative politics” (Pierce 2) of spatiality in Czapnik’s text. According to geographer Doreen Massey, feminist cultural geography frameworks seek to dispel simplistic or insular notions of space, place, and identity—reenvisioning physical and cultural environments, and the subjects who move through them, as local and global “stories-so-far,” thrown together in potentially transformative ways. Previous scholarship on contemporary children’s and young adult literature drawing on Massey’s seminal work has examined spheres of adolescent belonging and place-based identities in and across physical and cultural borders. For instance, in their analysis of Emily Danforth’s 2012 novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Barbara Pini, Wendy Keys, and Elizabeth Marshall fuse feminist theories with queer and rural geography scholarship to explore how the young adult protagonist Cameron navigates and responds to the “spatial inequalities related to sexuality” (“Queering” 364). Highlighting the pedagogical implications of spatial readings, Wendy Glenn similarly argues that a feminist geography lens “reveals assumptions about privilege, place, and identity that reinforce stereotypical representation” (“American Legacy” 384). Other scholars have combined cultural geography with postcolonial and critical transnational theories to explore dynamic hybrid spaces and subjectivities. As Carol Brochin and Carmen Medina contend, transnational frames facilitate understandings of the “new forms of marginalization, unfair redistribution of wealth, and re-segregation that emerge specifically for transmigrant communities” (6). However, rarely has literary scholarship foregrounded a critical mobilities lens in relation to contemporary urban landscapes.5 In essence, a critical mobilities perspective extends feminist theories of geography to examine how differentiated flows of people, objects, and ideas interrelate with spatial distributions of power (Cresswell; Massey, “Power-Geometry”). As geographers of youth maintain, tracing tides of embodied and discursive spatial hegemonies are especially salient to constructions of adolescent “betweenness” that might otherwise dismiss adolescent subjects and bodies as apolitical, ineffective members of their communities.6 Whereas related theories of becoming, such as cosmopolitanism and nomadism, follow subjectivities, movements, and flows, a critical geography and mobilities framework has the potential to enrich examinations of movement as well as stillness, access as well as opportunity, and the constellations of mobility that enable some at the expense or exclusion of others. To this end, in my analysis of Czapnik’s The Falconer, I reflect on the protagonist’s interdependence with structures and systems of power, exclusion, and injustice—as well as her fragile hold on the entrenched spatial narratives that define who and what can participate, linger, and belong.

82  Caroline Hamilton-McKenna The Falconer is, on its surface, a hypermobile, kinetic text—a romantic encapsulation of cosmopolitan subjectivity. Chronicling the development of 17-year-old basketball player Lucy Adler as she struggles to define her own sense of purpose and belonging in New York City circa 1993, Czapnik’s novel seems to be in perpetual, unbridled motion. Indeed, Lucy’s mantra from the start is: “… don’t stop. Keep running” (15). Self-identifying as a middle-class “pizza bagel—a Jewish and Italian mutt-girl” (6)—Lucy, aka “Loose,” idealizes what it means to be young, free, and powerful, as evidenced by her admiration of The Falconer in Central Park: A statue of “some kid at the height of his powers standing on top of a mountain, commanding nature, releasing a bird into the wind without any fear” (87). To her, this paradigm of individual mobility and freedom in public spaces represents a clear and coherent vision of youth, an embodiment of possibility she likens to the rarefied moments on the basketball court “when you hit the perfect jump shot” (61). In part due to this purist vision of autonomy and self-determination, Lucy ruefully observes how her own mobilities across the city are stratified by expectations for her gender, age, and class. For instance, resentful of constructions of femininity that reduce women and girls to symbolic guardians of polite conformity, Lucy envies the cultural allowances that afford boys and men the power to take up “as much space as possible” (140–141). Like the Falconer statue, her friend Percy comes to embody this privileged mobility bestowed to wealthy White men. While Percy’s heteronormative, basketball-playing image “gives him social capital” (19), his family’s considerable economic leverage ensures his acceptance into elite schools and impunity from legal punishment as he tags street corners with philosophical quotations. As Percy himself professes, “I’m my own country” (81). Lucy similarly glamorizes her 25-year-old cousin Violet for an artistic mobility that seems righteously set apart from the commodified wastelands of teenage consumer culture. As an artist, Violet exudes a kind of anarchic chaos—as Lucy notes, “she reeks of it” (36)—bucking the forces of a homogenized global economy. Railing against the machines of “latecapitalist America” (39), Violet embodies the liberated feminist ideal as she refuses to let commerce or social judgment dictate her work or her appearance. As she says to Lucy, “Whatever. I just gotta be me” (43). By essentializing youthful autonomy, Lucy thus initially ennobles and mischaracterizes the mobilities of certain individuals as separate from the interconnected, quotidian spatial “politics of mobility and access” (Massey, Gender 150). Neglecting to see the privileges and challenges endemic to everyday navigations of space and place, as well as the interrelated flows of ideas and systems that enable and constrain youth mobilities in different

“Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want”  83 and inequitable ways, she also fails to recognize the source and effects of her own freedoms. To Lucy, anything short of unrestrained liberty is a sellout; as she puts it, life often appears “like those Choose Your Own Adventure books where every last adventure ends up with some part of yourself … snuffed out and deadened” (Czapnik 206). As the novel progresses, however, Lucy’s observations of spatial politics develop into more nuanced appreciations of the inequitable access, opportunities, and freedoms afforded to some at the expense of others. For example, complicating Lucy’s visions of pure and transcendent mobile figures, Percy’s purportedly self-determined life trajectories prove to be contingent, ephemeral, and misleading. Happening upon one of Percy’s street tags, Lucy observes how easily she can “wipe away the excess ink” (Czapnik 28) of his message, as it is written “in dry-erase markers and chalk” (29). Percy’s professed hatred of social and economic hierarchies is likewise exposed as empty posturing; his engineered acceptance to Harvard along with his frequent disposal of girlfriends reveal his dependence on the flow of capitalism and patriarchal systems of privilege and exclusion. Violet, too, emerges as a problematic figure of autonomy and subversion. Despite her resolute and principled stance against the corrupt “circular farce” (40) of American institutions, Violet continues to benefit from the protections and privileges they have afforded her. When her building is sold and her fellow artists are displaced, Violet—a Bennington grad—is sheltered by her ability to choose an alternative career, confessing, “it’s all a sham. I’ve been working a nine-to-five job at a marketing firm… . I didn’t want to be a starving artist anymore” (221). Her mobilities within the art world are similarly yoked to external flows of power and commerce. Capitulating to the whims of wealthy patrons, Violet cedes her own recognition to bolster the success of her roommate, Max, “ … for genius to be celebrated it has to come from an individual. So it’s only Max’s name on the bottom of the painting” (195). In some ways, this erosion of Lucy’s previous idealizations has emancipatory effects. Whereas her inability to “fit in the box that makes the most sense to people” (19) at first felt like an impediment to her success, not fitting in later emerges as a source of authenticity and strength—a newfound potential to “wrestle the current” (16) of spatial politics without pretense or unrealistic expectations. As Lucy walks to the subway, she even emanates a hopeful—if not ironic—sense of possibility and control over her own life, armed with purpose rather than aimlessness: “Where to go? Where to go? Girl. Wherever the fuck you want” (274). At the same time, however, Lucy’s growing sense of independent selfhood fuses with an uncomfortable awareness of her own privileged mobilities. Throughout the novel, Lucy is somewhat aware of her White privilege

84  Caroline Hamilton-McKenna to enter, participate, and leave a variety of spaces at will. For instance, she juxtaposes her own relatively safe and playful routes to and from school with the actual risks posed by her friend Lexie’s commute to an outer borough, “... she has to take the school bus immediately after practice because the walk home from the train late at night is dangerous” (19). Further, Lucy openly acknowledges that the advantages of her private school education stem from unequal distributions of power. Illustrative of Massey’s contention that “the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people” (Gender 150), Lucy notes how her middle-class family actually benefitted from White flight, “many of the rich White families had fled the city for safer hamlets with better schools and less crime. Suddenly, a school like Pendleton was accessible to families like mine and like the Watanabes in 5B” (Czapnik 83). Yet it isn’t until her basketball team visits a public school in a predominantly Black community that Lucy is physically confronted with her complicity in this unjust spatial reality. An architectural remnant of financially-depleted civil rights-era policies, Manhattan Academy on Staten Island resembles a prison—complete with rent-a-cops, a stone courtyard, and a metal detector. As Lucy observes, “the school might as well be another country. We ought to get our passports stamped” (113). The material consequences of Lucy’s sheltered and privileged middle-class life become increasingly clear when Lucy enters the girls’ bathroom—what she describes as a “shithole” (126) defaced with mildew, crushed-up cigarettes, and graffiti written in permanent marker. Staring at the mirror tag, “Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a / wicked jump shot” (127), Lucy embodies a privileged outsider—the cosmopolitan White interloper free to enter and leave a space otherwise configured to contain, limit, and discipline its occupants. Like Thomas’s description of urban contact zones, Lucy’s ability to not only witness but actually generate this intersection of privilege and challenge lays bare the extent of her inherited liberty and power. Rendered immobile at this stark injustice, Lucy angrily deplores the conditions and fixates on her own sense of inadequacy: “I feel gritty and alone and stuck inside myself, with no way out” (130). Ultimately, Czapnik’s novel does not resolve the tensions inherent in Lucy’s contingent mobilities as a White, middle-class female. At Manhattan Academy and elsewhere, Lucy wrestles with her intricate blend of privileges and constraints with varying degrees of irony and selfishness, empowerment and hope. As a result, The Falconer resists simplistic readings of agency or transgression, instead offering a critical portrait of how young adult subjects access and participate across a diverse range of physical and cultural spheres. Examining such work through a feminist cultural geography and critical mobilities lens further attunes readers to the subtle and nuanced ways in which the local and global flows and fixities of ideas,

“Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want”  85 people, and structures sustain modes of exclusion and privilege in everyday spaces, including schools. As Lucy’s narrative demonstrates, a heightened sense of “outwardlookingness” (Massey, For Space 15), or awareness of spatial dynamics, can dispel fixed conceptions of belonging and power. While such a reading opens up geographical imaginations to the possibilities of youth engagement, it also enables readers to look more deeply at why and for whom those imaginings are possible—exposing how the contingent and differentiated mobilities of young people co-produce and transform our everyday worlds. Notes 1 See psychologist Stanley Hall’s description of adolescence as a rebellious time of “storm and stress” (xiii); see also Lesko on oppositional constructions of adolescence and the teenage years, and Skelton and Valentine on the constrained geographies of youth. 2 Readings of flânerie often draw on the subversive urban walker, as outlined by Michel de Certeau. 3 Although not initially marketed as YA fiction, The Falconer has been described as a “crossover” novel for its representation of and appeal to young adults. 4 Featherstone et  al. illustrate Massey’s critical divergence from other spatial theories (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari). 5 A mobilities lens has been used, however, to interrogate movement in and out of magical realms; see Murray and Cortés-Morales on the “impossible mobilities” of children’s fantasy novels. 6 For more on the liminal politics of youth, see Kallio and Häkli, Skelton, and Weller.

Works Cited Bavidge, Jenny. “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 319–330, https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280601005682 Brochin, Carol, and Carmen L. Medina. “Critical Fictions of Transnationalism in Latinx Children’s Literature.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 4–11, https://doi.org/10.1353/bkb.2017.0036 Cresswell, Tim. “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 1 2010, pp. 17–31. Czapnik, Dana. The Falconer. Atria, 2019. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by S. Rendall, U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota Press, 1987. Featherstone, David, et al. “‘Stories So Far’: A Conversation with Doreen Massey.” Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey, edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 253–266. Fitzhugh, Louise. Harriet the Spy. Yearling, 1964.

86  Caroline Hamilton-McKenna Glenn, Wendy J. “Space and Place and the ‘American’ Legacy: Female Protagonists and the Discovery of Self in Two Novels for Young Adults.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 48, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 378–395, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10583-016-9310-6 ———. “Theories of Space, Place, and Navigational Identity: Turning Inside Out and Back Again in the Exploration of Immigration.” Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom, edited by Ricki Ginsberg and Wendy Glenn, Routledge, 2019, pp. 113–121, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429053191 Hall, Stanley G. Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. D. Appleton and Company, 1904. Hamilton-McKenna, Caroline, and Theresa Rogers. “Reenvisioning Space, Mobilities and Public Engagement with Young Adult Literature.” English Teaching: Practice and Critique, vol. 20, no. 1, 2021, pp. 64–77, https://doi.org/10.1108/ ETPC-06-2020-0055 Kallio, Kirsi Pauliina, and Jouni Häkli. “Tracing Children’s Politics.” Political Geography, vol. 30, no. 2, Feb. 2011, pp. 99–109, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. polgeo.2011.01.006 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2012, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203121580 Lockney, Karen. “Progressive Presentations of Place-Based Identities in Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 44, no. 4, 2013, pp. 311–325, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-013-9198-3 Marshall, Elizabeth. “Innocence.” Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges, edited by Nancy Lesko and Susan Talburt, Routledge, 2012, pp. 295–299, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203805909 Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage Publications, Ltd., 2005. ———. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping The Futures: Local Culutres, Global Change, edited by John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner, Routledge, 1993, pp. 60–70. ———. Space, Place, and Gender. U of Minnesota P, 1994. McCulloch, Fiona. Contemporary British Children’s Fiction and Cosmopolitanism. Routledge, 2016, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315738512 Murray, Lesley, and Susana Cortés-Morales. Children’s Mobilities: Interdependent, Imagined, Relational. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2019, https://doi. org/10.1057/978-1-137-52114-9 Pierce, Joseph. “How Can We Share Space? Ontologies of Spatial Pluralism in Lefebvre, Butler, and Massey.” Space and Culture, vol. 25, no. 1, Feb. 2022, pp. 20–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331219863314 Pini, Barbara, et  al. “Queering Rurality: Reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post Geographically.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 15, no. 3, May 2017, pp. 362–373, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1252830 Pini, Barbara, et al. “Rural Youth: Mobilities, Marginalities, and Negotiations.” Space, Place, and Environment: Geographies of Children and Young People 3, edited by Karen Nairn and Peter Kraftl, Springer, 2016, pp. 463–480, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5

“Girl. Wherever the F*ck You Want”  87 Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown and Co., 1951. Skelton, Tracey. “Taking Young People as Political Actors Seriously: Opening the Borders of Political Geography.” Area, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010, pp. 145–151, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00891.x Skelton, Tracey, and Gill Valentine. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. Routledge, 1998. Spring, Erin. “Where Are You from?: Locating the Young Adult Self within and beyond the Text.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 14, no. 3, May 2016, pp. 356–371, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015.1055456 Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. “Landscapes of City and Self: Place and Identity in Urban Young Adult Literature.” The ALAN Review, vol. 38, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13–22. Tribunella, Eric L. “Children’s Literature and the Child Flâneur.” Children’s Literature, vol. 38, 2010, pp. 64–91. Weller, Susie. “Situating (Young) Teenagers in Geographies of Children and Youth.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2006, 97–108, https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280600577517

9 Whirlpooling Feminist Rage Gang Rape-Revenge in Foul Is Fair and The Nowhere Girls Amber Moore

Taking inspiration from those who use water metaphors to describe sexual violence and rape culture such as Chanel Miller and Heather Savigny who both characterize rape as a “tsunami,” this chapter theorizes collective feminist avenging in two young adult (YA) gang rape-revenge texts. In them, water functions as fluid space(s) wherein rape culture ebbs and flows; that is, water is where rape culture is experienced as both a comfort and a threat, as well as resisted by the violated characters and their friends/ allies. First, Hannah Capin’s Foul is Fair (2020) is a Macbeth adaptation where Elizabeth (Elle) Jade Khanjara is drugged and gang-raped. Jade and her “coven” then plot Jade’s rapists’ murders. Next, in Amy Reed’s The Nowhere Girls (2017), three girls band together to combat rape culture generally and avenge the gang rape of former fellow student, Lucy, specifically. Collective feminist rage is weaponized, which I conceptualize as feminist whirlpooling: a complex collective culmination of rage rippling out resistance against rape culture. Feminist whirlpooling both complexly churns and subversively swirls, altogether functioning to create counterspaces for cultivating particular and potent feminist consciousness that helps the girls to reclaim their worlds. “Whirlpool” is fitting because water in its many manifestations surfaces in diverse and discursive ways in both texts, shifting in symbolic meaning. A whirlpool is more than the combination of currents into a twisting body of water; it carries rich symbolic possibilities and is a useful frame because whirlpools both harmoniously “swirl” as well as complexly “churn.” It is also a “monstrous force,” a fearsome vortex with “immeasurable depths, sucking things into the void and then disgorging them again,” and yet, it also suggests an access point to another world; they represent “a state of calm intelligibility at the heart of the funnel, a transition from dread to hope” and “discover[y]” (Ronnberg and Martin 46). Thus, water comes to represent the fluidity and transgressive bounds of feminist capacities for rage and revenge against rape, a twisting reservoir of the collective feminist anger that is both smooth and rough but hopeful, representing a discovery. DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-13

Whirlpooling Feminist Rage  89 These texts demonstrate that whirlpooling feminisms hold capacity for both world-building and destruction. These novels represent a subgenre of rape-revenge narratives that reimagine victimhood and/or survivorship in more resistant and even retributive ways. They can be read as part of a broader genre that includes film, such as Promising Young Woman (2020) and literature like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008). Rape-revenge stories are an established genre, such as through the often-scorned horror sub-genre (e.g., I Spit on Your Grave), and more recently in YA, stories reimagine victimhood where “the damsel is often replaced by the avenging woman” (Fredriksson 59). Raperevenge is also a specific narrative structure that can be mapped across genres. Especially since #MeToo, this genre especially offers powerful politics for enhanced understanding(s) of rape culture. Increasingly, YA literature offers shifting perspectives on rape-revenge as a genre and/or narrative structure as whole. Following Roberta Seelinger Trites’ argument that YA texts are all about power, Foul is Fair and The Nowhere Girls focus on boldly and brutally taking power back following gang-rape—a particularly painful form of sexual violence. For example, Roxane Gay, who was gang-raped as a child, describes her experience: They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men. I remember the smells, the squareness of their faces, the weight of their bodies, the tangy smell of their sweat, the surprising strength of their limbs. I remember they enjoyed themselves and laughed a lot. I remember they had nothing but disdain for me. (44) Similarly, the boys in these texts hold no regard for Jade or Lucy. Rather, these rapists are cunning, cruel and organized to take what they feel entitled to. And, as Kate Manne argues, entitlement toward women and girls also sparks ferocious anger that can inspire feminist solidarity, as evidenced by these novels. Indeed, feminist rage is “having a moment” (Orgad and Gill 596) with scholars recently extending conceptualizations of it, including Brittney Cooper, Jilly Boyce Kay, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Sarah Orem, to name a few; Aiyana Altrows also specifically looks at feminist anger in YA rape texts, including celebrating The Nowhere Girls for its loud feminist anger that “foregrounds collectivity” (7). Drawing on Audre Lorde and bell hooks, feminist anger is most useful when employed with focus, precision, and in response to systemic oppression(s). Sara Ahmed especially informs this chapter; for her, feminist rage is both a tool and a task that dynamically enhances feminism, gives it an “edge” (Cultural Politics 174). This is necessary because, as she writes of complaint against sexual violence, it “can come off as steam, puff puff. In being let out, a complaint disappears,

90  Amber Moore becoming air” (Complaint! 84). And so, rather than allowing their experiences to evaporate, these characters spiral in liquid and livid solidarity. Ahmed is particularly applicable to an analysis of space, place, and rape in YA because she argues that painful experiences and angry outrage influences feminisms requiring “reading[s] of the world” (Cultural Politics 176) and necessary discomfort, “even when we feel it provides us a home” (178). With this in mind, feminist rage both complexly churns and subversively swirls in the whirlpooling response to sexual violence in these texts. To begin with, whirlpooling feminisms can be rough; indeed, a kind of churning made complex by how water functions as a symbolic reminder of trauma. In each novel, water is also a site of entrapment (see Moore, “Traumatic”) and a symbolic reminder of violence. Continuing with The Nowhere Girls, it is significantly set in the Pacific Northwest, which, as noted by Grace, is an overwhelmingly wet place. Further, Lucy describes rape like drowning and her rapists as an ocean of pain. She details, “So much darkness in the murky water, her head submerged. Her body torn apart by violent waters” (Reed 62). As the boys abuse her semi-conscious body, she feels “[R]ocking, thrashing, a violent sea” believing that she has died, “a whale carcass being torn apart by eels at the bottom of the sea,” “pulled underwater” repeatedly (63). Gang rape can be a bonding experience for rapists (Messner); the rape space can be a significant site for boys to find a sense of community with one another in shared attacks. This suggestion gains more traction in considering how the boys gather on “The real men of Prescott” blog filled with ageism, anti-fat bias, body shaming, classism, misogyny, slut-shaming, and where sexual violence is encouraged. Reading it, Grace thinks, “The world is a sick place… It is a place where people can post things like that, spreading hate and darkness, and no one holds them accountable” (Reed 81). The raped person can then be understood as displaced, a “nowhere girl.” Lucy is so far “nowhere” that she imagines herself underwater, only to be beached back to the place of her local rape culture when they have finished. As Grace describes: … they only destroyed; they did not plant anything live inside her. The bottom feeders have cleaned her skeleton of all its flesh. She is washed up onshore, tangled with seaweed, smelling of decay. She crawls across the storm-tossed beach, over the rocks and garbage, over the beer bottles and cigarette butts and lifeless bodies. Over so many red cups. Bodies all over the place, bodies everywhere, people who didn’t make it home last night. (64) She is left without any allies or justice, churned out and away. Thus, the rape is so traumatizing that Lucy and her family move away so that she is nowhere to be found.

Whirlpooling Feminist Rage  91 In Foul is Fair, water imagery is similarly used as a reminder of Jade’s rape as well as how, like with Lucy, turbulent waters are also personified as a villain attempting to drown her. This happens when Jade jumps off a boat in order to lure one of her rapists in to drown him. However, Jade initially struggles in the waves: The water swallows me whole. Its teeth cut gashes into my skin and it’s so cold that my mouth flies open and I gasp and then I’m choking. It’s darker than any dark there’s ever been. The water grabs my arms and my legs and pulls me down, pulls me apart, pulls me deeper. (Capin 233) Soon after, Jade’s coven worries that she is going too far. This is because Jade allows Mack, the boy she’s using as her “in” to the group who raped her (and don’t recognize her), to drive her home after her water stunt; she is even still damp, the stain of her violence lingering. Mads accuses, “You’re getting reckless” (242) because Mack could have seen the other girls and figured out their torture conspiracy. This is because, like the Macbeth witches, Jade’s coven has been scaring her rapists. As a result, Jade and Mads share a rare tense moment, demonstrating how their feminist collective plan sometimes churns roughly. Despite this, Mads soon affirms solidarity, instructing, “Don’t forget us. We’ll be yours until it’s over and we’ll be yours after it’s done” (244). Ultimately, their connection buoys them through the sometimes-rough waters of the rape-revenge plan. Returning briefly to The Nowhere Girls, similarly, there is some choppiness in their activism that especially ripples in the places they hold meetings; when the girls first assemble, there is friction and interpersonal conflict. For example, at the first meeting, someone accuses character Elise of “looking gay” (Reed 27) and she storms out in tears. At the second, an attendee criticizes the meetings’ disorganization, someone else calls Rosina “the Mexican girl” (27) and she bristles, and Jenny, a former friend of Lucy, downplays their friendship until confronted. Later, slut shaming ensues. These moments show how sometimes, feminist anger can be “directed toward those who happen to be the nearest, often those who are dearest” (Ahmed, Living 172). And yet, despite the bumps, the girls do significant social justice work together. Although the feminist whirlpooling across both texts involves some turbulent churning, the girls mend their conflicts and push forward with significant swirling of social change, discussed below. As feminist rage bubbles up in both stories, although water has sometimes been symbolic of violence, water also surfaces as representative of subversion and resistance; anger can also be creative (Ahmed, Cultural Politics). The girls channel and funnel their rage into violent antirape activism and defiance. Beginning with Foul is Fair, it is first worth noting

92  Amber Moore that the girls are also called “the ice queens” (Capin 11), with Jade assuring, “I am still ice. I am still savage and wicked. I am the little girl who pushed the boy off the playground castle” (318). Further, they are also repeatedly called “sirens,” “like the ones in those stories. The ones who sing and make men die” (1; 300); that is, mythical beings who lure sailors off course with their murderous music (Ronnberg and Martin). What is extraordinary about their subversive siren identities is that they don’t need magic; rather, the “magic” is in their vengeful attitudes, minds, sisterhood, and spite. The girls embody watery and wild characteristics that suggest that they wield water critically and capably in a whirlpool of revenge. Jade offers literal displays of defiance in the turbulent ocean. First, she visits the ocean after traumatic flashbacks for catharsis. Driving her “slut-red BMW” (Capin 13) up to the place “where the waves crash almost against the rocks” (18), Jade jumps out and runs along the coastline, feeling powerful. A while later, Mads finds her atop a cliff, where “the waves can’t reach” (18). Soon she returns to the water and makes her desire for it to submit to her clear: I stand up and walk into the ocean. The waves are stronger than they look and cold enough to crack bone. I should fall but I don’t. I won’t. I keep walking, steady, until my feet barely touch the sand and I float closer to the sun with every wave. Keeping my head above the water— daring every fucking wave to drown me—daring sharks to find me— daring the St. Andrew’s boys to come back—until my feet can’t touch the sand at all …. (19) Here, Jade aligns the water and her rapists; both are capable of claiming her but she “dar[es]” both try her. Later, as mentioned, water becomes integral to her murder plans. With The Nowhere Girls, after Lucy moves, Grace’s family buys her house, which seems to hold the memory of Lucy’s trauma. Lucy’s old bedroom leaks, almost weeping in mourning, evidenced by her ceiling’s recurring water stain. At one point, Grace wakes to “the sloppy percussion of drip drip drip” (124). While Oregon is a place “known for its year-round wetness” (2), she is surprised that the dampness draws her attention to places where Lucy’s calls for attendance to her testimony are marked: pleas for a kind of wet witnessing. This is because Lucy has left her words on the walls in ghostly notes like “hear me,” “help me” (55), and “HELP ME” (88). While the water is written as symbolic of Lucy’s pain, it is also what seems to literally draw Grace’s attention to Lucy’s walls that hold these messages, sparking Grace’s motivation to avenge Lucy. Water then becomes the vehicle for drawing attention to the antirape activism desperately needed in this community and as a newcomer inhibiting this

Whirlpooling Feminist Rage  93 kind of waterlogged space of trauma, Grace is uniquely positioned to help. She calls on new friends, Rosina and Erin, to join her. Next, Erin, another victim-survivor, has a complex but compelling relationship with water. Although she hates showering, she loves the ocean, even its most disturbing details; for example, she shares, “Did you know otters rape baby seals?” (Reed 68). Her passion for aquatic life seems boundless; her favorite episode of her beloved Star Trek is about deepocean exploration. Perhaps most importantly, she also takes great pleasure in imagining herself underwater, especially when upset. For example, after fighting with her mother, she knows her “heavy blanket and whale songs” (211) will be comforting. The whale songs help her envision herself “deep underwater, in a ship of her own design, so far down that sunlight can no longer reach her. But thoughts still creep in. Even this far underwater” (170). Listening, she feels “safe, boneless” (341), almost in a womb-like space which can perhaps also be interpreted as unrapable. Erin is also comforted by the wet weather; after one of their activist meetings, she leaves and “looks out at the rain after being triggered inside” (262). Erin even influences Grace to focus on natural places and spaces when she’s stressed, such as “the wet breeze of a coming rainstorm” (243), which Grace thinks of after interacting with one of Lucy’s rapists. Thus, the girls offer support in both a highly organized activist fashion and in smaller, intimate moments of friendship and emotional care. The rain also comforts Rosina, making her feel grounded. Like Erin, she is “grateful for the rain, grateful that she can focus on the sound and feel of it on her body, a new heaviness of her clothes, the cold wet of her skin” (263). Returning to Erin’s escape into watery places, even imagining it here, as she does, is also very much akin and connected to how Jade also is comforted by water and literally goes to it when she is experiencing flashbacks, as discussed. The stories somewhat similarly swirl together here, as water becomes a refuge for Erin and a source of strength for Jade as they work through their rapes and consequent trauma symptoms. Further, the girls’ solidarity swirls together through activism, which is conceptualized by Grace as a kind of buoy in a sea of rape culture, “our voices, they are louder than we even know … one small kindness in a sea of cruelty” (Reed 84). Grace understands that “When they raped Lucy, they raped all of us” (115), as the girls write in an anonymous email to their student body that calls out Lucy’s rapists and their school’s overall rape culture. The “nowhere girls” group begins for a “sharing of disgust,” a shared rage or anger (“Cultural Politics” 96) through meetings where the girls more “safely” drink alcohol together, and action is planned such as through a manifesto and with a sex strike. To end the sex “drought,” the terms are: (1) justice for Lucy and (2) respect for all girls. One boy even reports that when he isn’t supportive, his girlfriend weaponizes liquid,

94  Amber Moore “drink-slapping” (Moore, “A Delicious”) him. Another girl explains the sex strike to her boyfriend and, although he is somewhat supportive, he looks “at the relentless, pounding Oregon rain” and pouts, “God, what a perfect day to have sex” (Reed 160). Here, the water is again aligned with sex in complicated ways in the novel’s setting. Returning to the nowhere girls’ activism—although there is indeed internal struggle, questioning, and friction—ultimately, many find the group to be a safe(er) space for disclosing trauma. The group raises feminist consciousness by helping to facilitate a “transformation of pain into collectivity and resistance” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 172). They become change makers, shifting their world so much that by the end, “The sea of students parts to let the girls through [the school halls]. Because the girls are unstoppable” (Reed 402). Moreover, their social action influences neighboring schools to start their own groups, demonstrating that feminist anger effectively expands feminist communities and washes out rape cultures with whirlpooling resistant rage. In these texts, water fluidly functions as a metaphor and place for rape culture at times and feminist rage at others, ultimately serving as a catalyst for affinities between girls and activism through collective angry organizing against rape culture(s). Because girls’ bodies are often understood as sites for violence (see Marshall), this has become the predominant mode of analysis in children’s and YA texts. Theorizing feminist anger through the metaphor of the place and space of the whirlpool therefore allows for complex understandings of adolescent rage, particularly against the often-overwhelming experience of gang rape violence, offering an intense intervention strategy for funneling feminist fury into resistance with and among adolescent girls. Such collectivity can then lead to ways for violated characters and their friends/allies to differently raise new feminist consciousness to destroy, (re)build, and/or reclaim worlds. These texts are therefore significant in and of themselves but also represent and are part of a long line of feminist rape-revenge texts that are increasingly becoming more necessarily nuanced. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Complaint! Duke UP, 2021. ———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Duke UP, 2014. ———. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017. Altrows, Aiyana. “Silence and the Regulation of Feminist Anger in Young Adult Rape Fiction.” Girlhood Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–16. https://doi. org/10.3167/ghs.2019.120202 Capin, Hannah. Foul Is Fair. Macmillan, 2020.

Whirlpooling Feminist Rage  95 Cooper, Brittney C. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Macmillan, 2018. Fredriksson, Tea. “Avenger in Distress: A Semiotic Study of Lisbeth Salander, Rape- Revenge and Ideology.” Nordic Journal of Criminology, vol. 22, no. 1, 2021, pp. 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/2578983X.2020.1851111. Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Harper, 2017. hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. Macmillan, 1995. Kay, Jilly Boyce, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. “Feminist Anger and Feminist Respair.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2019, pp. 603–609. https://doi.org/10.10 80/14680777.2019.1609231. Larsson, Steig. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Knopf, 2008. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1981. Crossing Press, 2007. Manne, Kate. Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Penguin Random House, 2020. Marshall, Elizabeth. Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence. Routledge, 2018. Messner, Michael A. “The Triad of Violence in Men’s Sports.” Transforming a Rape Culture: Revised Edition, edited by Emilie Buchwald et al., Milkweed Editions, 2005, pp. 23–46. Miller, Chanel. Know My Name. Penguin Random House, 2020. Moore, Amber. “Traumatic Geographies: Mapping the Violent Landscapes Driving YA Rape Survivors Indoors in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl, and E. K. Johnston’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, pp. 58–84. https:// doi.org/10.1353/jeu.2018.0003. Moore, Tracey. “A Delicious Cultural History of Throwing Food and Drink at People We’re Pissed At.” Mel Magazine, 2016. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/ story/history- throwing-food-wine-drink-slap. Accessed 9 Mar. 2022. Orem, Sarah. “Tangles of Resentment.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 46, no. 4, 2021, pp. 963–985. Orgad, Shani, and Rosalind Gill. “Safety Valves for Mediated Feminist Rage in the #MeToo Era.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2019, pp. 596–603. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1609198. Reed, Amy. The Nowhere Girls. Simon & Schuster, 2017. Ronnberg, Ami, and Kathleen Martin. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images. Taschen, 2010. Savigny, Heather. Cultural Sexism: The Politics of Feminist Rage in the #MeToo Era. Bristol UP, 2020. Trites, Roberta S. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. U of Iowa P, 2000.

10 A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People Harriet M. Welsch’s Small-Town New York City Emma K. McNamara New York City is the place one goes to in order to lose their innocence. As Alicia Keys sings in Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” there’s nothing you can’t do in New York City, and it is a melting pot of every culture, religion, language, and educational- and socioeconomic level. There are many books, films, and television programs that use New York City as the playground it is: jetting off to some corner of the city on the subway as though it is a world away instead of a few miles. Newbery books of the 1960s, like George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square (1961); Emily Cheney Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat (1963); and E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), used New York City as a bastion of plenty and possibility. Mario Bellini and Dave Mitchell, the protagonists in The Cricket in Times Square and It’s Like This, Cat hop on and off the subway to explore neighborhoods in all five boroughs. Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, in From the Mixed-Up Files …, run away to New York City from Connecticut in search of a more interesting and daring life. Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 Harriet the Spy, though, does not utilize New York City in this way. Instead, the first installment of Fitzhugh’s wildly popular series takes place within eight square blocks. Harriet M. Welsch’s New York City is actually a small town. Harriet M. Welsch lives on the corner of East 87th Street and East End Avenue (Fitzhugh 3) in Yorkville, a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that is also home to Gracie Mansion, the official mayor’s residence. In her storyworld, Harriet travels from East 82nd Street north to East 87th Street, up and down the borders of York Avenue to the west and East End Avenue to the east and into and out of Carl Schurz Park. Harriet does not travel from these blocks to observe people in Washington Square Park; Harriet does not treat herself to a day at Coney Island; Harriet does not even add the shoe salespeople at Bloomingdale’s on East 60th or the lobby of the 92nd Street Y to her spy route, despite those being close to her home and full of comings and goings. Instead, Harriet roams the comfort of her East 80s. DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-14

A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People  97 Harriet keeps herself confined to the boundaries of the East 80s just as she keeps herself confined to the boundaries of her preferences, even though neither of these boundaries are mandated by the adults in her life. Harriet’s self-imposed “boundaries contribute to [her] identity” (Dainotto 5). Harriet is someone who likes order and routine. She does the same things each day and has no desire for those things to change. Harriet runs home from school to have a snack of cake and milk at 3:40 every afternoon (Fitzhugh 35). When her mother suggests something as innocuous as changing what Harriet brings in her lunch every day—two tomato sandwiches—Harriet is horrified (25–26). Each night when Harriet is tucked into bed, instead of falling asleep, “she got out her flashlight, put the book she was currently reading under the covers, and read happily until Ole Golly [Harriet’s nanny] came in and took the flashlight away as she did every night” (25). “Harriet always waited until her mother said [to drink her milk], no matter how thirsty she was. It made her feel comfortable to have her mother remind her” (26). Thus, it is no secret that “Harriet loved doing everything every day in the same way” (35). The quiet idyll that Harriet relies upon is paralleled by the boundaries of her neighborhood. Street neighborhoods and their enclosed blocks “serve as a means … [to] provide a sense of smallness within the large city” (Wojcik 25). Harriet, in fact, is so ensconced in Yorkville that when her nanny, Ole Golly, takes Harriet and Harriet’s best friend Sport to visit Ole Golly’s mother in Far Rockaway, a neighborhood in Queens, Ole Golly tells them that it is “time you began to see the world … it’s time you saw something” even though they only travel three subway stops to get there (Fitzhugh 8–9, 12). When Ole Golly, Harriet, and Sport arrive at their destination, the children note that the air smells differently in Queens than it does in their riverside neighborhood in Manhattan: “‘Gee,’ said Sport … ‘we’re near the ocean.’ And they could smell it, the salt, and even a wild soft spray which blew gently across their faces” (12–13). Harriet the Spy is one of the many “children’s books where the maps are part of the textual level only. In these books, maps are often described in full detail and propel the story as they’re closely connected with the narrative” (Goga and Kümerling-Meibauer 2). Each time a new character is introduced in Harriet the Spy, their location in Harriet’s neighborhood is given: • “Harriet’s school was called The Gregory School … it was on East End Avenue, a few blocks from Harriet’s house and across the street from Carl Schurz Park” (Fitzhugh 27). • “[Pinky Whitehead] lived on Eighty-eighth Street…” (31). • “Harriet headed toward the Dei Santis’ grocery, the first stop on her regular spy route. The grocery store was on York Avenue…” (53). • “Harrison Withers lived at Eighty-second…” (63).

98  Emma K. McNamara • “The Robinsons were a couple who lived in a duplex on Eighty-eighth Street” (65). • “Janie lived in the garden duplex of a renovated brownstone off East End Avenue on Eighty-fourth Street” (73). • “Rachel Hennessey lived on Eighty-fifth Street … on the corner of York and Eighty-fifth … the fourth one over” (211–212). When Harriet wants to find out where Ole Golly is going on her night off, she follows Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein, Ole Golly’s boyfriend, “up and down the hills and across the paths” of Carl Schurz Park (Fitzhugh 97). When Mr. Waldenstein asks Ole Golly if she would like to see a movie, he indicates that the movie he is talking about is “playing over on Eightysixth Street” (98). And, when Ole Golly accepts that invitation, the reader is told that the pair walk out of the park until “they had reached East End Avenue again … [and] disappeared around the corner into Eighty-sixth Street” (99). A few weeks later, when Harriet’s classmates pour ink over her head and ruin her clothes, Miss Elson, her teacher, who believes that it was an accident, tells Harriet that she “must simply run home and take a bath and change. You’ll be back in time for math class” (218). This is possible because Harriet lives so close to her school. When Harriet leaves school to do as Miss Elson says, “she catapult[s] herself out of the door … She ran even faster out on the street because everyone stared at her. I’m the blue monster of East End Avenue, she thought as she careened across Eighty-sixth Street and up the block to her house” (220). These robust location descriptions “render[s] both storyworld and real world more tangible and authentic” (Marie-Laure Ryan, qtd. in Gutierrez 121). This is more important than providing a visual map because it shows that Harriet is aware of her surroundings, has an intimate relationship with her neighborhood, and contributes to the orderliness that she likes to live by. Gutierrez points to a movie tie-in edition of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist that gifts fans “a sketched map pointing out some of the key locations of the story” (Gutierrez 117). Similarly, there is a map of Harriet’s neighborhood provided in the 50th Anniversary edition of Harriet the Spy (Delacorte Press). The map is not available in other editions of the book—including the original—which indicates that a topographical map is of secondary importance to verbal and cognitive mapping. Additionally, the visual map is something that Fitzhugh herself did not find necessary and, given that the novel’s 50th anniversary was well after Fitzhugh’s death, was created without her input. Although Harriet the Spy takes place within eight blocks, Fitzhugh often makes the area seem larger than it is. While city blocks are known to be larger than the size of a block is typically imagined, the area is still relatively small. Yorkville’s total area is about 0.5 mi² and that includes the

A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People  99 blocks in the East 70s and 90s and west of York Avenue. When Harriet is spying on Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein, she writes in her notebook that she can “GO ACROSS THE STREET AND HIDE BEHIND A TREE IN THE PARK I CAN SEE THE FRONT DOOR JUST RIGHT” (Fitzhugh 93, capitalization hers). When Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein enter the park themselves, Harriet “watched them turn onto the esplanade which runs along the river … they were turning off the walk by the river onto one of the smaller paths, the one beside the mayor’s house” (96–97). It is indicated that it takes Harriet a great deal of effort to keep up with them, as she has to go “up and down the hills and across the paths” of Carl Schurz Park (97) even though it must be only a few feet contained within the park, and not a traveled journey. Later, when Harriet gets discovered spying in Agatha K. Plumber’s dumbwaiter, Harriet “didn’t stop running until she was at her front door. She sat down on the stoop and panted a long time” (Fitzhugh 174–175). The Plumbers and the Welsches both live on 87th Street between York and East End avenues, yet Harriet is so winded as to be “pant[ing] a long time” having run less than a block between the two. Reflecting on the proximity of her home to her school, Harriet writes in her notebook, “I REMEMBER WHEN WE LIVED AT SEVENTY-SEVENTH AND FIFTH. I HAD TO RIDE THE SCHOOL BUS EVERY DAY INSTEAD OF WALKING” (Fitzhugh 226, capitalization hers) even though it would have been only a one mile walk to East 85th Street and East End Avenue, where the Gregory School is. Any city dweller would tell you that a one mile walk is a terribly short distance, yet those who live in suburban, exurban, and rural areas, who are used to driving everywhere, tend to turn up their nose at such an idea as walking a mile. This further reinforces that Harriet’s life happens as though she lives somewhere besides a large city. Toward the end of the book, when Harriet’s parents force Harriet to see a therapist, the office is at 96th Street and Fifth Avenue (Fitzhugh 252). Mrs. Welsch drives Harriet to the office. They do not walk the mile and a half there; they do not take the subway or the bus; they drive their own car (Fitzhugh 252). During the appointment, when the therapist asks Harriet if she would like to play a game, Harriet is appalled, “this was the dumbest thing Harriet had ever heard of. To come all this way to play a game” (254). While the therapist’s office is less than 20 blocks from Harriet’s home, Harriet still considers that to be a far distance—“all this way,” she thinks—when she has not even left the Upper East Side. These examples imply that Harriet believes she is traveling from one edge of her town to the other, as opposed to staying within a mile’s radius, and usually closer than that. Harriet does not think of herself as a New Yorker in the way that is typical of other New York residents. Harriet creates her own order within New York’s general disorder.

100  Emma K. McNamara Contributing greatly to that order is Harriet’s proclivity to routine. Harriet is not out of the ordinary with this. All people who live in large cities adhere to the same mundanity of everyday life that is apparent the world over. There is an oft-repeated quip that nobody has time to be a tourist in their own city because everyone is bogged down with work, family, errands, chores, and the like. Even Claudia and Jamie Kincaid end up creating their own routine despite seeking adventure (Konigsburg 77), and Mario Bellini and his parents work at their newsstand each Saturday night and Sunday morning to get the Sunday newspapers out instead of relaxing and going to church (Selden 1, 4, 99). This is how place contributes to “a category of cultural understanding” (Dainotto 3) because there is a universality in routine. There is also a universality in routine taking up so much of one’s energy that incorporating something new, or deviating from a schedule, is overwhelming. Given that Harriet was not supposed to know that Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein went out together, she is eager to ask about her nanny’s night off, “So the next afternoon, after school, [Harriet] went into Ole Golly’s room even before she went to the kitchen [to eat her cake and milk]. Harriet had to be dreadfully curious to break routine in this way” (Fitzhugh 104). In contrast, Harriet feels the pull to follow her classmates to Rachel Hennessey’s house to see what they are doing without her, yet she thinks of her daily after school cake and milk, “She stood for a minute, torn, but habit won” (Fitzhugh 210). Harriet, then, would rather stick to her routine than indulge her curiosity of her classmates’ plotting. Harriet the Spy begins with a new school year, and Harriet is eager for the normalcy an academic year brings. With it, her spy route. She writes in her notebook, “I CAN’T WAIT TO GET BACK TO MY REGULAR SPY ROUTE THIS AFTERNOON. I’VE BEEN AWAY ALL SUMMER AND THOSE HOUSES IN THE COUNTRY ARE TOO FAR AWAY FROM EACH OTHER. TO GET MUCH DONE I WOULD HAVE TO DRIVE” (Fitzhugh 33, capitalization hers). Sport does not understand the excitement Harriet has to get back to her routine. He asks her, “you see the same people every day?” “Yes,” she replies (10). Wojcik contends that children in urban narratives are neglected in two facets: one, through unsupervision, and the second as a way to facilitate independence (12). Children in suburban and rural narratives, though, are more tethered to their homes and families (Wojcik 12–13). Harriet, while neglected by extremely social parents, is attached to her home. She runs straight home after school every day to have cake and milk, and other than her spy route, she does not participate in other extracurricular activities. As frequently as Mr. and Mrs. Welsch are not home, Harriet is home. Harriet chooses to dwell wholly in her neighborhood. In fact, when Harriet is early getting ready for school one morning, instead of idling in her bedroom or watching television, she chooses to be out in Yorkville. She thinks,

A Town Should Have Twenty-Five People  101 “I have only two and a half blocks to walk [to school] … She crossed East End at the corner of Eighty-sixth and walked through the park, climbing the small hill up through the early morning onto the esplanade, and finally sat … right by the [East R]iver’s edge” (Fitzhugh 202–203). Mario Bellini, Dave Mitchell, Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, and Harriet M. Welsch all navigate the streets of New York City in the 1960s and without adult supervision. While the city has been viewed as a space of crime, amorality, and corruption, Fitzhugh allows Harriet to wander and be entranced and absorbed by her own neighborhood. This trait is usually saved for the country idyll, yet Fitzhugh shows her reader(s) that urban neighborhoods are safe and full of nurturing (Wojcik 8). Fitzhugh “thus locates the pastoral in the city” (Wojcik 9). Fitzhugh has Harriet living across the street from a large park, which functions as her own yard with space and air and foliage, further signaling that Harriet’s version of New York City is not that of canon and more aligns with traditional rural narratives, which tend to be synonymous with outdoor narratives (Wojcik 22). If the pastoral symbolizes child inhabitants as naïve, innocent, and dreamers, and the city symbolizes child inhabitants as schemers and mature beyond their best interests, then Fitzhugh subverts that notion, too. Harriet, an 11-year-old, often does not understand information. One evening Harriet asks her mother how she met Harriet’s father and Mrs. Welsch jokingly asks Harriet’s reason for the question, “‘are you considering [marriage]?’” Not realizing that Mrs. Welsch is being flip, Harriet, exasperated, thinks, “adults are getting sillier every year” before replying to her mother, “‘I’m only eleven’” (Fitzhugh 101). When her classmates turn against her and begin building a clubhouse, Harriet, who has followed them to find out what they are doing without her, wonders who they are trying to keep out of the clubhouse. It takes her a few days to understand that it is she who is deliberately being excluded (214, 216, 224). As Harriet the Spy begins, Harriet is playing a game she calls Town with Sport, a game she plays mostly by herself throughout the novel. She tells Sport that the town, this one called Carterville, should have a filling station, a doctor, a lawyer, someone who works in television, a writer, a hospital, a town bar, a police chief, and a main street (Fitzhugh 3–8). She tells Sport that in order to keep the game relatively uncomplicated, “‘you can’t have too many [people] … I usually have twenty-five’” (Fitzhugh 1). Harriet’s inclination to small towns is conveyed within the first paragraph of the novel. And throughout the novel, the contents of Harriet’s neighborhood parallels that of Carterville: the East 80s have a grocery store (the Dei Santis’s), a school (the Gregory School), a park (Carl Schurz Park), a cinema (on East 86th), a main street (East End Avenue), and about 25 people (Harriet, her parents and their cook; Sport and his father, Janie and her family, Harrison Withers, Agatha K. Plumber and her maid, Pinky

102  Emma K. McNamara Whitehead and his parents, the Robinsons, and Rachel Hennessey and her parents). Harriet the Spy does not “operate on stereotypical associations based on” New York City (Gutierrez 122). Instead, Fitzhugh, through Harriet M. Welsch, “create[s] and recreate[s] the identity of New York” (Whyte and O’Sullivan 27). In so doing, Fitzhugh does not treat New York City as merely a backdrop to her story; she casts Yorkville as a main character, shows that Harriet has a close relationship with her neighborhood, and emphasizes the importance of feeling safe and secure in one’s home. Fitzhugh makes it obvious that the East 80s provide Harriet with the nourishment she needs, and Fitzhugh makes it obvious that Harriet’s New York City is her own small town. Works Cited Carter, Shawn, and Alicia Cook. “Empire State of Mind.” The Blueprint 3, Atlantic Records, 2009. Dainotto, Roberto M. Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities. Cornell UP, 2000. Fitzhugh, Louise. Harriet the Spy. HarperCollins, 1964. ———. Harriet the Spy. Delacorte Press, 2014. Goga, Nina, and Bettina Kümerling-Meibauer. “Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature.” Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Cityscapes, edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümerling-Meibauer, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017, pp. 1–14. Gutierrez, Anna Katrina. “‘New York Just Like I Pictured It—Skyscrapers and Everything.’” Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Cityscapes, edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümerling-Meibauer, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017, pp. 113–128. Harriet the Spy. Directed by Bronwen Hughes, Performance by Michelle Trachtenberg, Paramount Pictures, 1996. Konigsburg, E. L. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Atheneum, 1967. Marcus, Leonard S. Storied City: A Children’s Books Walking-Tour Guide to New York City. Dutton Books, 2003. Neville, Emily Cheney. It’s Like This, Cat. Harper and Row, 1963. Selden, George. The Cricket in Times Square. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960. Whyte, Pádraic, and Keith O’Sullivan, editors. Children’s Literature and New York City. Routledge, 2014. Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Rutgers UP, 2016.

11 How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program in Three Easy Steps Jennifer M. Miskec

So you want to lead a study abroad. I once wanted to lead a study abroad, so I developed one. And then another one. And then I started assisting others. Ten years and 15 programs later, I am by no means an expert, but I know a thing or two about the American1 study abroad game. Here, I’ll lead you through three easy steps toward developing a short-term study abroad program. Whatever destination you choose, whatever academic objectives you establish, you can’t go wrong with Place as a way of seeing, children’s culture as your text, and Global Cultural Education (GCE) as your pedagogy. Let me help you make your study abroad program more than just a vacation with a syllabus. Step 1: Know what you’re getting yourself into. Broadly defined, a study abroad is any program that allows a student to earn college credit off-campus, usually in a foreign country. Study abroad has been an option in American universities for over a hundred years. In the beginning, study abroad meant semester- and year-long programs that functioned as an extension of the Grand Tour tradition in which the wellheeled made pilgrimage to Europe to absorb the masterpieces of arts and culture (Lewin xvi). However, study abroad evolved, and flagship programs were designed to fulfill diplomatic efforts between nations. The junior year abroad model was founded after WWI (Walton 62), for example, and the Fulbright program, “for the promotion of international good will through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture, and science,” was established after WWII (Fulbright). Today, study abroad reflects the narrative of responsible global citizenship that “requires knowledge of ‘others’ in the world” (White 22). According to pre-pandemic Open Doors data, most students who study abroad choose to do so for a semester, and well over half study in Europe (the top four destinations for American college students studying abroad are consistently Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and France). These days, though, students aren’t studying the classics in Europe and are instead most likely to be participating in Business and Management or Social Sciences DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-15

104  Jennifer M. Miskec programs; the Humanities and Education don’t even make it into the top five fields of study. However, about one-third of students choose a shortterm study abroad option (eight weeks or less). That number is on the rise, perhaps due to shifts in student mobility or even because of the types of subjects offered. In any case, this is where your program comes into play: a short-term, faculty-led children’s culture study abroad program. While semester- and year-long programs tend to be with affiliate or partner programs that have an established infrastructure for hosting foreign students, short-term faculty-led programs are designed for and based on the specific needs of the students at your home institution, especially Humanities and Education students. There are many models for a faculty-led shortterm study abroad, and every university has its own rules and regulations. Whatever shape yours takes, your equitably designed, short-term study abroad, full of “focused and reflective interaction with the host culture” (Engle and Engle 4), can be tailor-made to suit the needs of your students and your university to be a transformational experience for underserved students and for you. Step 2: Know where you’re going. Here’s where things get interesting: where are you taking your students? We know that children’s culture provides a rich text for critical inquiry and insight into culture at large, “a sphere where entertainment, advocacy and pleasure meet to construct conceptions of what it means to be a child occupying a combination of gender, race and class positions in society” (Giroux 89). As Henry A. Giroux reminds us, children’s culture is no longer associated with any one place or location or social sphere or culture or set of behaviors; children’s culture reflects the plurality of the world we live in. Let that knowledge guide the program you build. Let place studies, visual rhetoric, and cultural studies act as your critical lenses to observe, analyze, and reflect on the schools, streets, playgrounds, restaurants, movie theaters, libraries, homes, stadiums, grocery stores, festivals, theme parks, and tourist attractions—and everywhere else children are brought to or hang out in—in the place you are building transferable skills for critically reading the world. With children’s culture as your focus, you have the freedom to create a study abroad program anywhere in the world … that US citizens are allowed to travel to with US passports, countries that don’t have a State Department travel warning. OK, there’s that. But you still have hundreds of options. The best place to start imagining your program is somewhere that is meaningful to you, a place for which you have a genuine love. As the leader of a place-based children’s culture study abroad, you will be modeling place as “a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world” (Cresswell, Short 11), demonstrating the empathetic gaze Tim Cresswell says allows us to see “attachments and connections between people and

How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program  105 place … worlds of meaning and experience …To think of an area of the world as a rich and complicated interplay of people and environment” (18). Foreign travel can feel like it is a series of spaces through which we walk to get to the next marked or identified place of importance—a tourist place, perhaps, with which we are invited to interact in predesignated ways. But, according to Yi-Fu Tuan, “[I]f we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for a location to be transformed into place” (Space 6). As study abroad leaders, our job is to make foreign spaces into places, to sink in, to pause, to be able to feel and articulate a sense of place. Where are you equipped to get outside of only experiencing officially designated places of importance and resisting the escapist draw of tourist traps? In Cohen’s classic tourism terms, where can you imagine encouraging students to drift and wonder? Wherever you go, you’ll ask your students to consider every destination and every place in between as a text. You’ll start with Lawrence Buell’s premise that “the concept of place also gestures in at least three directions at once—toward environmental materiality, toward social perception or construction, and toward individual affect or bond” (63). You’ll ask the students to create an experiential map that illustrates what they saw, what they smelled, and what people were doing around them while they were on a walkabout. You’ll ask them about the written and unspoken rules of the place and how they know these things to be true. Tuan calls the “affective bond between people and place or setting” (4) “Topophilia.” Says Tuan, “People everywhere … aspire to contentment and joy. Environment for them is not just a resource base to be used or natural forces to adapt to, but also sources of assurance and pleasure, objects of profound attachment and love” (xii). You’ll ask your students to look for this all around them. In fact, your most profound time abroad will be in the spaces in between the attractions. Go to a children’s museum in Tokyo; experience the salt mines in Warsaw; celebrate children’s day in Lima. Then find a place to sit in the grass and notice how people interact with the place, the interpersonal dynamics of families who walk by, the songs you hear children singing and the games they’re playing. When a place is working, ask the students to find and discern the qualities of a functional space to determine what—from lighting to sound to structure to movement to usage—makes a space a place and a place popular. You’ll make sure to take your students to different locations, urban, suburban, rural, and coastal, tourist and local, asking them to describe, interpret, and evaluate what they saw. Then you’ll ask them how they made those assumptions. As Hannah Strange and Heather J. Gibson explain in “An Investigation of Experiential and Transformative Learning in Study Abroad Programs,”

106  Jennifer M. Miskec Transformative Learning Theory … asserts that through reflection, active learning, and placing ourselves in uncomfortable situations students are able to develop their understanding of the world and of themselves, allowing a potential change to their perspectives and frames of reference. (86) So ask yourself, where do you see exploring the unfamiliar landscapes, music, books, and art of children’s culture with your students? Step 3: Know why you’re doing this. Because it’s fun. Of course it’s fun. But that’s not the only reason why you’ll design a study abroad. You’re doing the work because it’s important, because you believe in high-impact educational practices and fostering a critical examination of global citizenship. Almost 20 years ago, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) started using the phrase “high-impact practices” (HIPs) to encourage more high stakes educational opportunities that require creativity and personal investment from students. HIPs such as capstone courses, collaborative projects, internships, and study abroad, they argue, strengthen transferable skills like critical thinking and problem solving, “broad-based skills that are transferable across jobs, including the jobs of the future that have not been invented yet” (Pasquerella 9), and have significant educational benefits for students “especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education” (“High-impact”). Study abroad has always been about creating opportunities for whole student development, intellectual, personal, professional, and cultural growth all at once. Now, the standards of a HIP can help guide how we structure a study abroad, qualities such as creating opportunities for meaningful faculty and peer interactions, the promise of engagement with a diversity of people and ideas, expectations for reflection, and applying learning skills in the realworld (Kuh 10), practices and outcomes to which study abroad already lends itself. Even more to the point: we all know that internationalization and globalization has impacted education in the last 30 years both pragmatically and ideologically (Bosio and Torres 746). Pragmatically, educational systems at all levels have shifted to include market-driven “skills and qualities that students need for working in a globalizing world” (746). In the AAC&U’s 2015 employer survey, for example, findings showed that nearly 96 percent of employers agreed that students needed to be able to solve problems with people with different views from their own, and 78 percent felt students needed intercultural skills and understanding of societies and countries outside the United States. (Whitehead vi)

How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program  107 Ideologically, internationalization and globalization has drawn attention to “issues of social responsibility, ethics and justice, and emphasizes the need to fight poverty, promote human rights and/or work for a sustainable future” (Bosio and Torres 746). Both outcomes have created a need for “an ethical-critical global pedagogy” that “encourages a way of acting in society that is community-centric, ecologically balanced, and culturally sensitive, in the ongoing construction of a more just and peaceful world” (746–747, emphasis in original). GCE, Emilio Bosio posits, will contribute to the common good and “may help our planet, global peace, and people through its contribution to civic engagement” (756). The goals of GCE are urgently needed across the curriculum. They also nicely align with the goals of a well-executed HIP like study abroad. When we invite our students to travel abroad and study the children’s culture in the world, we are bringing them into real-world conversations about culture, place, and practice, not just facts and figures. Says Cameron White, “We live in a world made up of many texts; it is essential that students and educators develop multiple literacies that will facilitate the reading of signs, symbols, and images (texts) of that world” (22). It’s as Giroux asserts: Citizens need to cultivate loyalties that extend beyond the nation-state, beyond a theoretical distinction in which the division between friend and enemy is mediated exclusively by national boundaries … Individuals must also have some distance from the knowledge of their birth, origins, and specificity of place. This suggests appropriating that knowledge that emerges through dispersal, travel, border-crossings, diaspora, and through global communications. (Giroux and Bosio 4–5) Communities tell their stories in their children’s places. Official and unofficial, children’s places tell anyone who is paying attention to the ideological narratives that are socializing them. When we invite our students to travel abroad and study these places, we are bringing them into cultural literacy and humility, not asking them to just memorize a bunch of facts, but asking them to draw conclusions in context. So you still want to develop a study abroad. Do it! But don’t do it because you think it’ll be easy or a life hack for a free trip. Study abroad is not a vacation; it’s work. It’s diplomatic work for the ordinary citizen: as you move through your chosen place, you will exchange ideas with the people you meet while abroad and share ideas and insights about the world. It’s intellectual work: it’s a two to three week exercise in analysis. It’s interpersonal work: your students will need you in ways that they don’t tend to need you in a traditional classroom environment. But it’s also transformative work. GCE through study abroad is a part of the evolution of teaching that Bosio calls for, “towards supporting learners in developing not only

108  Jennifer M. Miskec knowledge and skills, but perhaps most importantly values … that lead to a contributive citizenship at local, state, national and global levels.” At the beginning of her article “Global Citizenship Education and Humanism: A Process of Becoming and Knowing,” Maria Guajardo cites peace activists and educational reformers like Daisaku Ikeda and Paulo Freire. GCE, she says, helps us to become more human by “bettering ourselves intentionally, through compassion, connection, and curiosity” (170). She concludes the article, “Raising the next generation of global leaders for a world that does not yet exist is the task of educators” (182). Put another way, as peace pedagogy scholar Larisa Kusumagić-Kafedžić suggests, “Education for living in a community” (Loc 803). Emilio Bosio drops the mic when he calls us all out: Value-creating, transformative global citizenship education leads students to become more inclusive, non-discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change and is vital to the development of critical thinking skills and critical reflection among graduates, and of teachers’ roles as “transformative intellectuals.” However, such an approach requires moving beyond the creative initiatives of individual teachers towards a more holistic redesign of university curricula. We should ask ourselves why we are in teaching and learning if not to be able to help enrich the lives of our students? (Bosio) While there is no reason for a study abroad course to not teach the content that it needs to teach for the academic program that it’s in, let it be—I do think first and foremost—the goal of the study abroad to be about the development of better human beings who human better in the world, and children’s culture—complicated, beautiful, problematic, rhetorically sophisticated children’s culture—can sustain the critical cultural investigation. Note 1 To be clear, I am talking about American universities and American study abroad programs abroad. Rather than qualify every statement as such, please note that I am not making globally applicable claims.

Works Cited Bosio, Emiliano. “How Do We Create Transformative Global Citizens?” University World News, 1 Dec. 2017, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post. php?story= 20171129082744388. Accessed 2 May 2023. Bosio, Emiliano, and Carlos Alberto Torres. “Global Citizenship Education: An Educational Theory of the Common Good? A Conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres.” Policy Futures in Education, vol. 17, no. 6, 2019, pp. 745–760.

How to Develop a Children’s Culture Study Abroad Program  109 Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Toward a Sociology of International Tourism.” Social Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 1972, pp. 164–182. Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction.Wiley, 2015. ———. Place: A Short Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Engle, Lilli, and John Engle. “Study Abroad Levels: Toward a Classification of Program Types.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1– 20. https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v9i1.113. Fulbright. “History.” https://us.fulbrightonline.org/history. Accessed 23 Dec. 2022. Giroux, Henry A. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. Routledge, 1996. Giroux, Henry A., and Emiliano Bosio. “Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship Education.” Conversations on Global Citizenship Education: Perspectives on Research, Teaching, and Learning in Higher Education, edited by Emiliano Bosio, Routledge, 2021, pp. 3–12. Guajardo, Maria. “Global Citizenship Education and Humanism: A Process of Becoming and Knowing.” Conversations on Global Citizenship Education: Perspectives on Research, Teaching, and Learning in Higher Education, edited by Emiliano Bosio, Routledge, 2021, pp. 170–184. “High-Impact Practices - Trending Topics.” AAC&U, 4 May 2023, https://www. aacu.org/trending-topics/high-impact. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023. Kasumagić-Kafedžić, Larisa, and Sara Clarke-Habibi. Peace Pedagogies in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Theory and Practice in Formal Education, Kindle ed., Springer, 2023. Kuh, George D. Ensuring Quality and Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale. AAC&U, 2013. Lewin, Ross. The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship. Routledge, 2009. Pasquerella, Lynn. “Planning for America’s Future: Educating for Democracy.” Liberal Education, vol. 104, no. 1, Winter 2018, pp. 6–11. Strange, Hannah, and Heather J. Gibson. “An Investigation of Experiential and Transformative Learning in Study Abroad Programs.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, vol. XXIX, no. 1, 2017, pp. 85–100. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minnesota UP, 1977. ———. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. 1974. Columbia UP, 1990. “U.S. Study Abroad.” Open Doors Data. https://opendoorsdata.org/annualrelease/u-s-study-abroad/. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023. Walton, Whitney. Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970. Stanford UP, 2009. White, Cameron. Internationalizing Education: Local to Global Connections for the 21st Century. Brill, 2018. Whitehead, Dawn Michelle. “Foreword: Global Learning: Shifting from an Option to a Priority.” Models of Global Learning, edited by Indira Nair and Margaret Henning, AAC&U, 2017, pp. v–vi.

Part IV

Place Attachment

12 Making Home The Queer Ecological Possibilities of Children’s Picturebooks Kathleen Forrester

Picturebooks for children can serve as portals into a queer ecology of home, offering stories that reorient us toward caring about worlds within and beyond our own. In this chapter, I think with Jillian Tamaki’s 2018 picturebook, They Say Blue, a poetic and layered text that challenges anthropocentric perspectives, cultivating an alternate imaginary for thinking of humans not as occupants but as co-inhabitants—making home through processes of becoming-with (Haraway, When Species Meet; Wright) a multitude of others. I suggest that the notion of what environmental literature is and does needs to be expanded beyond the generic neoliberal narrative of individual activism to include children’s stories that, like Tamaki’s picturebook, invite the reader/listener toward an affective, more-than-human, relational, and queer response to the ecological challenges of our times. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot…”1 The concept of home is a prevalent theme in children’s picturebooks, especially in environmental stories that aim to foster a sense of personal responsibility and planetary stewardship in the listening/reading child. In these texts, home is a place, scaled—sometimes local and sometimes global—that humans inhabit and act upon in protective or destructive ways. We see an early example of this contentious dualism in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1971), arguably the first English-language environmental picturebook for children (Dobrin and Kidd 11). While the “prototypically American” (Marshall 88) Once-ler relates to home through an extractive framework of “biggering,” hard work, innovation, and development (via deforestation of the Truffula Trees), the Lorax—a human-like spirit who “speak[s] for the trees”—brings a paternalistic, preservationist stance to the notion of home.2 Their objectives, though wildly divergent, both hinge upon a nature-culture divide expressed through neoliberal ideals of property ownership and individualism (Gaard 329; Marshall 89). As Suzanne Ross writes, “Clearly, the Once-ler has failed to identify himself with the DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-17

114  Kathleen Forrester Truffula forest and all of its inhabitants. But so has the Lorax. Each sees himself as an individual standing out in bold relief against a background environment” (103). The Lorax’s individualist advocacy does not, in the end, “save” the trees or the local multispecies community from ruination and forced migration, demonstrating a deep need for something other than anthropocentric solutions to environmental problems. Just what this something other is, the book does not elaborate, except to leave the reader with the closing suggestion that ecological reparation may yet be found in the hands of a child—bequeathed with the “last of the Truffula Seeds”— who simply “cares” enough. More than 50 years after The Lorax was first published, environmental literature for children—grounded in a pedagogical ethic of educating and inspiring the next generation of “ecocitizens” (Massey and Bradford 109)—has become a booming industry.3 And yet, children’s literature scholars, like Clare Echterling, Greta Gaard, Geraldine Massey, and Clare Bradford, have shown that, just as in The Lorax, there is a tendency in these texts to place responsibility for ecological issues on the shoulders of individuals, (usually a cis white child), trending toward simple solutions that shy away from addressing underlying systemic inequities and root causes, while also avoiding the complex nuances of environmental justice that would tie ecological devastation to intersecting issues such as class, race, gender, ability, migration, nationhood, and Indigenous sovereignty. Clare Echterling, in her essay “How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature,” argues that the overarching emphasis on individual lifestyle choice as activism in picturebooks “positions the child … as … capable of activism and change only within the boundaries of the private sphere and their own lives” (286–287; emphasis added). While I agree that young and old alike deserve to be entrusted with stories and discourses that enable complex engagements with ecological justice, I hesitate to rest this argument on such a neoliberal binary as private versus public space. Learning from the interdisciplinary field of Queer Ecologies, described in an online talk by queer, Black, activist-scholar, Deseree Fontenot, as “a lens through which we can reclaim and reimagine our bodies, lands, communities, and movements with the knowledge that diversity assures resilience,” I wonder how we might decouple the notion of home in environmental narratives from dualisms like private/public, human/nonhuman, nature/culture, as we imagine a more just and ecologically resilient present and future? The Queer Ecology of Becoming-With Eco is a prefix derived from Greek—Oikos—a complex idea that distilled down encompasses all the relationships of home. Ecology, then,

Making Home  115 is the knowledge of home (Fontenot; Pimm and Smith). Home, through a queer ecological lens, is more than a physical place or structure, it is also, as described by feminist and queer geographer, Will McKeithen, “an imaginary, felt, embodied place, and a contested process of everyday un/ making” (124). The contested processes that make and unmake home are vitally important to my thinking here because throughout colonial histories the meaning of home has been wrestled into an airtight package of heterosexual domesticity and nuclear family, propping up exclusionary racial politics in support of white settler nation-making projects (TallBear 147). But the meaning of home cannot only exist at the center of empire in opposition to all that is diverse and strange. After all, those in the margins make home too—queer homes full of everyday excesses that spill across and between the seams, breeding heterogeneity through nonbinary, stochastic, and unruly processes of becoming-with. Donna Haraway writes, “[i]f we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism then we know that becoming is always becoming with …” (When Species Meet 244). Just as the word queer has been reclaimed from a pejorative slur, so too can home come to represent so much more than exclusionary, racist, isolating versions of kin-making. Indeed it must, for the stories we tell about home, matter to the kind of worlds we call in. Embodying Epistemologies of Home in They Say Blue I propose that we expand the scope of what we commonly think of as children’s environmental literature, looking beyond the conventional bookshelf of “green” kid-lit toward other texts and narratives providing alternate onto-epistemologies of multi-kind cohabitation and care. They Say Blue, an award-winning picturebook by Canadian cartoonist-author, Jillian Tamaki, is one such book. This is a visual narrative in which home is recognized as an embodied and imagined place of particular, dynamic, entangled, multi-species/multi-kind relationships. It is not an environmental story in the purely didactic sense of addressing a specific issue like climate change or oil extraction, but rather does its eco-pedagogical work through immersing the reader in a speculative and affecting world of interconnection and becoming-with. With deceptively simple text and colorful illustrations (acrylic on watercolor paper), the story invites us to think alongside a child whose philosophical wonderings circle questions of perception, knowing, and feeling. In the opening doublespread a narratorial voice speaks, “They say blue is the color of the sky,” accompanied by a full watercolor wash of blue. This saturation of color, notably, is absent of any kind of human form. It is not clear who the speaking subject is, a textual invocation to contemplate the liminal edges of where the body ends and everything else begins, a theme that carries throughout the book.

116  Kathleen Forrester This opening blue image is followed up, after a page turn, with an image of the child narrator sitting alone on a beach looking out across the gutter of the book toward a blue ocean. Here is the body that goes with the voice. The qualifying words, “[w]hich is true today,” display an ambivalence toward the idea of an absolute, external truth—what Haraway might call the God-trick (“Situated Knowledges”)—the child is noting that what “they say” is sometimes, but not always, true. “They say the sea is blue, too. It certainly looks like it from here,” the child expresses from the distance of the shore, but then upon entering and holding the water, finds it to be “clear as glass,” and tossing it in the air, finds it to “make diamonds.” And so we see the dynamic, interactive, and transformational quality of “phenomena in their becoming” (Barad 148) in which the body of water and child body are not discreet entities, but are agentic participants, dissolving the animate-inanimate divide as they cocreate knowledge and their shared world. This is the epistemological work of becoming-with—what Kate Wright describes as “a form of worlding which opens up the frames of what registers to us and so what matters to us (in part by recognizing what matters to others)” (279). It is a queer kind of worlding that extends our ecological imagination, surpasses language, inviting speculative embodiment and curiosity about the other. It also requires us to take note of what we don’t know, or what we feel we know without knowing why. The child, swimming in a sea of blue, wonders if a blue whale is blue and concludes that because they have not “seen a blue whale” for themselves, that they “don’t know.” And yet, on the following pages we are told that “I don’t need to crack an egg to know it holds an orange yolk inside,” and also “I can’t see my blood but I know it’s red.” For this child, knowing does not mean seeing. Knowledge can be felt and shared across skin and membrane. Egg shells are porous, human bodies are too, and they both have a tendency to leak, break, and split open revealing their contents— bright colors spilling across the myth of intact corporeal divisions between “inside” and “outside” worlds. Drawn across the gutter, with half their body in a page of yolky-orange painted swirls, and the other half in a page of blood-red swirls, the child, immersed in the colors of bodily fluids, displays a kind of affective understanding of the porosity and queerness of bodies as material-discursive worlds—multispecies homes—that are best known through a layering of facts, feelings, memories, and more intangible means, rather than through the theatrics of purely visual observation. Timothy Morton writes that the world is queerly composed of blurred boundaries and interdependencies that unfold “between species, between the living and nonliving, between organism and environment” (275–276). At the center of the book, Tamaki’s story takes us deeper into these liminal spaces, as the child is shown moving from a kind of speculative thinking

Making Home  117 about the other into a more embodied dreaming as the other. Queering all boundaries and binaries that we imagine for the enlightened human—notions of dominance through culture, rationality, animacy, and subjectivity—the child sheds their winter clothes and, over the span of two pages illustrated in the linear cartoon style of repeated moving vignettes, they sprout leaves and transform into a tree (see Figure 12.1). Across six proceeding pages, it is the tree whose perspective we are given through the liminal subjectivity of child-as-tree. The pace of the book slows, and even as we are compelled to progress through the book in linear fashion, we are also granted space to feel an alternate temporality to progress through the queer time of becoming-with-tree. Losing leaves in the fall, the child-as-tree narrates, “I … wiggle my toes in the soft pile at my feet,” and in the cold snow of winter they move into a state that feels almost beyond human consciousness: “All white, up and down. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the land and sky. I close my eyes. Oh, I’m so sleepy…” By paying close attention to the temporal and spatial mode of a particular tree, its rhythms and paces and its relationship to place through the seasons of a year, we are asked to stretch our imaginations in an exercise that develops and builds our capacity to think, and feel, with an expansive ecological awareness. The child-as-tree tells a story of becoming-­withtree—a poetic and pared down worlding in picturebook form that perhaps does the aesthetic-didactic work of shining a light, however partial, toward

Figure 12.1 Illustration from They Say Blue by Jillian Tamaki. Text and illustrations copyright © 2018 Jillian Tamaki. Used by permission of Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York. All rights reserved. Spread of pages 22–23 of They Say Blue copyright © 2018 by Jillian Tamaki reproduced with permission from Groundwood Books Limited. www.groundbooks.com.

118  Kathleen Forrester other entangled multitudes of becoming-withs that humans and nonhumans perform as we make our homes in webs of inter(intra)dependencies. “Tiny Inkblots on a Sea of Sky”: The Limits of Knowing They Say Blue is a speculative engagement with an old story of coevolution and shared histories, one that questions the arbitrary edges of species categorizations, while also taking difference seriously. The child-as-tree is making home through and with the seasonal changes, affecting and being affected by the soil and its creaturely inhabitants, the sun, rain and snow, and a multitude of other processes, forces, and transitions. The child shows us that nature and culture are not oppositional, but rather co-constitutive—that our stories make the world, and vice-versa. Such a positioning, however, is not to be confused with the authoritative and appropriative stance of claiming knowledge over another’s lived experience and absorbing another’s story into one’s own. Tamaki’s picturebook, in its closing pages, supports such an awareness, bringing us into the domestic human home where the child is sleeping, and yet allowing for shimmering connections to the world, to night, crows, and a sunrise, that extend the reaches and definition of the body and home. As the child awakens an intimate close-up of their yawning face is shown half in darkness and half in yellow light. The darkness that flows off to the left of the doublespread is both the night and the child’s own black hair. A hand reaches across the page toward the line of darkness and light, accompanied by the words, “My mother parts it [my hair] every morning, like opening a window,” suggesting that even here the child and mother’s bodies are inseparable from the world about them—including from the spatial-temporal shift of night to day. And yet, on the following page a window is placed between the child and the “outside” world, as we are shown a domestic scene of the mother braiding the child’s hair bathed in the morning light that shines through into their darkened room. Here is an image of home as a familiar and familial space. We see the tree, moments before so intimately known as child-as-tree, now distant through the closed window. It is surrounded by “black crows [that] bob and chatter in the field outside.” In this emphasis on “outside,” the window is imbued with material-semiotic meaning as a divider, or perhaps a threshold, between the human home and everything else. If the story were to close on this domestic image, we might be left with a feeling that the preceding narrative was only a dream and so conclude that, in the end, humans are distinct from the environ that surrounds them. This would be a rather jarring turn in philosophy and affect after all the explorations and queer becoming-withs of the previous pages. But the story continues for two more pages, with images of crows flying into the

Making Home  119 reddy-pink wash of sunrise, enabling a more nuanced thinking about human domesticity, knowledge, and the notion of home. The child and mother, watching the crows, collectively “wonder what they are thinking when they look at us. What they see[?]” In answer to their own question they do not speak for the crows, but rather allow for the mystery of otherness to prevail as they surmise, “[t]heir dark eyes won’t tell. They just pull their big bodies into the air. Tiny inkblots on a sea of sky.” After exploring the speculative embodiment of becoming-with-tree, the child also demonstrates a crucial recognition of the limits of knowing— that one cannot truly know the thoughts and worlds of another. This is a fruitful tension, held lightly, and left unresolved in the close of the book: we humans are always coevolving and caught up in intimate stories of making worlds and homes with others—to think otherwise is human hubris; and yet, at the same time, as we strive to know and care for one another through stories of becoming-with, we must also recognize the difference that cuts through this knowing, and be accountable to this difference. Becoming Kin In a 2019 interview, Donna Haraway said, “[s]ystemic homelessness” must be understood as a “multi-kind and multi-species question” (Weigel). Homes are dynamic sites of cross-species interconnectivity, and so when homes and habitats are destroyed and humans and non humans are forced to migrate, complex and historic multispecies networks of knowing are lost as well. In Seuss’s iconic eco-tale, the Once-ler’s simple solution of replanting the Truffula Trees may possibly bring back the Lorax and his displaced “friends”— the Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, and Humming-Fish—but the vast historical networks of storied knowings built between species and across generations, particular to place, will not be so easily restored. A “fix” implemented from within the same old enlightenment/late-capitalist paradigms will always maintain the status quo of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism that caused the problems in the first place. Even if individuals do “care a whole awful lot,” nothing will change until the care comes from a relational, non-dualistic ethic of kinship steeped in the feminist understanding that “nothing comes without its world” (Haraway, Modest_Witness 137; Puig de la Bellacasa). If ecology is about the knowledge of home, then how do we come to know our homes in their queerest sense—not as static space to occupy, but as a relational place of unexpected collaborations, more-than-human meaning-makings? By broadening the definition of environmental children’s literature to include stories that invite the listener/reader into the queerness of an imagined home that is multispecies, non-hierarchical,

120  Kathleen Forrester collaborative, and emergent, we are reorienting our ecological imagination to see our own lives and homes as entangled in rich and diverse becomings of kin that extend beyond biological family and kind. It may seem small to place philosophical stock in a fictional child’s strange wonderings about the nature of knowledge and the knowledge of nature—but I say it is a place to start. Picturebooks—these aesthetic-didactic worldings—have the potential to shift perspective and change the stories we live by, so that we might, like the crows at the end of Tamaki’s book, pull our big bodies into the air, and dream of a better way to know. To care. To act. To make home. Notes 1 The complete quotation from the penultimate page of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (1971) is, “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” 2 As Ian Marshall points out, the Lorax uses possessives to talk about the environment: “my Truffula tuft,” “my poor Bar-ba-loots” and “my poor Swomee-Swans” (89). 3 In 2019, Nielson Book Research reported that children’s books about the environment had more than doubled over the previous 12 months, a phenomenon described as “the Greta Thunberg effect” after the teen environmental activist who rose to fame in 2018 (https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ childrens-books-environment-trendy-greta-thunberg/).

Works Cited Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 121–158, https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121 Dobrin, Sidney, and Kenneth Kidd, editors. Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Wayne State UP, 2004. Echterling, Clare. “How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 47, no. 4, 2016, pp. 283–299, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9290-6 Fontenot, Deseree. “Queer Ecologies and Climate Justice.” Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion,1 Mar. 2021, https://www.clgs.org/multimediaarchive/queer-ecologies-climate-justice-a-lavender-lunch-with-deseree-fontenot/. Accessed 1 May 2023. Gaard, Greta. “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy.” Neohelicon, vol. 36, no. 2, 2009, pp. 321–334, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11059-009-0003-7 Geisel, T. S. (Dr. Seuss). The Lorax. Random House, 1971. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 1997. ———. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Making Home  121 ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. ———. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Marshall, Ian. “The Lorax and the Ecopolice.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, pp. 85–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/2.2.85 Massey, Geraldine, and Clare Bradford. “Children as Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism and Environmental Texts.” Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Engaging with Theory, edited by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 109–126. McKeithen, Will. “Queer Ecologies of Home: Heteronormativity, Speciesism, and the Strange Intimacies of Crazy Cat Ladies.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017, pp. 122–134, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/0966369X.2016.1276888 Morton, Timothy. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 125, no. 2, 2010, pp. 273–282, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273 Pimm, Stuart, and Robert Smith. “Ecology.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https:// www.britannica.com/science/ecology. Accessed 25 Aug. 2022. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care.” The Sociological Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 2012, pp. 197–216, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x Ross, Suzanne. “Response to ‘The Lorax and the Ecopolice’ by Ian Marshall.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 2, no. 2, 1996, pp. 99–104, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/2.2.99 TallBear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, Prickly Paradigm P, 2018, pp. 145–164. Tamaki, Jillian. They Say Blue. Abrams, 2018. Weigel, Moira. “Feminist Cyborg Scholar Donna Haraway: ‘The Disorder of Our Era Isn’t Necessary.’” The Guardian, 20 Jun. 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth. Accessed 26 Jan. 2023. Wright, Kate. “Becoming-With.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 277–281, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615514

13 Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story Country, Multimodality, and Living Space Melanie Duckworth

Between 1956 and 1963, British nuclear tests took place at Maralinga in the South Australian desert. The tests were managed badly. The land, animals, and plants were contaminated, and Aṉangu people became sick and died.1 Forcefully displaced from their homes, the Aṉangu people did not stop caring for, longing for, and advocating for the land to which they belonged. As Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet Ali Cobby Eckermann writes, “Our hearts still mourn for our land. We will not forget the horror and the hurt. Our land has been poisoned, and it is our cultural duty to tell our truths through our art” (Eckermann 136). One way these truths have been told is through Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story (2009), a historical picturebook that tells for children, in words and pictures, the story of this loved place poisoned by nuclear testing.2 The book was created by the Yalata and Oak Valley Communities together with the Australian children’s author Christobel Mattingley. It is based on the oral histories of Aṉangu women, historical sources, and paintings produced in a series of workshops. With reference to the Australian Aboriginal concept of “Country,” this chapter argues that the rich multimodality of Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story—the interaction of its paintings, words, colours, designs, and photographs— facilitates powerful truth-telling. Not only does the book bear witness to painful and tragic events but also it expresses an abiding love for and reliance on Country, a deep connection stronger and more enduring than nuclear devastation. As Matthew Hall points out, “Indigenous-led representations of nuclear threats document a history often elided from official records, and which can actively bear witness to the atrocities of the past” (2018). There have been several Indigenous-led retellings of the lasting damage caused by the nuclear tests at Maralinga, mostly since the year 2000, and mostly through visual art (Speck; Black Mist Burnt Country; Smart et  al.; Mittmann).3 Four artworks from Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story were included in the Black Mist Burnt Country exhibition of 2016 (Mittman 46). Catherine Speck foregrounds the book in her discussion of the lineage of Maralinga DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-18

Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story  123 artworks in Aboriginal art (70), Xu Daozhi argues that Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story is a “postcolonial [text] for children which [carries] the transformative possibility of unsettling colonial representations of space in the Australian context” (40), while Phil Fitzsimmons points out that the “blend of different text types forms a powerful multi-voiced narrative.” This chapter explores the techniques through which this multi-layered text responds to and speaks of history, grief, and Country. As a settler Australian of British heritage, I acknowledge my position as a cultural outsider to the narrative. I acknowledge the lands of the Kuarna people, on which this essay, as well as the text and many of the paintings of Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story, were created, as well as the lands of the Pitjantjatjara, Yankatjatjara, and Kokotha people, on which the events of the story took place. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I rely on Indigenous scholars, especially Ambelin and Blaze Kwaymullina, to guide my interaction with the text, as well as the living spaces it inhabits, mourns, and celebrates. Kwaymullina, Kwaymullina, and Lauren Butterly argue that Indigenist research, including research on Indigenous texts, should build on Indigenous frameworks and ontologies, which they distil as “everything is alive, everything is related, and everything is participatory” (3). These perspectives inform my approach to space and multimodality in the book, which I argue is, in Kwaymullina, Kwaymullina, and Butterly’s terms, a “living text” embedded in and responding to living space (Kwaymullina et al. 4). “Everything is Alive”: Place, Space, and Country Maralinga was chosen by the British and Australian governments as a site appropriate for nuclear testing because it was regarded as empty space. This erroneous assumption echoes the notion of “terra nullius,” or “empty earth,” which underpinned the British colonization of Australia. The western desert region of South Australia, over a thousand kilometres from any capital city, was not a place either government cared for. Tim Cresswell defines “places” as “spaces which people have made meaningful” (12). The naming of Maralinga represents a particularly sly act of “place-making”: In 1953 the site … was named Maralinga by the whitefellas. … they took the word from an Aboriginal language of northern Australia. Because Maralinga means thunder, they thought it was appropriate to describe the sound of the explosions they would make over the next ten years. The Aṉangu word for thunder is tuuni. (Yalata and Oak Valley 36–38) After claiming what they saw as empty space, by choosing an Indigenous (though anachronistic) name for their bomb site, the British attempted

124  Melanie Duckworth to justify their poisonous and destructive bombs as belonging in a quasi-­ Indigenous place of “thunder” (Daozhi 39). The distinction between “place” and “space” as defined by western geographers, however, does not reflect Indigenous world views. Ambelin and Blaze Kwaymullina note that in non-Indigenous frameworks, “[g]eographical landscapes were viewed primarily as physical rather than metaphysical spaces; and indeed much of space was characterised as inanimate; nonliving and non-feeling” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 201). In contrast to this, “In an Aboriginal worldview, space is both alive and conscious, and the source of all life and all consciousness” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 201). This is not simply a version of “space” becoming “place” as people give it meaning, “As all relationships are a part of space, and space is a part of all relationships, it is as true to speak of space as bringing meaning to humans, as of humans bringing meaning to space” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 201). For Aboriginal Australians, Country is more than just land. The Gay’wu group of women explain, “Country has awareness, it is not just backdrop. It knows and is part of us. Country is our homeland. It is home and land, but it is more than that. It is the seas and the waters, the rocks and the soils, the animals and winds and people too” (xxii). These relationships with and within Country are evident in statements recorded in Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story. Myra Watson says, “I was worried about my country. I grieved. I was upset about what the bombs would do to the land” (Yalata and Oak Valley 43). John Baker explains, “we wanted to go back to the country to which we were all related” (Yalata and Oak Valley 35). As Deborah Bird Rose puts it, “People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life” (Rose 111). Country is space, but this space is alive, conscious—the source of life and meaning. “Everything is Related”: Multimodal Expressions of Country Maralinga is on one level a history book, but more importantly, it is a book responding to and honouring Country. Picturebooks are particularly suited to representations of place because of their visual elements.4 In picturebooks, meaning is created by both words and images, and thus they can be understood as inherently multimodal artefacts. Modality, a term borrowed from linguistics, refers to “socially shaped and culturally given resources for making meaning” (Kress 54). In picturebooks, “[i]n addition to written text, readers rely on illustrations, design, and typographical features to construct meaning” (Kelly and Kachorsky 35). The multimodal elements of words and pictures in picturebooks enable different types of

Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story  125 readings—images and text can be read together, separately, or even against one another (Nikolajeva and Scott 175). However, as John Stephens points out, even when responding to the multimodal form of the picturebook, critics and reviewers often privilege the written mode over the visual (46). But when the visual elements of picturebooks themselves operate in multiple modes (Stephens 46), as can be said for the paintings, photographs, and design elements of Maralinga, the authority of the visual as a meaningmaking medium is reinforced. This is appropriate, as Aboriginal painting is a form of storytelling. Aboriginal acrylic painting emerged in the 1970s, most famously at the Papunya community in the Northern Territory, but was not established on APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands until the early 2000s (Speck 78). Aboriginal acrylic painting draws on ancient traditions of storytelling and symbol but uses western materials and can enter western contexts. The paintings depict and embody Country, relationships, and story, often mapping landscape and inscribing journeys. Several layers of meaning can reside in a single image, but not all meanings are available to all viewers. Artists and communities also make decisions about what not to paint. The Papunya Schoolbook of Country and History (2001) records that “[s]ome stories were all right to tell outside the community, but other stories were to be kept secret” (Papunya School 33). Yvonne Edwards, a respected, prolific artist and one of the contributors to Maralinga: The Aṉangu Story, explains, “I’m not really a painter. But I like doing some stories. Just putting my story into a painting for people to look at, just like I’m telling a story, but it’s in the painting” (Mattingley 88). According to Rose, “Aboriginal ‘art’ consists in stories. Rather than a representation, an artwork may be better understood as a text which condenses the story, showing some bits, concealing others, but always directing the mind away from the canvas and toward the world” (Rose 111). The paintings contained in Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story are not merely illustrations or decorations, but “living texts” in relationship to Country (Kwaymullina 4). Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story is a multimodal collage of paintings, photographs, narrative, recollections, stories, and archival material. The page layout of Maralinga emphasizes its multimodal qualities. Each page is edged by a narrow, textured, black-brown border and within this, a closeup of a painting spans the width of the page. Text boxes, paintings, and photographs are overlayed on top of the background image. The overall effect is somewhat busy, but it also engenders a sense of intimacy and closeness with the land, which is depicted in nearly every painting. The opening pages of the chapter “Bush Tucker” (see Figure 13.1), for example, feature a background image of maku (witchetty grubs) dwelling in roots beneath the ground (Yalata and Oak Valley 6–7). The text describes the role of women in digging snakes, echidnas, wombats, lizards, and maku out of

126  Melanie Duckworth

Figure 13.1  Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley. Maralinga: The Aṉangu Story. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1 April 2009, pp. 6–7.  Reprinted by permission of Allen & Unwin.

the ground. Placed on top of the background image, is another painting of “bush tucker” arranged for consumption: two lizards, a snake, maku, and some leaves. The two paintings present an image of just how closely Aṉangu people, animals, and earth, dwell together. The first three chapters celebrate the enduring, intertwined relationship the Aṉangu have with the land. The opening chapter, “Tjukurpa: the story of the land,” features a simple background image of black footprints on an ochre-colored surface. This links the surface of the page with the surface of the earth, an equivalence that is expanded upon and deepened throughout the rest of the book. It also draws attention to the closeness between the earth and Aṉangu—as the earth is covered in footprints. The text reinforces the intimacy of relationship already established in the painting: “They knew the earth, red and strong under their feet. That earth was their life” (Yalata and Oak Valley 1). Living space—Country—is articulated in the layout and design of the book, as well as in the text and paintings. This multimodality means that the book is profoundly relational—words, images, stories, and memories relate to each other, to the reader, and to the earth. “Everything Is Participatory”: Spatial Histories, Temporality, and Relationships Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina point out that Indigenous time is not ­linear: “Time, like all things, is relative to the enduring physical and metaphysical context of country” (199). Nothing is resolved by time simply passing, traumatic events are only resolved if relationships are healed (Kwaymullina

Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story  127 and Kwaymullina 206). Nuclear detonations from the 1950s and 1960s still cause pain and danger, they still disrupt Aṉangu life, they are still an enduring source of grief. The slow decay of nuclear materials disrupts human timelines. It seems appropriate, then, that although the chapters of Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story are in consecutive order, they do not have to be read that way. Each chapter can function as an independent unit, and the book facilitates a reading process of flicking through, or flicking back and forth. The peritext of the book supports this approach: there is a contents page at the beginning of the book and glossary and a map at the end, but no timeline. The chapters are placed in chronological order, but are not numbered. The historical details of the text are somewhat complex, but they are centered on the story of Country. The book covers stories of creator beings, thousands of years of Aṉangu life, first contact with “wallypalla,” “whitefellas,” and the establishment of Ooldea mission at the culturally significant site of Yuldea, a vital permanent source of water in the desert, exploited by the colonizers to maintain a railway line. In 1952, the government closed Ooldea mission without warning (Yalata and Oak Valley 27). Shortly after this, the government decided to grant the Maralinga lands to British government to conduct nuclear tests, so the Aṉangu were prevented from returning. The book records the tragedies inflicted upon Aṉangu too close to the explosions or exposed to poisoned land in the years that followed. It catalogues sufferings of the land and the people: deaths of old people and babies immediately following detonations, eye problems, blindness, miscarriages, asthma, skin diseases, and high rates of cancer devastating families over generations. The dead trees and plants that extended over plains. It also follows the slow, staggered path to the land’s return, the delayed, dangerous, and inadequate clean-up, and the eventual establishment of a new community north of Maralinga, at Oak Valley. Aboriginal art often contains multiple temporalities or historic events on the same plane. One of Yvonne Edwards’s paintings, reproduced on page 56, consists of five black circles framing five scenes (see Figure 13.2). The central scene shows a nuclear bomb exploding. Edwards explains: The bomb going off (central image). The soldiers going through Yalata all the time (top left). Mens in uniforms and drums of poison (bottom left). This is where all our old people end up in the cemetery from the bomb. That poison, it destroyed all our old people (top right). Here the people are sad. They went back to the land, and they’re sitting down, sad, because it’s not the same like it was before (bottom right). (Mattingley 93)

128  Melanie Duckworth

Figure 13.2  Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley. Maralinga: The Aṉangu Story. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1 April 2009, p. 56.  Reprinted by permission of Allen & Unwin.

The painting shows not only the moment of the explosion itself but the relationships of the people and Country affected by it. The nuclear destruction is experienced through relationships, and it is through relational, multimodal storytelling that healing can begin. The relationality and participatory nature of the text is emphasized in the way it is framed. The cover flaps of the book contain several photos of the book’s production, together with the words, “We have made this book together. The artwork was produced in a series of workshops.”5 The front flap displays photographs of Aṉangu women and Mattingley at the painting workshops in Belair, South Australia. The back flap shows photographs of Yalata school students voting on the cover, and Mattingley visiting some of the contributors in the desert. Rich awareness of relationality is also evident in the text’s opening and closing words. The first paragraph describes how the Aṉangu taught their children about the land: “They knew all its secrets and they taught those secrets to their children and their

Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story  129 children’s children, tjamu to tjamu (grandfather to grandson), kapali to kapali (grandmother to granddaughter)” (Yalata and Oak Valley 1). As Kwaymullina, Kwaymullina, and Butterly point out, “because everything is alive and interrelated, to ‘come to know’ involves participation in relationships” (4). The final pages of the book include interviews with the students at Yalata school about their dreams for the future. The success of this history book does not lie in placing historical events in chronological order, but in affirming and extending relationships between Country and its people. The last words of the book are, “Maralinga – the Aṉangu Story is our story. We have told it for our children, our grandchildren, and their children. We have told it for you” (Yalata and Oak Valley 66). The book positions itself as part of an ancient and continuing practice of grandparents teaching their grandchildren and extends an open invitation for any reader to encounter and learn from its pages, and the voices of Country that speak through them. Maralinga – the Aṉangu Story is a multimodal work of truthtelling—of pain, sorrow, and love—grounded in the living space of Country. Because of nuclear testing, Maralinga was for several years not a safe place for children or adults. This book thus performs a significant role of recording and witnessing continuity and belonging. Kwaymullina, Kwaymullina, and Butterly assert that “Aboriginal stories, however expressed or embodied, hold power, spirit and agency” (5). The images and stories of the book affirm that Country, community, and continuity are more significant than the tests themselves and hold the possibility and the promise of restoration. Notes 1 Aṉangu is the Western Desert name for “people,” shared between several languages of the region including Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. 2 The creation of the book was funded by several government grants which covered travel costs and paid Aṉangu contributors for the time they spent creating their artwork, telling their stories, and reviewing the manuscript. Copyright rests jointly with the Yalata and Oak Valley Communities and Christobel Mattingley. Royalties from the book proceed to the Yalata school. 3 Yankunytjatjara man Yami Lester, who was blinded by the nuclear testing at the age of 10, published his autobiography in 1993. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s 2016 poem, “Thunder Raining Poison,” was a response to the 2016 artwork of the same name by Yhonnie Scarce (Hall). A song by Johnny Lovett was translated into Pitjantjatjara and recorded with the Yalata Band (Lovett et. al.), and the documentary Maralinga Tjarutja, by Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman, scholar and filmmaker Larissa Behrendt, was released in 2020. 4 The same can be said for graphic novels, as discussed in “Mapping, Countermapping, and Country in Trace Balla’s Graphic Novels” (Duckworth). 5 The painting workshops took place in Belair, a suburb of Adelaide, as Mattingley was unable to travel far at that time due to health reasons. Some workshops and discussions about the book also took place in Mattingley’s Adelaide home.

130  Melanie Duckworth Later, Mattingley, together with members of the publisher’s production team, visited the community at Yalata to discuss the book’s progress, receive feedback and authorization, and for the community to choose the cover image.

Works Cited Black Mist Burnt Country: Testing the Bomb—Maralinga and Australian Art. 2016, https://www.blackmistburntcountry.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ BMBC-catalogue-web.pdf. Accessed 1 May 2023. Daozhi, Xu. Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature. Peter Lang, 2018. Duckworth, Melanie. “Mapping, Countermapping, and Country in Trace Balla’s Graphic Novels.” BLFT: Nordic Journal of Childlit Aesthetics, vol. 13, no. 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.18261/blft.13.1.4 Eckermann, Ali Cobby. “Poems: Thunder Raining Poison.” Soundings, vol. 2017, no. 65, 2017, pp. 136–140. Fitzsimmons, Phil. “Maralinga: The Aṉangu Story: Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley.” Practically Primary, vol. 14, no. 2, June 2009, p. 48. Gay’wu Group of Women. Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines. Allen & Unwin, 2019. Hall, Matthew. “The Whiteness of the Bomb: Nuclear Weaponry, Race and the Nation in Australian Indigenous Poetics.” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 65, no. 3, 2018, pp. 152–168, https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856. 2018.1546649 Kelly, Laura Beth, and Dani Kachorsky. “Text Complexity and Picturebooks: Learning from Multimodal Analysis and Children’s Discussion.” Reading and Writing Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 1, 2022, pp. 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/105 73569.2021.1907636 Kress, Gunther. “What Is Mode.” The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by Carey Jewitt, Routledge, 2009, pp. 54–67. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2010, pp. 195–208, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443051003721189 Kwaymullina, Ambelin et al. “Living Texts: A Perspective on Published Sources, Indigenous Research Methodologies and Indigenous Worldviews.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–13, https://doi. org/10.5204/ijcis.v6i1.106 Lovett, Johnny, Russel Bryant, Keith Peters, Mima Smart, and Yalata Band and Choir. “Sing Maralinga.” Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts 5, https://unlikely. net.au/issue-05/sing-maralinga-253. Accessed 1 May 2023. Mattingley, Christobel. Maralinga’s Long Shadow: Yvonne’s Story. Allen & Unwin, 2016. Mittmann, J. D. “Atomic Testing in Australian Art.” Black Mist Burnt Country: Testing the Bomb—Maralinga and Australian Art, https://www.blackmistburntcountry.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BMBC-catalogue-web.pdf. Accessed 1 May 2023.

Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story  131 Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work. Routledge, 2006. Papunya School. Papunya School Book of Country and History. Allen & Unwin, 2001. Rose, Deborah Bird. “Dreaming Ecology: Beyond the Between.” Religion & Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008, pp. 109–122, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40059845 Smart, Mima et al. “Life Lifted into the Sky.” Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, vol. 5, https://unlikely.net.au/issue-05/life-lifted-into-the-sky. Accessed 1 May 2023. Speck, Catherine. “Thunder Raining Poison: The Lineage of Protest Against MidCentury Nuclear Bomb Tests in Central Australia.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, pp. 68–89. Stephens, John. “Modality and Space in Picture Book Art: Allen Say’s Emma’s Rug.” CREArTA, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 44–59. Yalata and Oak Valley Communities with Christobel Mattingley. Maralinga: The Aṉangu Story. Allen & Unwin, 2009.

14 Re-placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene Carole Lindstrom’s We Are Water Protectors Hatice Bay The Anthropocene, the recent geological era in which human activities have transformed the ecological systems irreparably and substantially (Zalasiewicz et al. 2231), requires fundamental changes in how children, as members of the future generation, learn about, interact with, and perceive nature, land, wildlife, inanimate elements, and other species. Anthropogenic interventions have spawned numerous scientific articles and literary works; however, creative works for children about the challenges of the Anthropocene era are rare. Examples from Anglo-American children’s literature are Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971), Joanna Cole’s The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge (2010), Loll Kirby’s Old Enough to Save the Planet (2020), Holly Webb’s Earth Friends: Fair Fashion (2021), and Hanna Gold’s The Last Bear (2021), to name a few. However, children’s literature needs to focus more on environmental issues, on how children might be re-placed within this era, and how the taken-for-granted childrennature relationships can be reconfigured. Further, works of fiction on the experiences of children from various ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds need to be publicized as the afore mentioned children’s books mostly narrate the adventures of white and privileged characters. This chapter argues that Carole Lindstrom’s lyrical picturebook We Are Water Protectors (henceforth, WAWP) (2020) is an excellent example that diversifies the Anthropocene children’s literature and provides powerful entry points to teach and inform children about the complicated relationships among children, the land, and the entire natural system; environmental injustice issues; and the potential agency of (Indigenous) children in the Anthropocene. How should the Anthropocene era change children’s perceptions about other species that they can and cannot see? How can privileged children be made more aware that particular groups of children in particular places are deeply affected by environmental devastation? What can universal and romantic environmental thought and practice learn from Indigenous intergenerational epistemologies? DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-19

Re-Placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene  133 The primary aim in this chapter is to explore how Lindstrom challenges and expands current preconceptions of the Anthropocene, place, nature, and child-nature relationships by presenting the changing land, nature, and children dynamics in the Anthropocene by portraying “common worlds” which “take account of children’s relations with all the others in their worlds — including the more-than-human others” (Taylor and Giugni, “Common Worlds” 108) and by enacting Indigenous “presence” which is a decolonizing practice that counters the “continual colonial mapping and erasing of Indigenous presence” (Simpson 96). “Presence” is, according to Simpson, a way of declaring Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, and resisting the forces of colonialism and capitalism that seek to erase and exploit Indigenous peoples and their places. Place is a crucial component of this relationship, as Indigenous peoples’ culture, identity, and survival are rooted in place. First, WAWP disrupts the innocent and naïve perspectives of childrennature and place relationships. Universally, nature is assumed to be an empty, static, and uninscribed backdrop for children’s discoveries and observations. Taylor in Reconfiguring writes: … childhood encounters with the “environment” are not always as restorative, healthy, or spiritually uplifting as some nostalgic stories have seduced many to believe. A child-nature reconnect as purported by many in the fields of childhood and nature are in danger of continuing to reinforce the human-nature divide by continuing to position humans as “exceptional” and outside of nature, a sentiment that some may say has set humanity on its current destructive path. (66) In a similar vein, Lindstrom presents more impure, layered, and unsettling child-nature-place relations by bringing into focus the often neglected lives of people on Indigenous lands and in societies that are drastically disrupted by settler colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization. WAWP originates from a personal, contested, and emplaced local story. Lindstrom is an Anishinaabe associated with the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, and the illustrator, Michaela Goade, is of Tlingit descent, a member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska (WAWP). Both the author and the illustrator were inspired by their Indigenous backgrounds and the protests of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in 2016 to prevent the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Lindstrom herself talks about the significance of water as follows, “In Ojibwe culture, women are the protectors of the water,” and that is why “I felt compelled to speak for the water through this story” (WAWP). In fact, the DAPL, which is over 1,000 miles in length, is planned to carry crude oil in pipes that will run beneath the tribal and sacred lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation

134  Hatice Bay (Jacobs-Shaw). Even before the DAPL, throughout the ­ twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Dakotan Indigenous people have been exposed to, and protested against, uranium mining, toxic waste, open pit coal mining, and coal and tar sands oil pipelines in their lands (Bosworth 10). As Cameron states, there has been a historical tendency to view Indigenous people and lands as absent, immaterial, and spectral (388). In WAWP, the representation of nature and lands is intimately connected with the ongoing neo-colonial practices in the Lakota and Dakota nations, and Lindstrom presents the violence to which Indigenous tribes, especially children, are exposed. As Walker et al. state, “People of color, low-income communities, and Tribes often are more susceptible to the effects of pollution posed by the conditions of their poverty, limited access to health care and lower overall health status, subsistence activities, and even genetic composition” (380–381). Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. also argue that the environmental crisis caused by man and deeply experienced by children and earthly beings has increased the discrepancy between the human and nonhuman, the privileged and the unprivileged (3). Many marginalized groups, young children growing up in settler colonized countries, and their natural spaces are, therefore, subject to place-based inequalities and ecological devastations perpetuated by forces of power. This is quite different from what an average child growing up in a developed country knows. A teenage environmental activist Bella Lack, in her 2022 book, The Children of the Anthropocene, writes that where she comes from, namely London, they often speak of the climate crisis as if it would affect and concern children only in the long term (xiii). Children, hence, experience and are exposed to the Anthropocene era differentially. Although the Ojibwe people have lived in harmony with their environment for thousands of years, they now find themselves in the midst of the Anthropocene and its hazards through no fault of their own. Likewise, the main protagonist of WAWP, an unnamed young Ojibwe girl, lives amid all the chaos, damage, and disquiet caused by the oil industry. She is representative of the bleak child-nature relationship that is instigated by exploitative human-induced changes: My people talk of a black snake that will destroy the land. Spoil the water. Poison plants and animals. Wreck everything in its path. … Now the black snake is here. Its venom burns the land. Courses through the water, Making it unfit to drink. (WAWP)

Re-Placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene  135 These lines are the accounts of a little child’s embodied encounter with “the black snake,” the DAPL, and thus, colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. As Eric Ritskes states, projects such as the DAPL, “remove any spiritual value of the land, with regard only given for economic value, serving to further distance communities from intimate relationships with their environments” (3). The Ojibwe child’s land is under assault and occupation, and children suffer the most because they witness how their communities are rendered helpless and powerless in the face of authoritarian forces. The Ojibwe child tells how “Tears like waterfalls stream down/Tracks down my face. /Tracks down my people’s faces” (WAWP). Lindstrom emphasizes how environmental precarity and environmental ­injustice are  ­interconnected issues for Indigenous persons living on tribal lands. Second, Lindstrom’s story resituates children within heterogeneous more-than-human “common world” environments. The “common world” is, according to Taylor and Giugni, “an active and cumulative inclusive concept, that resists the division between human society as distinct from nature (and other living things) that characterizes post-Enlightenment western thinking” (111). They further argue that instead of seeing [children] as living in exclusively human societies—somehow separated from the “natural” world because of our exceptional human qualities—the notion of common worlds encourages [them] to move towards an active understanding of and curiosity about the unfolding and entangled worlds [they] share with a host of human and more-thanhuman others. (111) However, Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw note that more-than-human-others are excluded from children’s pasts and futures (“Unsettling Pedagogies” 45). WAWP, to some extent, rectifies this negligence. The Ojibwe children are entangled with various human and more-than-human lifeforms: “The winged ones, / The crawling ones, / The four-legged, / The two-legged, / The plants, trees, rivers, lakes, / The Earth” (WAWP). “We are all related” (WAWP), emphasizes the young Ojibwe girl. Through enumerating common world constituents in children’s worlds, especially, Indigenous children’s worlds, she acknowledges the significance of other-than-human entities. She encourages us to unlearn the anthropocentric view that maintains nature/human and subject/object divides, where children have agency and are insulated from nature and its living, as well as nonliving, inhabitants (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, “Learning with Children”; Nxumalo, “Forest Stories”). In other words, the young Ojibwe girl shifts attention from herself to her entanglement with entities of all sorts.

136  Hatice Bay Moreover, WAWP represents the “common world” to be indispensable for humans. The grandmother of the Ojibwe girl teaches her: Water is the first medicine. We come from water. It nourished us inside our mother’s body. As it nourishes us here on Mother Earth. Water is sacred. (WAWP) These lines highlight the fact that Indigenous people not only have an intimate and spiritual connection to natural elements but also sanctify them. The Ojibwe girl adds, “The river’s rhythm runs through my veins. / Runs through my people’s veins” (WAWP). From a broader perspective, the fate of humans, in common world environments, depends on the other nonhuman entities. This challenges the mainstream Western understanding of place and non-human inhabitants of the Earth as nothing more than an inert stage or backdrop for/to the all-important human activities. Lindstrom’s story decenters the human (and hence children) and elevates the more-than-human entities; it even endows them uniqueness and distinctiveness. Nokomis says, “Water has its own spirit,” and “Water is alive / Water remembers our ancestors. / Who came before us” (WAWP). As Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw put it, the common world “not only challenges human-centric assumptions about individual children’s significant relations, it also challenges the assumption of human exceptionalism, including the assumption that only humans have the capacity to exercise agency” (“Learning with Children” 508). However, as Lindstrom’s story makes clear, Indigenous people, their epistemologies, and their multispecies common world community are still tampered by anthropogenic activities. Lindstrom takes note of this complexity already imminent in these child-common world relations and seeks to prepare young children to act differently to ensure that future generations receive the legacy of a healthy and vibrant land. Third, to respond to the ecological challenges posed by the oil industry which accelerates the Anthropocene era in their local environments, WAWP reconfigures Indigenous children as active agents rather than as apolitical and distanced observers. They are, in the words of Blaise et al., “political actors rather than political objects being acted upon” by adults (32). Thus, WAWP foregrounds Indigenous children as activists, who are usually obscured by media and hegemonic narratives. As Chika Unigwe in her Guardian opinion piece writes, “For years, young people across the world have been campaigning to draw attention to the crisis our planet faces, and to tackle it. Yet it seems the media is only interested in one young climate

Re-Placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene  137 activist [Greta Thunberg].” Drawing attention to ­Indigenous, Black, and Brown teenage activists, Unigwe further states: There are many more whose names we rarely, if ever, hear. Yet, f­rustratingly, these other activists are often referred to in the media as the “Greta Thunberg” of their country, or are said to be following in her footsteps, even in cases where they began their public activism long before she started hers—their own identities and work almost completely erased by a western media that rarely recognizes progress outside its own part of the world. (n.p.) Significantly, Lindstrom’s place story and the girl protagonist’s agency can be read in terms of Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Simpson’s concept of “presence.” Simpson asserts that “Indigenous societies [are] societies of presence. [Their] processes—be they political, spiritual, education or healing—[require] a higher degree of presence than modern colonial existence” (92–93). Similarly, Lindstrom’s protagonist gathers together with her community leaders, elders, families, and other tribal children and organizes dancing, singing, and drumming activities. She announces: We stand With our songs And our drums. We are still here! (WAWP) Lindstrom shows that Indigenous place relations are defined by solidarity, intergenerational responsibility, and, most importantly, standing their ground. As Nxumalo argues, place-based narratives refigure presences that have “the potential to highlight complexities and inequities that might otherwise remain elusive in a normative child-centered narrative of events and encounters in early childhood settings” (“Situating Indigenous” 6). It is a celebration of Ojibwe resurgence and a declaration of Ojibwe existence and continuance, simultaneously. Lindstrom’s little protagonist further takes the lead and enacts “presence” by rounding up her tribe members hand-in-hand and delivering her rallying cry: TAKE COURAGE! I must keep the black snake away From my village’s water. I must rally my people together. To stand for the water. To stand for the land.

138  Hatice Bay To stand as ONE Against the black snake. (WAWP) This is a collective political act of bringing Ojibwe’s existence to public attention. The Ojibwe girl foregrounds her community, water, and land as “presence.” Thus, Lindstrom’s story unsettles “the literal and figurative ghosting of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and land from place-based and environmental early childhood education” (Nxumalo, “Situating Indigenous” 5–6). In addition, the protagonist’s rallying cry has great significance. Simpson points out that demonstration is “a reminder that although we are collectively unseen … when we come together with one mind and one heart we can transform our land and our city into a decolonized space and a place of resurgence, even if it is only for a brief amount of time” (11). In conclusion, all nature or place-based experiences and child-nature relationships are not the same. In this chapter, the attempt is to argue how Lindstrom offers an emplaced, embodied, and politically fraught nature/ place-children coupling. It is argued that WAWP unsettles innocent, simple, and idyllic child-nature encounters. Children, in the Dakotas, are traditionally enmeshed with nature and other living and non-living entities. They are also beholden and committed to their places. However, as WAWP draws out, Indigenous children are exposed to environmental encroachment—exemplified by the oil pipelines—in their own lives and in the lives of common worlds. Additionally, the discussion has centered on how extra-activist systems, which obscure and ignore other living beings, Indigenous peoples, their knowledge, and their relationalities, in Lindstrom’s story are disrupted by Indigenous “presence.” Here, children play an important role in performing “presence,” namely, asserting their ongoing existence and sovereignty; hence, Lindstrom unsettles the notion of trouble-free childhood and places free of struggle. The young Ojibwe girl exemplifies children’s ability to exercise active guardianship over their lands. She declares, “We are stewards of the Earth / Our spirits have not been broken” (WAWP). Indigenous people and common worlds cannot be relegated to an absence. Ultimately, within these frameworks, children can perceive natural settings as not simply static, untouched, unoccupied places but rather as places where complex, restless, problematic, and contested encounters take place. Furthermore, the discussion reveals how Lindstrom unsettles the notion of “children-as-subjects learning about nature-as-object” (Taylor 123). Bringing the notion of the “common world,” to children, Lindstrom highlights the inextricable intertwining of all living beings. She creates an attentiveness to other-than-human entities’ rights, sanctity, power, and agency and encourages children to develop responsibilities toward other living

Re-Placing Indigenous Land and Children Within the Anthropocene  139 organisms for a common sustainable future. Most importantly, Lindstrom voices how Indigenous people and children are more implicated in the Anthropocene than their wealthy and white counterparts and how their storied and real “presence” should be recognized and appreciated so that they can make more impactful claims for environmental and social justice issues. Works Cited Blaise, Mindy, et al. “Modest Witness(ing) and Lively Stories: Paying Attention to Matters of Concern in Early Childhood.” Pedagogy, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 1, 2017, pp. 31–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2016.1208265 Bosworth, Kai. “The Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle: Vulnerability, Security and Settler Colonialism in the Oil Assemblage.” ResearchGate 2019, pp. 1–27, https://www.­researchgate.net/publication/331977247_The_Dakota_Access_ Pipeline_struggle_Vulnerability_security_and_settler_colonialism_in_the_oil_assemblage. Accessed 13 July 2022. Cameron, Emilie. “Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Postcolonial Ghost Stories.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 3, July 2008, pp. 383–393. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, et al. “Childhoodnature and the Anthropocene: An Epoch of ‘Cenes.’” Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research, edited by Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Karen Malone, Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, Springer Nature, 2019, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_35-1. Jacobs-Shaw, Ramon. “What Standing Rock Teaches Us About Environmental Racism and Justice.” Health Affairs, 17 Apr. 2017, https://www.healthaffairs. org/do/10.1377/forefront.20170417.059659/. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023. Lack, Bella. The Children of the Anthropocene Stories: From the Young People at the Heart of the Climate Crisis. Penguin Books Ltd: Penguin Life, 2022. Lindstrom, Carol. We Are Water Protectors, Illustrated by Michaela Goade. St Martin’s Press, 2020. Nxumalo, Fikile. “Forest Stories: Restorying Encounters with ‘Natural’ Places in Early Childhood Education.” Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, edited by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Affrica Taylor, Routledge, 2015, pp. 21–42. ———. “Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene.” ­Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and ­Nature Research, edited by Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Karen Malone, Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, Springer Nature, 2018, pp.1–22. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_37-2. Ritskes, Eric. “‘A Great Tree Has Fallen’: Community, Spiritual Ecology and ­African Education.” African Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–21. Simpson, Leanne. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-­creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Arbeiter Ring Publishers, 2011. Taylor, Affrica. Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge, 2013.

140  Hatice Bay Taylor, Affrica, and Miriam Giugni. “Common Worlds: Reconceptualising Inclusion in Early Childhood Communities.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, vol. 13, no. 2, 2012, pp. 108–119. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.108. Taylor, Affrica, and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. “Learning with Children, Ants, and Worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a Common World Pedagogy of ­Multispecies Vulnerability.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 4, 2015, pp. 507–529. ———. “Unsettling Pedagogies Through Common World Encounters: Grappling with (Post-) Colonial Legacies in Canadian Forests and Australian Bushlands.” Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, edited by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Affrica Taylor, Routledge, 2015, pp. 43–62. Unigwe, Chika. “It’s Not Just Greta Thunberg: Why Are We Ignoring the ­Developing World’s Inspiring Activists?” The Guardian, 5 Oct 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/05/greta-thunberg-developingworld-activists. Accessed 21 Jan. 2023. Walker, Jana L., et al. “A Closer Look at Environmental Injustice in Indian ­Country,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 379–401. Zalasiewicz Jan, et al. “The New World of the Anthropocene.” Environmental ­Science and Technology, vol. 44, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2228–2231.

15 Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature Meghan M. Sweeney

In September 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a speech to the United Nations excoriating adults for failing to act on the climate crisis: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! Thunberg, 16 at the time of her speech, accused adults of childishly ­following fairy tales and refusing to face hard truths. In rejecting the image of herself as the heroic child who will save us from ourselves, ­Thunberg underscored her own rhetorical power, even as she wished it were not ­necessary to use it. In the past decade, reports of the climate crisis have grown increasingly dire, with the widespread recognition that children—and particularly children of the Global South—have been and will be most drastically affected. As Inger Ashing, a children’s rights advocate, points, the climate crisis “is a child-rights crisis, affecting children first and worst with deepening inequalities across borders and generations.” The urgency of the current climate crisis has given rise to many youth leaders like Thunberg all around the world as well as many books about these leaders. This chapter examines several of these recent (since 2018) children’s books that, for the most part, resist the trope of the child as “eco-warrior.” While meant to be positive, this trope can prove limiting, locking children into roles defined by adults in which their agency is minimized or located in some distant future. Furthermore, this warrior (often a girl like Thunberg) seems to work single-handedly for change rather than operating as part of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-20

142  Meghan M. Sweeney a larger community. Resisting this tendency to focus on individual efforts, the most effective environmental children’s literature develops a sense of place that requires a recognition of one’s part in an ecosystem even as it also emphasizes “place attachment,” the “bonding that occurs between individuals and their meaningful environments” (Scannell and Gifford 1). In this way, environmental children’s literature can move beyond the trope of the lone warrior child toward a more capacious understanding of an individual’s place within a broader community. Beginning in 2017 in the US, perhaps in response to cultural conditions after the presidential election, depictions of “warrior” girls in fiction and nonfiction proliferated. Dozens of books and book series such Rad Girls Can, Rebel Girls, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World, HerStory: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook up the World emerged, and many have included eco-warriors among their ranks. Thunberg has served as a key figure in many such books, including Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers as well as the board book My First Heroes: Eco Warriors, among others. In addition to these books, in which her story is presented only briefly, there are also numerous picturebooks and longer biographies of her life. As a female neurodivergent climate leader, Thunberg is remarkable and her “refusal to bow to criticism or be silenced is a powerful assertion of agency” (Moriarty 198). But by emphasizing her uniqueness, many books about Thunberg tend to, as Sinéad Moriarty points out, “elide the work of other young climate activists, in particular young activists of color, Indigenous activists, and activists from the Global South” (201). Some books (such as Divika Jina’s The Extraordinary Life of Greta Thunberg) do a somewhat better job, foregrounding the ways Thunberg’s “activism builds on existing activism of other young people” (202) and showcasing the power of the collective. Thunberg herself, who is aging out of her role as “youth climate activist,” seems to be aware of what some authors who narrativize her life are not: her views on the climate crisis are evolving and she recognizes the importance of other voices. As a Politico profile of her reports, she recognizes that naming her movement “Fridays for Future” was a privileged position to take, since, for many, the climate catastrophe is taking place in the present, particularly in island communities and nations without stable economies. She understands that her activism is predicated on privileges such as access to drinking water and the right citizens have within a democracy to protest, something that not all activists have. Because of this, Thunberg has actively decentered herself, demonstrating that we must listen to vulnerable populations to create a sustainable world. If we look to her actions and rhetorical choices rather than the books that depict her life, a more nuanced strategy emerges.

Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature  143 Many other children’s books about the environment follow the pattern of books about Thunberg rather than following the pattern etched out by Thunberg’s leadership style. Environmental picturebooks have historically, Clare Echterling observes, tended to overlook “the connections between environmental degradation and systemic social problems” (283). Echterling discusses books such as Wangari’s Trees of Peace that place “so much emphasis on Maathai’s individual role as the leader’s movement that the story becomes less about collective resistance to patriarchy and neocolonial development and more about the importance of heroic, individual deeds” (293). Similarly, Greta Gaard, writing about perhaps the most famous children’s environmental text, The Lorax, observes that the problem of deforestation, species loss, pollution, and overproduction/consumption driven by industrial capitalism’s profit motive and the “jobs-jobs-jobs” rhetoric is “solved” through a private conversation between the industrialist Once-ler and the environmentalist boy (16).1 The 2018 book Rad Girls Can by Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl resists such “solutions.” Like other books in the “Rad” series, it generally emphasizes the power of the individual, but it also foregrounds collectives and emphasizes complexity. The book depicts younger girls fighting for change, including “The Radical Monarchs,” an activist organization for girls of color, and “The Climate Kids,” who are suing the federal government for its contributions to climate change. Although the book is not focused on climate activists, its inclusion of groups alongside its individual portraits is an important model. Rather than being known by name, these children are identified as part of a collective advocating for change, challenging the image of the warrior girl saving the world on her own. Additionally, even as the back section of the book directly addresses readers, “What will you do to make the world a better place?”, it also emphasizes the importance of collaborative effort with supportive friends and mentors in the difficult, sometimes frightening work for justice. The power of the collective is even more prominently foregrounded in perhaps the most well-known environmental children’s book in recent years, We Are Water Protectors written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated Michaela Goade, which won the 2020 Caldecott Medal. The book begins with a young girl recalling that her grandmother, Nokomis, has told her that “Water is the first medicine.” But there is a “black snake” that has come to “poison plants and animals”: a pipeline. Goade’s illustration shows this pipeline, first as an inert thing and then come alive as a snake, with fiery eyes and forked tongue: an enemy that the young girl faces head on, “I must keep the black snake away / From my village’s water. / I must rally my people together.” It’s a powerful image, as the young girl, with furrowed brow, clutches a feather tightly and propels herself forward. Her

144  Meghan M. Sweeney hair, streaming behind her, becomes a lush landscape itself with fish, turtles, and flowers. It is not clear why she is taking on the burden herself, why she must be the one to “rally [her] people.” Goade and Lindstrom emphasize that they were inspired by the “youth-led movement” at Standing Rock and see their character as “a water warrior” (Saxon). Although gender is not specified in the text, illustrator Goade said, “It never occurred to me not to have her as a young girl.” While such a choice could be another example of the romantic eco-warrior stereotype, Lindstrom does emphasize that “In the Anishinaabe culture, women are the Keepers of Water” and, because of this, having a girl protagonist made sense (Saxon). The cover of the book has this solitary protagonist front and center and in full color, while the other community members are painted only in shadow. By several pages into the book, though, as the snake looms over the young girl, she holds hands with two others, part of a community. Throughout this very short book, “we” or “us” appears 14 times and “my people” four times. “I” or “me” appears only four. It is primarily a story about the power of the collective, with the final image of the book, a lush double-page spread, featuring dozens of people carrying signs like “#NoDAPL” (“No Dakota Access Pipeline”). Many have their fists raised and many others carry feathers or other objects that are significant to tribal identity. This book emphasizes that the community is the hero because they fight for those “who cannot fight for themselves: / The winged ones, / The crawling ones, / The four-legged, / The two-legged, / The plants, trees, rivers, lakes.” By design, the book is more poetic and suggestive than narrative: Lindstrom rewrote the book after her agent asked her to pare it down (Saxon). Many reviewers appreciated this,2 although it also has the effect of making the story vaguer, less concrete. The protagonist has no name, and the clarifying descriptions are left to the back matter; the lack of specificity about the water protectors and the reasons why such protection is necessary may make it more difficult for some readers to connect with the story. And while this book depicts a model of heroic community, it doesn’t depict a coherent image of a particular place, nor does it clearly address the root causes of the environmental devastation in the text itself.3 Since characters are carrying signs that say “No DAPL!” (“No Dakota Access Pipeline”) and “Mní Wičhóni” (“Water is Life”) and since both writer and illustrator have said that they took the youth protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation as an inspiration (Saxon), the text itself might address these real spaces more directly.4 For the Water Protectors who came together at Standing Rock, protecting water from the contamination of DAPL is part of “the practice of Wotakuye (kinship), a recognition of the place-based decolonial practice of being in relation to the land and water” (Estes and Dhillon 3)—a kind of place attachment that reflects Indigenous values.

Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature  145 For it is not just that, in Indigenous tradition, water is life, although the Lakota phrase “Mní Wičhóni” is most frequently translated this way, but that water is alive, a relative, and must be treated with deep respect. Like many of its environmental children’s books counterparts, this book does have a prominent peritext describing the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and it provides an informative illustrator’s note and a glossary. There is also an “Earth Steward and Water Protector Pledge,” which asks the reader to sign and date a pledge to “honor Mother Earth and all its living beings including the water and land.” While some readers may choose to ignore the pledge, it can provide an opportunity for other readers to engage with the language of the text in a new way (part of the pledge directly echoes a place earlier in the book). It is also significant that the pledge is not about being a “warrior” but a steward and protector of water and land—using language of guardianship and care rather than fighting. Even if the sense of place is somewhat vague in the book, the peritext does attempt to foster readers’ relationship with place. One small press book about a real-life protector depicts place attachment in the body of the text in a more substantial way, even though the text is sparse, and photographs tell the bulk of the story. Young Water Protectors: A Story about Standing Rock (2018) is important because it was written just after the events at Standing Rock, before other books about water activism came out, and because it written by a young person, Aslan Tudor, a Lipan Apache Tribal member, for young people. Although the book has a simple design and may also be prohibitively expensive for some readers, it carefully lays out what brought people to Standing Rock, which remains a pivotal political moment in youth environmental activism.5 The book describes what a water protector is and why they are necessary to this community: “a company was trying to build under the Missouri River, which is Standing Rock’s drinking water supply. The pipeline is called the Dakota Access Pipeline. The land and water where the pipeline was being built is their treaty land.” It describes what this treaty is and how it has been violated. Most crucially, it emphasizes that “[t]he land is called unceded treaty territory because the Lakota people did not give up the land.” A map shows how the land shrank from 1868 to the current day. It clearly lays out the issues of the water protectors and conveys a sense of urgency and unfairness. Tudor then provides his personal experience of living in the Oceti Sakowin camp at age eight with his little sister the first summer and how it had changed by the fall, when there were 5,000 people protesting the pipeline (7). It’s a simple book, published independently, but it nonetheless manages to convey a sense of immediacy as well as a sense of hope and possibility, as hundreds of Indigenous communities from all over the world and their allies joined the Standing Rock Sioux. Tudor is aided by his mother

146  Meghan M. Sweeney in writing his story and was brought by her to the camp in the first place, reminding us of the ways that children’s agency is often contingent upon adult decisions. Yet Tudor is not romanticized as an eco-warrior who will create a better future; he is a child who is already involved in being part of community that acts heroically not just by protesting the pipeline, but by caring communally for the children at the makeshift Defender of the Water school. Moreover, like Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, who first spoke at a climate rally at age six, Tudor sees himself as an activist: he is a fourth-generation member of the American Indian Movement and his second book, published in 2019, is called Young Native Activist. By drawing on “deep pasts and possible futures through present actions” (Conrad 230), books like Young Water Protectors show that children do not need to be positioned as a “hope for the future” in texts about climate activism. Rather, they can and should be shown to be connected meaningfully to the future and to the past through present work. Today, in organizations such as Sunrise Movement, a youth-led movement to stop climate change and end the influence of fossil fuel, and Zero Hour, which brings together diverse youth to find climate solutions, child and teenage voices are centered. While the environmental activism of young people can be mediated, vexed, or thwarted by adults, it is also often the site of possibility and power—and often radical possibility. As Bowman et al. write in Diversity and Inclusion in Environmental Activism (2021), “Young ­environmental activism is not monolithic, but is characteristically oriented towards the environmental justice approach, an approach with roots in civil rights movement in the U.S. and indigenous sovereignty movements” (132). In these movements, there is frequently “a desire for radical systemic change” (140) that requires community and coalition—and an a­ bility to feel an attachment to places both locally and globally. Although children are often positioned as lone eco-warriors in environmental texts for children, the larger story of environmental action is of many people working together for systemic change—in ways that are often invisible and frequently difficult. This is hard to convey in literature: as Rebecca Solnit points out, “[w]e are not very good at telling stories about a hundred people doing things.” Yet the qualities that matter in “saving a valley or changing the world are … the ability to coordinate and inspire and connect with lots of other people” and, crucially “create stories about what could be.” Children’s literature, including books like Young Water Protectors, has an important role to play in these ongoing environmental actions. The more children’s books of all kinds can move away from a romanticized eco-heroism to eco-agency grounded in place and an ethics of care, the better positioned they—and the children who read them—will be to make lasting change.

Beyond the Eco-Warrior Child in Children’s Literature  147 Notes 1 Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, however, requires collective efforts. It is only when the entire community “makes noise”—literally—that they are heard and respected by forces larger than them. 2 For example, the review of the book in The Horn Book says, “Between the text, like a chanted poem, and the pictures, like a vision of what we could be, here indeed is a book that can influence minds and cultures, and shift how we see and treat our world” (Allen). Even a less exuberant review in SLJ says that this book, with its “lyrical text,” “will both educate and inspire youth” (Saarinen). 3 An understanding of place does not have to be limited to unique geographic locations. Yet this book begins to evoke a particular location in the text itself while leaving the important work for the peritext. 4 Goade drew her illustrations after Lindstrom wrote her text, which is f­ requently the case with picturebooks. 5 The adaptation of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for ­ akota young people dedicates a chapter to the 2014–2017 protests against the D Access Pipeline (Dunbar-Ortiz).

Works Cited Allen, Autumn. “Review of We Are Water Protectors, by Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade.” The Horn Book, 13 Oct. 2020, www.hbook.com/story/weare-water-protectors. Accessed 18 May 2022. Ashing, Inger. “Children Face Life with More Floods, Droughts and Wildfires Than Grandparents.” World Economic Forum, 18 Oct. 2021, https://www.weforum. org/agenda/2021/10/climate-change-crisis-child-rights-crisis-save-the-childrencop26/. Accessed 25 May 2022. Bowman, Benjamin, et  al. “Youth, Climate and Environmentalism.” Diversity and Inclusion in Environmentalism, edited by Karen Bell, Routledge, 2021, pp. 132–147. Conrad, Rachel. “Youth Climate Activists Trading on Time: Temporal Strategies in Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, April 2021, pp. 226–243, https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2021.0017 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People. Adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese, Beacon, 2019. Echterling, Clare. “How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 47, Aug. 2016, pp. 283–299, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9290-6 Estes, Nick, and Jaskiran Dhillon. “Introduction: the Black Snake, #NoDAPL, and the Rise of a People’s Movement.” Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, U of ­Minnesota P, 2019, pp. 1–10. Gaard, Greta. “Toward an Ecopedagogy of Children’s Literature.” Green Theory and Praxis the Journal of Ecopedagogy, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 11–24.

148  Meghan M. Sweeney Lindstrom, Carole, and Michaela Goade. We Are Water Protectors. Roaring Brook Press, 2020. Moriarty, Sinéad. “Modeling Environmental Heroes in Literature for Children: Stories of Youth Climate Activist Greta Thunberg.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, April 2021, pp. 192–210, https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2021.0015 Saarinen, Tamara. “Review of We Are Water Protectors, by Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade.” School Library Journal, 1 Apr. 2020, https://www.slj.com/ review/we-are-water-protectors. Accessed 27 May 2022. Saxon, Antonia. “Q &A with Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade.” Publishers Weekly, 17 March 2020, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/82716-q-a-with-carole-lindstrom-and-michaelagoade.html. Accessed 27 May 2022. Scannell, Leila, and Robert Gifford. “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite ­Organizing Framework.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2010, pp. 1–10. Solnit, Rebecca. “When the Hero Is the Problem.” LitHub, 2 Apr. 2019, https:// lithub.com/rebecca-solnit- when-the-hero-is-the-problem/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022. Thunberg, Greta. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.” NPR.org, 23 Sept. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/ transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate- action-summit. Accessed 5 Apr. 2022. Tudor, Aslan, Kelly Tudor, and Jason Eaglespeaker. Young Water Protectors: A Story about Standing Rock. CreateSpace, 2018.

Part V

Spectrality and Memory

16 Dearly Departed The Arrival’s Spectral Refugee Katharine Slater

The Arrival is a ghost story. In the distressed and aging cracks of its pages, in the non-linear space-time of its careful attention to memory, a haunting takes place, one that invites us to see what comes back. Shaun Tan’s 2006 wordless graphic novel depicts a nameless protagonist who crosses oceans to escape a coercive threat, encountering other refugees in his new homeland. As invited spectators to this story, we’re asked to witness what returns, over and over: what it means for these characters to depart, to be unsafe, to be without a home, and to be expendable. The Arrival never arrives; instead, it continually emphasizes an endless return that disrupts the teleological promise of the title. Coming back, not arriving, is the device through which the novel ultimately explores the affective and material costs of displacement. As Yen Lê Espiritu has argued in her work on refugee remembrance, the ghost functions as a signifier of what someone or something has disappeared or tried to hide; how something lost attempts to make it back (123). A haunting draws our attention to what is missing. Reading Tan’s novel as a spectral narrative, then, is a political undertaking that acknowledges how The Arrival makes visible the invisible, asking us to witness and be accountable to real-world acts of trauma, exile, and disappearance. As a ghost story, The Arrival constructs an ongoing dialogue between specter and spectator. The Latin spect- means to see or to look, and in that prefix is the core of what this book accomplishes. All texts with visual components ask their readers to look, but The Arrival, as a wordless graphic novel, prompts its readers toward a kind of seeing that prioritizes careful scrutiny. Note the cover’s illustration, where the novel’s protagonist stares with transfixed curiosity at what the author has called a “walking tadpole,” his careful gaze a model for our own spectatorship (Tan, “The Arrival”). Will Eisner suggests that the act of successfully reading images without words requires advanced “sophistication … and a history of observation” on the part of the viewer (24). Looking closely and carefully is necessary in order to accurately interpret facial expressions and DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-22

152  Katharine Slater implied movements, since these details are central to meaning-making. This process of reading effectively decelerates the spectator’s pace, as Tan himself notes in his website post on The Arrival. And yet slow reading, in and of itself, does not produce spectrality. What separates the non-spectral narrative from the spectral one is, in large part, whether or not this act of looking becomes reciprocal. A spectral narrative looks back. Jacques Derrida tells us that textual hauntings are primarily “a technique to make oneself seen by ghosts,” who seek us out for acknowledgment (Wylie 134). While engaging with a wordless graphic novel is not an act that universally summons ghostliness, it’s The Arrival’s emphasis on accountability that helps produce its spectrality. The novel unhooks place, persons, and time from linearity, locale, and written language in ways that specifically aim toward requesting acknowledgment. If spectrality is, as John Wylie calls it, “an irreducible condition that demands new, themselves haunted ways of writing about place, memory, and self,” then The Arrival haunts writing (173). Its image-based narrative dislocates from expected forms of reading, frequently slowing down our pace, and miring us in a panel that stares back, like a lidless eye, unblinking. Tan’s panels, varying in size, frequently “alter the narrative rhythm, most times with the effect of slowing it down” (Scanu 9). This paralyzing geography merges past and present, both within the narrative and in our temporal experiences of it, encouraging us to slacken our speed to witness more fully the traumatic affiliations of refugee displacement. Importantly, trauma itself is not a perfect synonym for spectrality. The two are close cousins, in that each shows how human beings are possessed by a history that is never past. However, spectrality is also heavily preoccupied with possibility, in that its reciprocal gaze is designed to incite a reply. “Haunting,” Avery Gordon writes, “unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done” (xvi). In this essay, I examine the ways haunting manifests in The Arrival as dialogic and generative, with particular attention to the protagonist’s encounters as he undergoes immigrant processing, depicted as institutional trauma. The narrative thrust of the novel is a continual return to what haunts its characters: repetition as a means for sustained engagement. By reframing history as inherently spectral, as something that survives through haunting, The Arrival seeks to produce an ethical dialogue with readers. This practice not only establishes the extent to which the past disturbs the present but opens up questions as to what might emerge in future. One significant way The Arrival creates this ethical dialogue is through the question of political designation, implicitly engaging with refugee status designation and the importance of refugee self-determination. The international 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its corollary, the 1967 Protocol, establish the definition of a refugee as

Dearly Departed  153 a person who is outside the country of their nationality “owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted … and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail [themselves] of the protection of that country” (Burson and Cantor 7). Not surprisingly, this definition has been heavily debated since its adoption and use by a significant majority of countries across the world. There are major restrictions on its use; Daniel Steinbock points out that refugees “were not, and are not, allowed to define themselves,” a constraint that places the burden of proof on the refugee to establish “wellfounded” reasons based in persecution. It is insufficient, Steinbock writes, for an individual to feel compelled to flee their country without evidence of targeted hardship (738–739). A refugee, then, is a political label that can never be adopted first by a person who is displaced, but only received under burden of proof. The Arrival requires no such burden of proof from its characters. Through its emphasis on personal knowledge and individual narration, Tan’s novel allows its refugees to self-define their experiences, and at the same time demonstrates the extent to which refugee experiences are never fully past. Migrant characters in The Arrival are refugees because their self-narrated experiences line up with the Convention’s definition, not because they have definitively proved their status. This choice not only elides the question of who gets to “count” as a refugee by stressing characters’ memories over definitional language, but it also explicitly rejects a long history of refugees’ systematic exclusion from global historical records through the visual rhetoric of return: a denial of history’s linearity (Agnew 17). These experiences come back, again and again, not only through the protagonist’s own story, but through his encounters with other refugees, each of whom he meets in his new homeland, and who narrate their stories to him. One of these narratives comes from a woman who recounts her prior enslavement and escape; in her story, spectrality and accountability are most clearly visible through form. Tan presents flashback black-and-white panels with narrow white borders, creating images that resemble a square photograph (Tan III).1 Unknown hands grab a book away from the girl in the “photos,” forcing her instead to shovel coal into a furnace, before she manages to recover the book and flee to safety. As we witness her abuse and escape, we are asked, implicitly, to recognize these images and what they tell us as truth, due to their formal semblance. “The Photograph,” Roland Barthes writes, “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been … Every photograph is a certificate of presence” (85, 87). Both the images and the girl herself are spectral elements, haunting the central linear narrative through their reminder of what has already happened and what, through its manifestation on these pages, is not yet over. These specters are documented for both the narrator

154  Katharine Slater and the reader, figures that testify to the continued and verifiable presence of the past. This is conjuring work, a ghost story “that not only repair[s] representation mistakes, but also strive[s] to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future” (Gordon 22). Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren have referred to the ghost as “a figure of surprise that does not necessarily reappear in exactly the same manner,” distinguishing it from traumatic repetition (13). While The ­Arrival is a spectral narrative throughout, a series of three sequential pages in Book I most effectively demonstrate how the novel manifests haunting in ways that incorporate but extend beyond the impacts of trauma (Tan I). The shifting ontologies of spectral presence to invite readers to reckon with the emotional costs of access and exclusion. On the first of these, we witness the protagonist, newly disembarked at an immigrant inspection station (see Figure 16.1). Multiple examiners assess his body, scrutinizing his eyes, ears, lungs, and ability to read. These disparate encounters are depicted through action-to-action transitions that require readers to heavily participate in order to establish continuity. Arguably, this busy process seems to create speed; we’re contributing substantial amounts of closure as part of the process of forward momentum. After the page turn, however, readers encounter a very different series of panels, all depicting the protagonist expressing his obvious confusion and concern to unseen inspectors (see Figure 16.2). The 12 panels here require very little closure, given that the protagonist is nearly stationary, moving only his hands and his head. Between gutters, the expression on his face changes just slightly. Like Blanco and Peeren’s ghost, he is a figure of surprise who resists identical reappearance. Scott McCloud points out that moment-to-moment transitions, as used here, are far less common than action-to-action transitions because they take more space to communicate (152). Here, however, the additional panels are necessary quicksand. They slow us down considerably, asking readers to acknowledge minute differences rather than larger discrepancies to interpret significance. The primary signifiers here are not actions, but facial expressions and body language. Each panel eludes specificity in favor of its emphasis on emotion. We’re unable to access what, precisely, the protagonist wants to convey. Haunting here manifests as something close to paralysis, which fixes both subject and reader in a kind of differentiated stasis, or sluggish repetition. Wylie calls this stricken state “an antechamber suspended between the living and the dead” or, in this case, an antechamber suspended between linear progression and cyclical return (181). Time becomes unsettled. On this page, the protagonist is gripped indefinitely by what he cannot understand, and by what we, lacking further context or information, are equally incapable of seizing.

Dearly Departed  155

Figure 16.1 The protagonist is inspected by immigration services. Shaun Tan, The Arrival, 2006.  Hodder Children’s Books. Copyright: Scholastic, Inc.

The photographic nature of these panels also contributes to the way this page disturbs chronology. In concordance with Barthes, Derrida has argued that photography is an inherently spectral medium because the

156  Katharine Slater

Figure 16.2 The protagonist attempts to understand inspectors. Shaun Tan, The Arrival, 2006.  Hodder Children’s Books. Copyright: Scholastic, Inc.

photograph foregrounds the impossibility of what we want: contact with its subjects, who are fixed in an inaccessible past yet simultaneously present (Derrida and Stigler 38). Tan himself notes that the language of The Arrival is inspired by pictorial archives and photo albums, which have

Dearly Departed  157 “both a documentary clarity and an enigmatic, sepia-toned silence” (Tan, “The Arrival”). These two statements, Derrida’s and Tan’s, co-produce an overlapping meaning. The Arrival constructs a sense of subjectivity through the photographic quality of its images, and yet this subjectivity is deferred through the enigmatic silence of what separates spectator and spectacle. Tan’s protagonist is paralyzed on this page within the archive, locked in a past created by the inference of black-and-white and sepia. Readers become briefly paralyzed, too: within the delay formal repetition creates, within our desire to reach out and connect, that frustrated need itself a ghost that haunts the experience of sustained engagement. The specter shows us that something unseen must be acknowledged, and as Yen Lê Espiritu writes, a haunted narrative “looks for the living effects of what seems to be over and done with” (35). The specter appears at the undone hinges of chronology, showing us the extent to which the past is always present. Despite the sepia-toned panels and their age-scratched borders, elements that give the impression of a long-ago artifact, The Arrival denies the hegemony of time-as-linear. The book is present. The experience is now. But what this rejection of easy temporality accomplishes, beyond a troubling of normative momentum, is a forced contention with the protagonist’s embodied experience. Tan’s protagonist is a survivor of some predatory and systemic threat, a headless spiked serpent that squeezes his city until staying becomes impossible (Tan I). This history aligns him within a larger conversation around the traumas of displacement. Western nation policies consistently deny stateless refugees the right to full humanity, and the realities of this violence summon a series of questions Judith Butler articulates in the aftermath of September 11 and the Iraq War: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? To what are we tied? And by what are we seized?” (20–21). On this page depicting his institutional processing, Tan’s refugee protagonist articulates an explicit claim to full humanity, encouraging readers’ empathy through the uncompromising and repetitious emphasis on his reactions. The Arrival consistently focuses on recognizable affective responses that align with broadly experienced and easily identifiable emotions. And to reinforce the link between character and reader, we are seized by the way he appeals directly to us, the position of his body and gaze communicating with readers rather than the inspector. Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued that to be a non-Western refugee is to have a body and a consciousness “that could never fit the prerequisites for modern subjectivity” (Espiritu 178). Here, the protagonist pushes back against that framework through the expressiveness of his body, to articulate a fugitive interpersonal capacity for agency and connection beyond the callousness of state networks. The prolonged focus of the page implicitly acknowledges his life as precarious, in need of the care that detail work can

158  Katharine Slater

Figure 16.3 Faceless inspectors process the protagonist’s papers. Shaun Tan, The Arrival, 2006.  Hodder Children’s Books. Copyright: Scholastic, Inc.

provide. We are called, through an extended temporality that duplicates his pain, to witness in ways that hold us in momentary abeyance on the page, that hold us morally accountable.

Dearly Departed  159 And when we do reach the next page, we briefly meet ourselves (see Figure 16.3). Or, to be more precise, we meet a character whose subject position we occupy: an inspector. As on the previous page, we see what this inspector would see. However, the subsequent three tiers show us three more inspectors handling the application, presumably from the viewpoint of the man who waits to learn his future. Perspective here summons the ghostly presence of the protagonist to manufacture empathy; he haunts our own gaze. We’re asked to see as the protagonist does, and remain equally uncertain as to what these stamps and markings signify. But when read together, the previous page and this one—which face each other—produce a meaning that takes The Arrival beyond the shorthand of similarity as empathy’s vehicle. On the right, the dissimilar sleeves and jewelry signal that each horizontal tier shows us a different inspector, but the color and shading of the tiers also indicate an affiliation, signaling how we’re meant to follow along. We read from left to right, in a manner that reproduces expected forms of Western reading. On the previous page, however, there’s a very subtle link between vertical columns, signaled through a far more understated tonal connection that demands extremely careful looking to be seen (see Figure 16.2). The far left vertical column is largely black-andwhite, while the middle and right vertical columns gently gradate toward sepia, a subtle difference that brings to mind how Avery Gordon characterizes the apparition: as something “barely visible that makes itself known” (8). While the page does not enforce a particular way of looking, we’re implicitly invited to see the first vertical column as connected, an invitation that opens up the possibility of reading from top to bottom. This way of reading is antithetical to Western practices, reproducing the system of vertical writing historically common to many East Asian scripts. It’s reductive to identify The Arrival as a narrative about Asian immigration to Australia, given the multiplicity of sources and the book’s dislocation from concrete events or locales. However, Tan acknowledges on his website that the “somewhat invisible history of the Chinese in Western Australia” inspired his original research, as did his own Chinese father’s immigration to Australia from Malaysia (Tan, “The Arrival”). Part of what haunts the narrative, then, is this cross-current of dissimilar mobilities. Different ways of reading stand in for different geographic orientations or movements, contrasting ways of experiencing the world at varying speeds and directions. Notably, Tan’s decision to render the protagonist’s distress through vertical columns distinguishes this character from the direct experiences of those who exclusively read from left to right. In short, The Arrival does not seek to base its appeal toward empathy solely on shared traits between the protagonist and Western readers. It also acknowledges the significance of cultural difference and stresses it alongside affective expression, reminding us that the experiences of refugee displacement cannot wholly be collapsed into the generalities of broadly shared emotions.

160  Katharine Slater Beyond this reminder, though, is a broader point that asks us to a­ cknowledge how Western nation states frequently position asylum-­seekers, refugees, and immigrants as in conflict with its strategies. Here, reading routes stand in for other oppositions. Like anything haunted, the vertical columns and the horizontal columns are seized by a simultaneity of what is and what could be. They don’t touch, sequestered to their separate pages, but their shared spread hints at the possibility of intersection: a crossroads where, as Walter Benjamin puts it, “ghostly signals flash from the traffic” (qtd. in Gordon 204). Haunting is a tool that illuminates how humanity and power meet and are repelled; an intersection between what exists at the margins and what makes its might continually known. It speaks even when it utters no words, and in the paneled crossroads where Tan’s vertical protagonist and his horizontal inspectors might make contact, we see how the state moves, too, more so than the refugee. The state follows, the state detains, the state processes, the state silences, the state forgets. But we, as readers, are compelled to remember, and to do so through active attention. The Arrival ends with a large panel depicting the protagonist’s daughter assisting a newcomer to their country, an image of careful listening that recalls the protagonist’s intent concentration on the cover. We return to the beginning. And as human beings living in this world, we return, too, albeit far less hopefully than Tan’s novel does. We return, over and over again, to the reality of policies that displace, separate, and target those the state deems less human. The Arrival shows that it’s incumbent upon all of us who are not directly targeted to be haunted: to look for what is missing, to find ways to witness, and to make visible the invisible. Note 1 Because The Arrival has no numbered pagination, I’ve chosen to cite the sections into which the book is divided. There are four, listed in Roman numerals as I, II, III, and IV.

Works Cited Agnew, Vanessa. “Refugee Routes: Connecting the Displaced and the Emplaced.” Refugee Routes: Telling, Looking, Protesting, Redressing, edited by Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, and Jane O. Newman, Creative Commons, 2020, pp. 17–30. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1982. Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren. “The Spectral Turn: Introduction.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 1–36. Burson, Bruce, and David James Cantor. “Introduction: Interpreting the Refugee Definition via Human Rights Standards.” Human Rights and the Refugee

Dearly Departed  161 Definition: Comparative Legal Practice and Theory, edited by Bruce Burson and David James Cantor, Brill, 2016, pp. 1–24. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. “Spectrographies.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 37–51. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. 1985. W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. Espiritu, Yen Lê. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es). U of California P, 2014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Tundra, 1993. Scanu, Alessandro. “How to Tell a Story without Words: Time and Focalization in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006).” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, vol. 11, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–19, https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.4043 Steinbock, Daniel J. “Interpreting the Refugee Definition.” UCLA Law Review, vol. 45, no. 3, Feb. 1998, pp. 733–816. Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. Hodder Children’s Books, 2006. ———. “The Arrival.” Shaun Tan, https://www.shauntan.net/arrival-book Wylie, John. “The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2007, pp. 171–188.

17 Someone’s Missing The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law in Selected Children’s Picturebooks from the Philippines Jose Monfred C. Sy

Remembering Martial Law with Picturebooks In the Philippines, students have been learning about the military dictatorship of late president Ferdinand Marcos since their elementary history classes. The Marcos regime is condemned and remembered for his imposition of Martial Law in the Philippines during the so-called long 1970s. The dictator enforced totalitarian control through the militarization of civil spaces and curfews. He reasoned that these measures were necessary to “salvage” the republic from threats (Reyes 458). However, it was no secret that the Martial Law was a response to growing civil unrest and emergence of communist and other progressive groups among the population (Concepcion 66; Majul 111). The silencing of dissent was part of the reactionary narrative of Bagong Lipunan (New Society) that the regime advanced to justify the indefinite extension of Marcos’ term as president (Majul 118; Reyes 458). In 1986, a series of protests widely known as the People Power Revolution ousted Marcos and pushed him and his family into exile. The Martial Law regime ended with 3,257 killings, 35,000 cases of torture, and 70,000 incarcerations (McCoy 131). While these numbers inspire the utmost reproach, I, for one, only grasped the horrors of the era when I entered college and was made to read about these atrocities, the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth, and the Filipino struggle for freedom and democracy. After all, narratives of state repression and peoples’ resistance occupy a relatively small space in many learning materials approved by the country’s Department of Education (Diokno et al.). It is tempting to say that these gaps in education are a factor in the return of the Marcoses to power. In the 2022 National Elections, the dictator’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. won the presidency. Alarmed by this result, several children’s publishers and booksellers remarketed picturebooks, tackling the theme of dictatorship, extra-judicial killings, and Martial Law itself. As someone who realized the insufficiency of history DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-23

Someone’s Missing  163 education in the Philippines later in life, I deem it important that these picturebooks reach the hands of Filipino children to instill the necessity of remembering early on. Indeed, picturebooks that depict harrowing historical events for children who were absent in that period spark interest. How do these texts map daunted social realities in relation to childhood? This chapter intends to tail them in their navigation of the Martial Law era. I focus on three narratives that revolve around the disappearance of a character under the Marcos administration: Si Jhun-Jhun, Noong Bago Ideklara ang Batas Militar (Jhun-Jhun, Before the Declaration of Martial Law 2001), henceforth Si Jhun-Jhun, by Augie Rivera and Brian Vallesteros, Isang Harding Papel (A Garden of Paper 2015) by Augie Rivera and Rommel Joson, and At the School Gate (2018) by Sandra Nicole Roldan and Nina Martinez. The selected picturebooks dramatize imprisonment and forced disappearance within politically charged spaces which I consider “spectral landscapes.” I argue that child characters latch on tropes signifying childhood such as play and storytelling to come to terms with the tumultuous reality of the era. By ontologizing (or “mourning,” as per Jacques Derrida) missing people, they also traverse the physical and abstract spaces of the Martial Law. Spectral Landscapes, or the Spaces of Presence-Absence Given that presences and absences are central concerns in this study, I turn to what cultural geographers call “spectral landscapes” as a tool for understanding socio-spatial relations in literary texts bearing on history. It involves two concepts: “specters,” borrowed from Derrida, and “landscapes.” First, discussing the constructiveness of spaces can illuminate how they can be spectral. As geographer Doreen Massey asserts, spaces are not “a static slice through time” or mere “representation” of something else but are instead constructions emerging from the intersecting trajectories of subjects in that place (59). In other words, spaces such as landscapes are concomitant to social relations. Carroll furthers this position by saying that landscapes can be shaped and given order physically, through cultivation and other activities on actual land, or imaginatively, through art and literature (2). All landscapes, whether out there in the world or in a children’s picturebook, occur in human consideration—literally, an act of seeing or gazing—and social activity. They are where cultural and geographical territories intersect (3). In literary texts, characters perform a cartographic activity within imagined landscapes, which these subjects attempt to understand and navigate as the narrative unfolds. Child characters in literature for young people merit attention because childhood, like space, is not a given; rather, it is  constructed through physiological, psychological, historical, cultural,

164  Jose Monfred C. Sy and other determiners (Torres-Yu 81–82). Thus, investigating landscapes in picturebooks can reveal the discourses of childhood “by which places are made visible in children’s literature” (Bavidge 323). The landscapes of childhood are highly contested spaces as adults maintain power over the spaces of children such as homes and schools. However, children’s activities, especially imaginative play, may resist power as they provide children the opportunity to imagine possibilities beyond the realities imposed upon them (Carroll 20; Cecire et al. 2–4). To illuminate the landscapes in this chapter, I borrow Derrida’s “specter” to refer to the condition of presence-absence. Specters are things “whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized” (21, emphasis in original). These are phenomena that exceed binary oppositions of existence: visible-invisible, spirit-body, present-absent (Labiste 124). In outlining what he calls “spectral geographies,” Wylie explains how the spectral is “the very conjuration and unsettling of presence, place, the present, and the past” (172). Spaces, this logic follows, are shaped not exclusively by dwelling but also by a “haunting” of subjectivity by memory made visible and the dislocation of the present. Other things—specters themselves—already, no longer, and will inhabit the same spaces (183). Landscapes characterized as spectral allow subjects to mourn what is believed to be dead or disappeared. The psychic work of mourning ontologizes specters, allowing identification and coming to terms with absence by making them present (Derrida 9). Spectral landscapes interrogate the opposition of physical and imaginative spaces, in the same way that they dislocate presence and absence. They are also navigable via specters, which I associate in this study to imaginative play and other activities related to childhood. As Buse and Stott note in their deconstruction of ghosts, “where we find ghosts, there are bound to be anxieties about property” (9). The spectrality of landscapes points out to the absence of objects previously deployed in it, and the presence of those that replace the former. The task of the spectral geographer, then, “becomes one of demystification” (Matless 336), that is, the mapping of the processes and relations of haunting. The Spectral Landscape of Martial Law The history of Marcosian Martial Law has been the topic of works of art, literature, and performance in the Philippines as a way of memorializing the past and preventing its repetition (Concepcion 67; Majul 121). These texts could have only been widely disseminated during the post-EDSA regime because Marcos also carried out the censorship of public materials critical to his regime (Concepcion 87). Writers, artists, and publishers, whether mainstream or politically committed, have also produced picturebooks

Someone’s Missing  165 and other works targeted to young readers, including the Modern Heroes for the Filipino Youth of The Bookmark, Inc., which introduced several martyrs and survivors from the Martial Law years to Filipino children. What ties the three texts I selected for this chapter is that each narrative revolves around a character missing from the space occupied by the child protagonist, who in turn seeks to find or reunite with them. Rivera and Vallesteros’ Si Jhun-Jhun tells how the titular character Jhun-Jhun finds out about his older brother Jaime’s participation in workers’ demonstrations against the Marcos administration’s labor policies. It opens with JhunJhun playing tumbang preso (a game of knocking down cans with one’s shoe) using Jaime’s left slipper. After being scolded, Jhun-Jhun reminisces about the times when he and his brother did everything together. Curious about what changed between them, Jhun-Jhun follows Jaime on his way to work at a shoe factory. There, he finds out why his brother is always busy: “There was a strike at the factory—the workers were all gathered outside  … Jhun-Jhun could see his Kuya Jaime clearly: shaking hands, talking, and joking with his co-workers … They all carried red flags” (17).1 Adopting the perspective of the child reader who is unfamiliar with these activities, Jhun-Jhun fails to understand the clamor around him. Suddenly, “he heard gunshots. Everyone panicked and ran in all directions” (23). Jhun-Jhun hides under a red banner during the commotion. Once it is clear, he comes out and sees an array of slippers scattered around the area, including the one owned by Jaime which he used in tumbang preso. He and his mother look for Jaime to no avail. Hoping to find his disappeared brother, “Jhun-Jhun secretly went to the rallies—wearing [Jaime’s] left slipper” (31). The picturebook discusses forced disappearances, which were common among the ranks of activists during Martial Law, to young readers through Jhun-Jhun and the left slipper that reminds him of Jaime. In Rivera and Joson’s Isang Harding Papel, the mother is the one missing from the child protagonist’s life. Based on a true story, the picturebook begins as Jenny and her grandmother Priming head to visit Chit, Jenny’s mother, a political prisoner who was detained for staging a play that protested the Marcos dictatorship. Jenny asks her grandmother why Camp Crame, where her mother is detained, is packed with armed security personnel called MetroCom, a shorthand for Philippine Constabulary Metropolitan Command: “According to the Marcoses, this is for everyone’s safety” (7).2 Once they get past the camp’s checkpoints, Jenny and Priming finally meet Chit, who joins them for lunch. The mothers and daughters exchange stories to catch up. Before leaving, Jenny receives the titular paper flower from her mother, who says, “every time you and your grandmother visit me, I’ll give you a flower. So that you can always remember me” (17). These playthings function as a substitute for the imprisoned mother. As the years go by, Jenny collects so many paper flowers that she

166  Jose Monfred C. Sy can already arrange them into a garden. While beautifully drawn in the picturebook, these flowers also signify the long time it took for the family to be complete again during the EDSA People Power Revolution in 1986. If the previous picturebooks revolve around a missing brother and mother, respectively, Roldan and Martinez’ At the School Gate features a father who goes missing during the post-EDSA years. The young protagonist Ella Cortez, a 15-year-old student journalist, is met by her auntie Em at the school gate at the beginning of the story. Em tells her after a bout of silence, “Ella, they got your Papa” (6). Ella knows that “they” refers to the AFP whom her father, a filmmaker and activist, contested during the time of Martial Law. “He was arrested and jailed twice during Martial Law. He was arrested and jailed twice during Martial Law,” Ella explains to readers (9). As they walk home, Ella and Em see a tall, bullet-toothed man wearing army boots watching them under a streetlight. This prompts them to join their other relatives staying at a former “safe house” where activists used to hide before. Ella “wishes that [she] could just hide in Lola’s house for the next few years” (25), but she realizes that, as an editor for the school paper, she needs to be at school on Monday. At the safe house, she intently listens to the stories of her relatives about the harsh political landscape of Bagong Lipunan as if she is writing a report for the school paper. Collecting these stories and constantly reminding herself of her responsibilities as a student help her muster up the courage to go to school. At the gate is the bullettoothed man stalking her with a gun on his belt. Despite her fear, Ella confronts him with the mustiness of a journalist during the Martial Law era, saying, “I know you’re military. Go tell my Papa I’m OK. I finished my article” (38). Surprised, the man leaves her alone. While unsure about her Papa’s fate, Ella commits to continuing her schooling for her missing father. All these disappearances, whether in the form of imprisonment, detention, or forced disappearance, unfold in the spaces of Bagong Lipunan. While much literature for children promotes “a nostalgic and, often, implicitly anti-urban world view” via rural places (Bavidge 324), the three picturebooks are set in cityscapes pervaded by Marcosian power. Isang Harding Papel paints this clearly when Jenny observes the regime’s propaganda scattered across the white-walled streets: “the cleanliness, order, silence, and other changes in the streets are part of Marcos’ dream of a New Society” (5). An antiseptic whiteness suffused with silence matches the quiet left by the capture of Jenny’s activist mother. Of the three picturebooks, Isang Harding Papel illustrates the military-led silencing and censorship most explicitly and spatially. Si Jhun-Jhun paints a different but related picture by featuring the landscape of resistance. Around the shoe factory, Jhun-Jhun sees “banners with red letters saying: ‘Bring Down!’ ‘Marcos, a Dictator!’ ‘US-Imperialism,

Someone’s Missing  167 a Worldwide Plague!’ People were shouting ‘Resist! Don’t be afraid!’” (18–19). The spread illustrated these calls on placards, introducing child readers, unfamiliar to radical politics like Jhun-Jhun himself, to the Filipino people’s resistance, filling the silent landscape of Bagong Lipunan with subversive noise. The landscape of At the School Gate, unlike the previous two, provides a view of post-Martial Law Philippines. Ella explains in relation to the EDSA People Power Revolution, “I thought [the terrible] period in our family life ended in 1986 with People Power … I now know things are more complicated. I should have remembered my Grade Four history lesson: Bad presidents like Marcos may come and go but They will always stay in power” (11). This interrogation of democracy justifies the dour landscapes that the picturebook presents, from the dreary school gate wet with rain to the safe house lit only by television where they wait for news about Papa. Martial Law continues to haunt people like Ella and her Papa despite the absence of its implementor. Unlike the idyllic rural spaces common in children’s literature, these politically charged urban landscapes expose the characters’ childhoods to the dangers of Martial Law, specifically the loss of a family member under the regime’s campaign to quash dissenters. However, the child protagonists are able to latch onto activities bearing on childhood to come to terms with their political realities. I read them as specters of the disappeared, who have “departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed” (Derrida 6). They allow for the reproduction of the “departed,” in this case the disappeared, in the present while signifying the impossibility of reproducibility at the same time. In Si Jhun-Jhun, the titular character holds on to his brother’s slipper, which functions as a specter of Jaime. The paper flowers given by Chit to Jenny in Isang Harding Papel signal not only a mother’s love for her daughter but also the child’s hope of reunification. The very possibility of reunification with someone missing can be characterized as spectral in the context of Martial Law given that the period was both imminent, in the sense that social movements were advancing its arrival, and remote, provided the indefiniteness of Marcosian rule. That Ella listened to the stories of her grandmother, cousins, and older brothers in the safe house in At the School Gate allowed her to reconcile with her father’s detention. The left slipper used for playing tumbang preso, collecting paper flowers, and storytelling in these picturebooks, to echo Labiste’s appreciation of specters, “[promote] engagement even in conditions of impossibility” (129). Through these imaginative activities anchored to childhood, the child protagonists traverse the physical and psychic spaces inaccessible to them such as the army detention camp in At the School Gate, the prison in Isang Harding Papel, and the indefinitely unrevealed space of the disappeared in

168  Jose Monfred C. Sy Si Jhun-Jhun. In Si Jhun-Jhun, the titular character begins to participate in anti-Marcos protests as if he is a specter of Jaime: “Even if his [mother] prohibited him, Jhun-Jhun secretly went to the rallies—wearing his [brother’s] left slipper” (31). In Isang Harding Papel, the garden of paper flowers allows Jenny’s navigation of power in the landscape of Bagong Lipunan. Every night in her garden, she whispers, “I hope that my mother comes home soon” (29). She bears hope despite the indefiniteness of martial rule. In At the School Gate, the storytelling of Ella’s family helps her imagine herself living in during the Martial Law era. Given that Marcosian power continues to pervade post-EDSA society, she realizes that “Elvis was real. Just like the man with the bullet-toothed grin. I wished I could pretend he was imaginary” (27). She later confronts the army agent with her newfound courage. Children coming to terms with the political realities of Martial Law emerge from their imaginative play, which becomes a “means of immediate resistance or an opportunity to practice scenarios” (Cecire et al. 3). These activities permit them to imagine beyond the limits imposed by Martial Law and their childness. Jhun-Jhun enters the space of protest that invades the landscape of Bagong Lipunan. Jenny’s space of home is filled by specters of her mother, uniting them not physically but psychically. While we do not see her father materially in the story, Ella reconstructs the courage of her father via her family’s storytelling. She replays the scenarios she learned when she confronts her stalker at the school gate. Matless’ description of spectral landscapes captures the spatiality of such cultural terrains: “the spectral [is] a carefully constructed and contrived field of pleasures and anxieties” (349). The anxiety toward an absent family member and the temporary pleasure of replacement helps them make sense of their loss. For the child reader of these picturebooks, the slipper, paper flowers, and telling of stories themselves act as placeholders in the narrative for their respective resolutions. Through imaginative play that evokes specters, these children render the spaces of Martial Law as permeable. Reading the Past for the Future This chapter investigated how children’s picturebooks map the political realities of childhood in the context of Martial Law. Using spectral landscapes as a tool for understanding socio-spatial relations in historical texts, I suggested that children can come to terms with missing a loved one during this tumultuous time by navigating the physical and psychic spaces controlled by the Marcos regime. They are able to transcend the spatial limits imposed upon them through imaginative play—a left slipper for the game tumbang preso, a garden of paper flowers, and a family’s storytelling—that enables the children to mourn the absence of the detained and disappeared by making them present.

Someone’s Missing  169 The same objects prefigure this development among the child ­ rotagonists. The spaces that these characters inhabit are haunted, so to p speak, by “pasts and futures, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (Wylie 172). Ultimately, these spatially symbolic narratives demonstrate how children leave the space of childhood to confront the loss and injustice they experience. Jhun-Jhun, Jenny, and Ella are both inspired and compelled by the period to sully the “constructions of childhood that reinforce power imbalances” (Faire 194). The publication of historical picturebooks for young people follows the proliferation of “progressive” children’s literature in the Philippines in the twenty-first century (Evasco 130). The historical is radical as it acknowledges the progression among past, present, and future. During the last 30 years, the Marcoses have been able to return to power (Martin 474), which culminated in the recent elections. Reading these books to Filipino children is all the more important today. Like Jhun-Jhun, Jenny, and Ella, they must remember the present-absent. Notes 1 Quotations from Si Jhun-Jhun were sourced directly from the picturebook, which comes in both English and Filipino languages. 2 Quotations from Isang Harding Papel are all translated from the Filipino language into English by the author of this chapter.

Works Cited Bavidge, Jenny. “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2006, pp. 319–330. https://doi. org/10.1080/14733280601005682 Buse, Peter, and Andrew Scott. “Introduction: A Future for Haunting.” Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Scott, Macmillan, 1999, pp. 1–20. Carroll, Jane Suzanne. Landscape in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2011. Cecire, Maria Sachiko, et al. “Introduction: Spaces of Power, Places of Play.” Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present, edited by Maria Sachiko Cecire et al., Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2015, pp. 1–19. Concepcion, Mary Grace. “Writing and Rewriting the Self: Narrative Projection and Transformation in Martial Law Autobiographies.” Humanities Diliman, vol. 18, no. 2, 2021, pp. 65–92. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Diokno, Maria Serena, et al. “The Dilemma of Philippine History Textbooks: A Review of Select Grades 5 and 6 Araling Panlipunan Textbooks.” Far Eastern University Policy Center, 27 Sept. 2022, https://publicpolicy.feu.org.ph/the-dilemma-of-philippine-history-textbooks-a-review-of-select-grades-5-and-6-araling-panlipunan-textbooks. Accessed 11 Jan. 2023.

170  Jose Monfred C. Sy Evasco, Eugene. “Ang Ikatlong Dekada: Ang Sitwasyon at Mungkahing Pagpapaunlad ng Panitikang Pambata sa Pilipinas (2000–2009).” Daluyan: ­ Journal ng Wikang Filipino, vol. 18, no. 1–2, 2012, pp. 128–162. Faire, Rita. “Child of the Revolution: Finding a Voice in Activism and Academia.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 191–207, https://publicpolicy.feu.org.ph/the-dilemma-of-philippine-history-textbooks-a-review-of-selectgrades-5-and-6-araling-panlipunan-textbooks Labiste, Ma. Diosa. “Spectres of New Media Technologies in the Public Sphere.” Plaridel, vol. 12, no. 1, 2015, pp. 123–140, https://doi. org/10.52518/2015.12.1-06lbste Majul, Mary Ann M. “Turning the Tide: Protest Poems on Martial Law as Counter-Memory.” Journal of Nusantara Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2017, pp. 111–121, https://doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol2iss1pp111-121 Martin, Jocelyn. “Martial Law as Philippine Trauma: Group Culture, the Sacred, and Impunity in Three Memoirs.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, vol. 86, no. 4, 2018, pp. 453–480. JSTOR, http://www. jstor.org/stable/45172793 Massey, Doreen. For Space. SAGE, 2005. Matless, David. “A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 335–357. https://www. jstor.org/stable/44251220 McCoy, Alfred. “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime.” ­Memory, Truth Telling, and the Pursuit of Justice: A Conference on the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship, edited by Gaston Z. Ortigas Peace Institute, Ateneo de Manila UP, 2001, pp. 129–144. Reyes, Portia. “Claiming History: Memoirs of the Struggle against Ferdinand ­Marcos’s Martial Law Regime in the Philippines.” Sojourn: Journal of Social ­Issues in Southeast Asia, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp. 457–498. JSTOR, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/26538540 Rivera, Augie. Isang Harding Papel. Illustrated by Rommel Joson, Adarna House, Inc., 2014. ———. Si Jhun-Jhun, Noong Bago Ideklara ang Batas Militar. Illustrated by Brian Vallesteros, Adarna House, Inc. and UNICEF, 2001. Roldan, Sandra Nicole. At the School Gate. Illustrated by Nina Martinez, The Bookmark, Inc., 2018. Torres-Yu, Rosario. “Panitikang Pambata, Edukasyon, at Konsepto ng Bata: Mga Palaisipan at Panukala.” Humanities Diliman, vol. 8, no. 1, 2011, pp. 80–99. Wylie, John. “The Spectral Geographies of W. G. Sebald.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2007, pp. 171–188.

18 Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark, and NineteenthCentury Notions of Adolescence Ivy Linton Stabell Today, the graveyard at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan is a minor tourist attraction, primarily trafficked by visitors spilling over from the alluring sites of the Wall Street area to view some of the earliest headstones in the city. The site, which dates back to the seventeenth-century Dutch settlers, attracts the historically minded who come to view the burial sites of Alexander Hamilton, Robert Fulton, and assorted other New York notables of the colonial and early federal eras. Yet in the nineteenth century, Trinity churchyard was a hotspot of early tourism in the United States, marked in many guidebooks as an essential stop on any New York City visit, in large part due to a grave that attracts little notice today, that of poor young Charlotte Temple (Keralis 42). Unlike the neighboring graves, however, Charlotte’s is probably empty,1 as she was not a real person at all, but rather the heroine of the first American bestseller, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794).2 Rowson’s hit novel tells the story of a young girl enrolled at boarding school in Britain, who is lured away from family and friends on her 16th birthday to join the dashing but dissembling Lieutenant Montraville as he sails across the Atlantic to fight against upstart colonists in the American Revolution and, ultimately, to marry someone else. Montraville abandons Charlotte pregnant and alone on New York shores where she dies in childbirth, as do so many other heroines of the eighteenth-century seduction novels. Yet despite its familiar narrative arc, Charlotte Temple was a sensation, sparking thousands of pilgrimages to the grave of this fictional character. We might name this an early iteration of fan culture, “a passion unprecedented in American literature” (Davidson, Introduction xiii), yet the midnineteenth-century timing of this particular explosion of Charlotte Temple devotion suggests that her story also provided a meaningful exhibit for emerging conversations about American adolescence, especially adolescent girlhood. The popularity of Charlotte Temple’s grave as a tourist site is typically cited as evidence of the “ardor of [the novel’s] readers” (xii) and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-24

172  Ivy Linton Stabell (to modern eyes) a curious manifestation of reading practices in the era of the sentimental novel. At a time when it was fashionable to evince an emotional response to your reading, graveside visits were not unheard of. “By the mid-nineteenth century,” writes book historian Spencer Keralis, “perhaps partially in response to the sentimental impulse to visit cemeteries on just this sort of pilgrimage, public cemeteries were designed with the leisure visitor in mind” (41). Yet while it may have been en vogue to make public demonstrations of one’s emotional connection to literary figures, this essay devotes greater attention to the age of this subject that provoked such sentimental outpourings of devotion and how contemporary visitors might have contemplated her meaning. Charlotte Temple is a novel replete with what-ifs that center on her age, frequently meditating on Charlotte’s psychic and physical distance from adult protectors while simultaneously imagining how different kinds of interventions—both individual and structural—might have altered her fate. Charlotte’s grave offered a physical site for contemplating all that can go wrong, not only when individuals fail the adolescent, but when social structures do as well. If, as Timothy Cresswell argues, “[p]lace is also a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world” (11), Charlotte’s grave gave the nineteenth-century readers an emblem of the fears and possibilities that attended the era’s emergent idea of adolescence. The novel was adored from the start, but Charlotte’s readers did not troop to the (imagined) resting place of her adolescent body until 1846, more than 50 years after the book’s initial publication. During renovations to Trinity Church, a foreman cut “Charlotte Temple” into a large flat stone grave marker in the churchyard (Keralis 41), perhaps knowingly tapping into rumors that attempted to locate a Charlotte in the real world and thus attracting visitors to the churchyard.3 True believers and general admirers alike, however, responded to this whole-cloth invention of Charlotte’s resting place with vigor, not only flocking to view the stone but “invariably leaving personal mementoes—locks of hair, ashes of love letters, bouquets of flowers” for the remainder of the century (Davidson, Introduction xiii). Keralis finds references to Charlotte’s grave in tour books into the 1890s (42), and Cathy Davidson cites a lawyer whose office overlooked the churchyard, who recalled in 1903, after nearly 50 years of daily observation, “Charlotte Temple was familiar in the household of every New Yorker … the turf over [her grave] is kept fresh by falling tears” (Introduction xiv). This fervent response from readers 50, even 100 years later corresponds with this novel’s impressive longevity with the nation’s readers. Charlotte Temple inspired more than 200 editions from the 1790s into the twentieth century, and it was the most popular American novel before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 But given that these gravesite visitors were not those who made the book popular in the first place, later Charlotte Temple

Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark  173 enthusiasts may have responded to different elements of the novel than their eighteenth-century fore-readers. Though Rowson wrote Charlotte Temple well before the cultural concept of adolescence emerged, critics have long rested their claims about the novel’s meaning and cultural resonance upon the idea that the book is about youth. Scholars have located both conservative and progressive explanations for Charlotte Temple’s popularity, but most interpretations of Rowson’s young protagonist spot a familiar political metaphor deployed across the political spectrum of eighteenth-century American political writing. In the decades preceding the Revolutionary War, metaphors of youth accentuating either emergent maturity or a state of dependence were used to encourage rebellion from or obedience to parental control. Among those who read the novel as a conservative hit, Charlotte Temple is a morality tale urging citizens back into an obedient relationship with political authority as the nation settled into its new Constitution. “Wound not,” Rowson’s narrator warns, “by thoughtless ingratitude, the peace of the mother who bore you” (Rowson 54). But scholars who see Charlotte Temple’s appeal in its sympathies for the downtrodden observe that the reader is encouraged to pity poor Charlotte, even to see themselves in a similar position, vulnerable to cruel social codes, especially in these years of early sexuality: “Believe me, many an unfortunate female, who has once strayed into the thorny paths of vice, would gladly return to virtue, was any generous friend to endeavour to raise and re-assure her; but alas! It cannot be, you say; the world would deride and scoff” (68). In the uncertain first decades of a new government established by radical overthrow of traditional rulers yet built upon adherence to other long-established power hierarchies, “post-revolutionary readers found it easy to apply to their own lives Susanna Haswell Rowson’s tale of a fifteen-year-old girl misled, … seduced, … and abandoned in a strange new country, an ocean away from beloved (but perhaps too paternalistic) parents” (Davidson, Introduction xi–xii). Whether the novel was a call to duty or a rebuke of political powers, these readings hinge on understanding the unique predicaments and desires of the young. Yet Charlotte Temple’s opening dedication to “the young and thoughtless of the fair sex” demonstrates the messiness of the term “young” in early America (Rowson 5). To begin, the declaration itself is by no means an indication of the book’s sole (or even primary) readership. Like so many eighteenth-century Anglo-American novels that preceded it, Charlotte Temple (subtitled: A Tale of Truth) appeared in a culture wary of fiction as a tempting force that would distract from more sober subjects and upend traditional social roles through its transporting capacity to depict other lives. More than a century of novels in English therefore pitched themselves as educational tools, aiming to instruct the “right” way to read.

174  Ivy Linton Stabell Thus, children were a natural object upon which promises of instruction could be laid (Weikle-Mills 101). Furthermore, in the first decades of the new nation, Americans under 16 made up between a half to two thirds of the population, so they were also a lucrative consumer group (100), if not yet one entirely distinguished from the adult market; readers of all ages shared reading material into the nineteenth century in the United States. This mixed audience is modeled in the novel itself, which offers direct address to “my dear sober matron” as well as “my dear girls” (Rowson 28, 29). And as Cathy Davidson has famously cataloged in her study of this novel’s editions and readers, Charlotte Temple was beloved by men and women, young and old, rich and poor, Black and white and was produced in nearly every format of the nineteenth-century publication: from toy book for children to prized gilt-edged gift editions to cheap newsprint disposable copies.5 “Young” in this period was therefore a broadly encompassing term that might refer to all Rowson’s readers, as it invoked everything from a legal definition that declared those under 21 “in law, infants”6 (The Political Class Book, qtd. in Weikle-Mills 102) to a more nebulous cultural term that could be used to mean “someone who had [not] achieved independence and freedom” (103). By the latter definition, most residents of the new nation counted among the “young.” Charlotte’s readers included but were not necessarily limited to young people, nor were her graveside visitors; as a result, scholars have infrequently focused on what Charlotte Temple has to say about actual young people. But the popularity of graveside visits in the second half of the nineteenth century prompts us to do otherwise. Charlotte’s age may have resonated primarily as a metaphor for a late eighteenth-century audience that heard youth as political code, but new interpretations may have been brewing for the next century’s tourists who attended her grave. The traditional story of adolescence in the United States holds that the concept of a separate developmental stage emerged slowly over the course of the nineteenth century and that cultural infrastructure for adolescents, like literature aimed at these readers, did not appear in earnest until the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century writers like Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, in this model, were not writing literature for adolescents, but rather by producing works addressing the experiences of older children helped create “a culture that believed a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood existed” (Trites xvi). Yet, Julie Pfeiffer’s recent comparative study of the mid-nineteenth-century German and American youth novels argues an earlier recognition of adolescent girls as readers as well as subjects, effectively locating the earliest American adolescent literature a hundred years earlier than standard histories of the genre. She argues American readers had access to German and American novels that employed the

Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark  175 backfisch narrative, a German literary form that recognized an adolescent “period of indeterminacy” and theorized “the solution … is to ensure girls are allowed a time of exploration and growth rather than forcing them too quickly into maturation” (14, 16). In the backfisch model, adolescent girls emerge into a supportive world of (largely female) mentors dedicated to supporting that growth into adult womanhood (marriage and motherhood). Pfeiffer cites a range of novels from the 1850s forward that speak directly about and to the adolescent girl,7 works that seriously considered the best care for this group. When we map the popularity of tourism to Charlotte Temple’s grave onto Pfeiffer’s literary history, the public mourning of this famous fictional adolescent materialized around the time that these first literary recognitions of adolescent girlhood began to appear, and graveyard popularity continued through decades of further formation of the cultural category of the adolescent. Charlotte Temple is clearly not a backfisch novel. Charlotte dies abandoned and alone in the classic formula of the seduction novel, rather than blossoming in a supportive environment. But if the mid-nineteenth-century readers pulled this novel down from a shelf that also held backfisch titles, then perhaps some of Charlotte’s readers saw echoes of it in her story. Much of the backfisch narrative Pfeiffer describes focuses on “collaborative growth,” particularly identifying extra-familial mentors “who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature” (4). At a crucial moment in the novel, Charlotte’s life is touched by one such extra-familial figure who, ever so briefly, shapes her story. Midway through the novel, when Charlotte has been living for months as Montraville’s dejected mistress in a rented country house outside the city, she receives his letter announcing, in so many words, that he will be distancing himself to seek other marital prospects. At the very moment that Charlotte is thus terrified at the prospect of being socially and financially abandoned, her kindly neighbor Mrs. Beauchamp, who has noticed the forlorn and visibly pregnant Charlotte, screws up her courage to be “one kind friend to raise and reassure her … [and to] endeavour to recall a wandering sister” (Rowson 74).8 Mrs. Beauchamp is precisely the kind of mentor Pfeiffer describes: confident in her ability to nurture her adolescent neighbor, even willing to defy social judgment for her efforts.9 In a single interaction, Beauchamp provides the array of support Charlotte so desperately needs: an invitation to dinner when she suffers from economic insecurity and social stigma, and the necessary advice to write to her parents without trusting her seducer to post her letter. Beauchamp, unfortunately, is called away with her husband shortly after this interaction, but the implication is clear: with the continued support of this understanding friend, Charlotte might have been reclaimed by her parents and, at least in part,

176  Ivy Linton Stabell by society. The near-miss is reinforced in the melodrama of the novel’s final scene when both Mrs. Beauchamp and Charlotte’s father arrive to her deathbed only in time to say goodbye. The limited results of Beauchamp’s interventions may be a far cry from the payoff of the sustained lessons of mentors in the novels Pfeiffer describes, but Charlotte Temple’s path to tragedy underscores the logic of the mentor model at the center of the backfisch plot. To a Charlotte Temple enthusiast standing at her graveside, it may have been difficult not to meditate on Charlotte’s missed opportunities, like a continued relationship with Mrs. Beauchamp. John Urry and Jonas Larsen write that tourism is desirable, in part, because there is “anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures” (4). Though pleasure may seem a strange word for it, one powerful experience of attending the graveside of a beloved is to engage in tantalizing whatifs; through a daydream of a longer connection with Mrs. Beauchamp, a sympathetic reader may imagine Charlotte (back) into being. But it is more than the untimely departure of Charlotte’s only friend that facilitates her downfall in the novel; it is also seduction and the confining laws of sexual consent in the eighteenth century; to effectively daydream a better end for Charlotte would be to rewrite Montraville’s actions and the eighteenthcentury rape culture he embodied. Lucia Hodgeson has recently argued that Charlotte Temple was a unique seduction novel for timing the novel’s catalyst on the most significant moment in a young girl’s legal life: Rowson aligns Charlotte’s seduction with her sixteenth birthday because sixteen is the age at which white free British and American girls found themselves in the legally precarious position of being old enough to consent to elopement but too young to marry without paternal consent. (170) Under the 1753 Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage, girls could consent to sex and elopement at age 16, but those marriages were not valid without paternal consent under age 21. Critics of the law pointed to the double-bind this law presented for girls between 16 and 21: seducers could secure their consent with a promise of marriage but later wriggle out of legally binding commitment when their fathers disapproved the marriage, a frequent occurrence when patriarchs blamed their daughters for their ruin or had held other economic ambitions for their marriage (177). The law, in effect, protected seducers and fathers, but left girls without sexual autonomy or legal recourse. Montraville appears to know the particulars of the law, courting Charlotte for weeks but eloping precisely on her 16th birthday, when he “pressure[s] Charlotte into consen[t] [by] threat[ening] a public spectacle that will potentially expose her as unchaste

Charlotte Temple, a Literary Landmark  177 in mind, if not in body” (188). Montraville’s seduction, then, is not merely the actions of a callous libertine (or calculating rapist, as Hodgeson persuasively argues) (188); he is an embodiment of threats against young girls’ wellbeing that were legally and socially codified. A nascent conversation about the possibilities and perils of adolescence swirled in the cultural atmosphere in the same decades that mourners lined up to visit Charlotte’s grave. Backfisch readers or not, these visitors existed in a world that increasingly recognized these young people as a distinct group, and to stand at the grave of such a famously, if fictionally, neglected adolescent must have involved imagining a world in which someone like Charlotte was better served. For the pilgrims peering down at Charlotte’s grave, “the tourist gaze”—a position John Urry characterizes as engaged observation moderated by the distance afforded by the temporary status of visitor—offered an opportunity to engage in the messy work of “order[ing], shape[ing], and classify[ing]” a whole new stage of human life (Urry 2). At the gravesite, these larger considerations could be centered on a beloved character’s doomed trajectory and by conjuring other possibilities for her story. Two poignant developments in the novel’s nineteenth-century publication history epitomize the possible results of such contemplation. Beginning in the early 1840s, just prior to the appearance of the gravestone, illustrated versions of Charlotte Temple began to depict a repentant Montraville standing grief-stricken in front of Charlotte’s grave (Keralis 41). Visitors were perhaps, then, following the script these images set before them: mournful reflection of the factors that contributed to her downfall, a list that included more than individual actions, but rather a social structure that afforded Charlotte no opportunity for reclamation. Readers may also have known Rowson’s sequel to Charlotte’s tale, a novel called Lucy Temple, originally published as Charlotte’s Daughter in 1828 and reprinted throughout the century. This story writes a better future for Charlotte through the life of her daughter. It is a reassuring tale of an adolescent girl supported through her “indeterminate” years; when seduction comes calling, Lucy successfully avoids her mother’s fate. Charlotte’s gravestone, then, was more than just a literary tourist beacon, but also a place that clarified, through mourning and daydreaming, the ways adolescents may be nurtured or failed. In dwelling on Charlotte, who did not survive these years, this gravesite prompted consideration of what is owed to young girls of the future. Notes 1 In 2008, an excavation team lifted Charlotte’s gravestone but found inconclusive evidence of whether or not a body lay below (Hughs). Spencer Keralis writes that church records suggest it may be a family vault, rather than an individual grave (41).

178  Ivy Linton Stabell 2 Like most early American novels, Rowson’s novel was first published in ­London (1791). 3 Various attempts were made to link Charlotte Temple and Lieutenant ­Montraville to Charlotte Stanley and John Montressor, real-life subjects of an English affair, though there is no evidence that Rowson used them as inspiration (­Davidson, Introduction xiii). 4 By 1812 alone, the book had sold around 40,000 copies (Davidson, Revolution 17). 5 For full detail on Charlotte Temple’s readers and the testimonials they left behind, see Davidson’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the novel, as well as Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in Early America. 6 Even this legal definition is misleadingly straightforward, however, and legal autonomy varied in different contexts, as we will see. 7 Pfeiffer’s study includes Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl and Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did, as well as other lesser known titles. 8 It is worth mentioning that Mrs. Beauchamp independently has the impulse to help Charlotte, but only does so when her husband supports her plan, telling her to defy the “prudes and fools” who would judge her for her kindness (75). 9 The narrator of the novel, too, frames herself as a nurturing influence. Not only does she shed “tear[s] of compassion” for Charlotte, she declares her novel’s purpose as a resource for young readers, “If the following tale should save one hapless fair one from the errors which ruined poor Charlotte … I shall feel a much higher gratification in reflecting on this trifling performance” (Rowson 5, 6).

Works Cited Cresswell, Timothy. Place: A Short Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Davidson, Cathy N. “Introduction.” Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, Oxford UP, 1989, pp. xi–xxxiii. ———. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in Early America. Oxford UP, 2004. Hodgson, Lucia. “Age and Consent in Charlotte Temple.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 46, no. 2, 2019, pp. 169–194, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2019.0008 Hughs, C. J. “Buried in the Churchyard: A Good Story, at Least.” NYTimes, 12 Dec. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/nyregion/13trinity.html. ­Accessed 15 Sep. 2022 Keralis, Spencer D. C. “Pictures of Charlotte: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her Readers.” Book History, vol. 3, 2010, pp. 25–57, https://doi.org/10.1353/ bh.2010.0011 Pfeiffer, Julie. Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence. U of Mississippi P, 2021. Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple. 1794. Oxford UP, 1989. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel. U of Iowa P, 2007. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Sage, 2011. Weikle-Mills, Courtney. Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence 1640–1868. Johns Hopkins, 2013.

Part VI

Placing Readers

19 Space, Place, and Readers Understanding Setting as “Placing-in-Process” Margaret Mackey

Readers are placed; they are always somewhere when they read, and awareness of their own space is part of how they respond to the challenge of bringing written words to life in the mind. The first section of this chapter presents readers talking about the role of landscape in their literate youth. The second takes a broader look at contemporary awareness of the role of place in a reading mind at work. The literary interface is a stark place. Christopher Collins offers us a view of its minimalist existence: To put it bluntly, when we enter the imaginary space of a text, we don’t know where we are. We orient ourselves only in reference to the few landmarks we are given—nouns situated in a void… . Not having actually perceived this scene ourselves, we have no peripheral field in which to detect and target an object as our next image. (151) Our peripheral field as we read these nouns, says Collins, is initially “as blank as the white space that surrounds each printed character” (151). At the same time, Daniels and Rycroft are persuasive in their account of the geographic fullness of many fictions: As a literary form, the novel is inherently geographical. The world of the novel is made up of locations and settings, arenas and boundaries, perspectives and horizons. Various places and spaces are occupied by the novel’s characters, by the narrator and by audiences as they read. Any one novel may present a field of different, sometimes competing forms of geographical knowledge and experience, from a sensuous awareness of place to an educated idea of region and nation. (460) To what extent and to what level of detail do readers need to create an internal perception of this teeming geography? What kind of background knowledge helps to bring life to an inchoate sense of a fiction’s place in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-26

182  Margaret Mackey world? In what ways do readers “add value” to a sense of setting through their awareness of their own peripheral worlds? Do some readers actually “subtract” and supply a less detailed sense of the fictional environment than is enabled by the words of the text? With appropriate acknowledgment of the huge variation in readerly processes and behaviors that turn the text’s “nouns in a void” into a virtually lived experience, is any kind of social consensus about the effects of a particular text possible or even desirable? Readers develop preferred individual approaches to the literary infilling of the white space to create at least a minimalist impression of that abundant variety of setting. The list of salient decision points is extensive. The author selects and supplies significant details about a setting. There may or may not be an equivalent originary place in our daily world, on which these nouns draw and to which readers can refer for supplementary information. Readers dedicate a variety of cognitive resources to establish a readerly envisionment of a setting; the priority given to fidelity to a given description differs from one reader to another. Readers rely to varying degrees on their own sense of locatedness in a particular place as they interpret how a character may belong to a specified site. Even if the territory in the book is entirely invented, readers know that characters must relate to the local ground and surrounding air of their setting and they supply implicit bodily awareness to those characters. In a recent study (Mackey), I chose to start with readers themselves, rather than with a specimen text. I asked these readers to consider a significant landscape from their literate youth and to explore how that landscape informed the toolkit they brought to bear on reading. For this project, I recruited a dozen undergraduates aged between 18 and 25 and asked them to create a digital map of a place (real or fictional) that had been significant to their literate youth. I interviewed each participant twice, once when the map was partially complete and once when it was finished. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and approved by the Research Ethics Board of my university. I invited participants to create a base image and layer their map with links in any way that seemed meaningful to them. The maps varied in almost every way imaginable. All interviews took place in front of a computer screen featuring the map and the participant used the mouse to demonstrate any element they wished. Screen information was captured along with the audio interviews, and everything was transcribed. The interviews were largely shaped by the contents of the maps; most comments about mental and/or real-life settings were volunteered by the undergraduates as they talked about the aspects of their childhoods that the maps evoked, rather than elicited by my prompts or questions.

Space, Place, and Readers  183 Though the population of this study is small, these readers describe lived experience with the cultures of six different countries on four continents. They represent a wide range of undergraduate majors, and their maps are vastly diverse, in both form and content (see Mackey for more detail about all these issues). Beyond these external variables, however, the disparities in their internal approaches to reading are equally striking. To take one example, the austerity of Collins’ “nouns in a void” may seem extreme to many readers, but to Rahina, a constant reader, this notion rings true. She has no interest in visualizing any aspect of a novel. She rejects the idea of providing a specific face for any character, on the basis that faces are too limiting, and dismisses the need for any provision of a setting. For Rahina, characters “could have a white wall behind them, it doesn’t really affect me.” Similarly, Amy, also a committed reader, is not interested in any kind of visual background for her fictions. At the most, she says, she will supply an abstract form of space or character that she describes as “Kind of, like—Peter shape or, like—bedroom silhouette.” Riya would not settle for such abstractions, but she does not add details to her basic mental images until instructed to do so by the text. She expresses a readerly utilization of schemas and stereotypes. Our discussion of how she would represent an island in her mind makes this process explicit. In a book featuring an island, she would imagine “just a regular island.” Our subsequent conversation probes the kind of minimal and stereotyped island that serves as her default, and that she says she would picture while reading any book about an island until the author required her to add specifics. Margaret:  Okay, what’s a regular island look like? Riya: Like a, like literally a mound of land, in like, the sea, or a river or something. Margaret:  Is it rocky? Riya: No. It’s just ground. Margaret:  Does it have mountains? Riya: Uh no, just, like, some trees and stuff. Margaret:  Trees, okay, bushes? Riya: Yeah, like a forest. Yeah, some bushes. At another point, she talks about “just a piece of the land, like a semicircle, almost.” Later we revert to the origins of this island. Riya grew up in a tea valley in India, with no islands nearby. Margaret: So where do you suppose it comes from, this smooth island that you described so certainly?

184  Margaret Mackey Riya:

Probably school, like, science textbooks or whatever, where you learn, like, geography, what’s an island, what’s a plateau. Yeah. Margaret:  So they would be almost schematic. Riya: Yeah, yeah. Riya starts with a generic landscape and adds individual details only if they are explicitly mentioned in the text. “I normally never make assumptions. If I have to make an assumption, I have to go and check if I’m right.” Matt is much more committed to building a detailed sense of the locations in which a story is set. He talks in terms of drawing on his own background awareness of the environment that surrounds his daily life to flesh out the substance of a given setting. For example, he supplies many details of the Forbidden Forest in the Harry Potter books from his experience of playing in a grove of trees behind his school soccer pitch (Figure 19.1): I spent a lot of my time in there building forts … It was a lot easier to imagine yourself being in these stories and re-enacting these stories

Figure 19.1 Matt’s image of the woods behind his soccer pitch where he spent many childhood hours. Digital map created by and used with permission of the participant of the study.

Space, Place, and Readers  185 when you have an environment like that around you … So this, for me, is a very strong narrative where I can take things from my childhood and visions from my childhood and imprint them on the literature I was reading. Of all the readers in this study, Matt is the most committed to building a full and accurate sense of the setting of every scene. He works hard to check the overall relationships between one setting and another, but this process is laborious; his initial and automatic response keeps the individual scenes discrete: “I think each individual icon, I had a fairly good idea, but the relationship where they were with each other, I kind of had to look for  … I would see like a sitcom where they have prepared rooms, compared to a movie.” Roman confirms that a detailed visual sense of a particular scene (the “sitcom” model of distinct and relatively static background settings) is not the same as an overall grasp of how different backdrops relate to each other: “I have a hard time with spatial areas. I’ll have the book leading me through, and then I have to go back and check the map at the front, because I don’t know where I am. But I know what it looks like.” Matt and Roman import their life experience into their reading in relatively seamless ways, but other readers described a more makeshift effect. Halia, for example, was a child immigrant whose parents were nervous about her going outdoors on her own. When, as a child with little repertoire about outdoor life in Canada, she read about a forest, she concocted a mental scenario out of two ingredients: her view through her bedroom window of a small stand of trees behind her house that intrigued her because of the pine trees (she was accustomed to palm trees), and her memories of a single trip to the Rocky Mountains (see Figure 19.2). She read many animal books and describes how she furnished a mental setting for one of them: It was very descriptive the way it described the Canadian landscape, and it was just a mixture of the Rocky Mountains that I saw very briefly and what was outside of my house. I would mix that up, I would mix up urban with rural. Like I’d assume, they’d be, oh, okay, there’s a stream and the raven was drinking from the stream and I’d imagine a street right beside the stream. Ying Yu also draws on an eclectic set of sources to furnish her mental settings for stories. But she does not expend much mental energy in creating a detailed setting if it does not come readily to mind. Frequently, her reading calls up what she labels as “flashes.” She talks about “flashes of different

186  Margaret Mackey

Figure 19.2 Halia’s image of the small stand of pine trees behind her house that fed into how she pictured rural scenes. Digital map created by and used with permission of the participant of the study.

colors like green and grey” and elaborates about the very provisional nature of her investment in a story: Accompanying colors are flashes of image of how adventures and journeys should be like. I don’t focus too much on the detail of the image. These flashes usually just have typical shapes. If I focus too much on a specific image, I will become confused because the story doesn’t explicitly state what things look like. Unless it does, otherwise I won’t imagine in that way. Also, I don’t imagine too much on just one image but a flash of images, because this way I will be less confused as to how the story can go. If sudden changes happen, it is easier to accept. In summary, we see many forms of reading work described here. Riya swiftly inserts a minimal stereotype of the background called up by her text; Ying Yu settles for the sensation of a transitory flash that may not amount to much more than a sense of color. Both readers, however, talk about adding detail as the text supplies it. Rahina and Amy feel no need to supply any kind of detailed visual setting at any point in their reading. Halia composes a provisional fragment of setting as her life experience permits, but when default discrepancies (such as an urban street alongside a rural stream) creep into her mental image, she simply keeps on reading.

Space, Place, and Readers  187 Matt attends carefully to the details of a given setting and then checks how different parts of the landscape relate to each other. Roman similarly creates a relatively detailed visual image of any scene but does not compile an overview of the total landscape; he reads with a segmented sense of specific individual backdrops. The spatial awareness encoded in the text through the author’s dynamic relationship with and representation of a geography must be enacted into life by the energy emanating from a reader’s general awareness of space. Clearly, we have no way of accounting fully for individual readerly investment; the nearly infinite number of variations rules out such an approach. But that limitation does not mean there is no theoretical room for taking account of what readers bring. The assortment of reading strategies and processes briefly but explicitly described by the participants in my own study indicates that readers add such geographical awareness to a reading experience in ways that are far from uniform. What we need is a theoretical stance that permits a coherent approach to accounting for individual proclivities. Sally Bushell comments that “literary place and space is experiential, not static: for writer, for character, for reader” (272). The quality of that experience is different in each case. As a first step in exploring readerly experience of place, we can rule out the notion that the text supplies every needful detail about a described space. Gabriel Zoran observes: [L]anguage cannot express all aspects of space… . there must be some selection. Language is not able to give a complete and continuous report on space and, moreover, the reader does not always demand such a report. The reader is much more demanding about the filling in of gaps on the narrative plane than he [sic] is about the filling in of gaps in space. There are many gaps in the information about space, and it is not essential to fill them all. (320) Zoran says that readers construct shifting fields of vision. “Unlike scenes in a naturalistic theater, textual fields of vision do not always occur in complete, closed units. They may be much more fluid, they may widen or narrow in scope … or move gradually from one place to another” (328). Nancy Easterlin proposes that readers work on an ad hoc basis, adding spatial information on the basis of why it matters to the focal characters, rather than as a broad and complete background: Instead of global mapping, which did not confer such an advantage in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, people follow species priority in physical world perception and navigation and in narrative world building: attending especially to the immediately bounded

188  Margaret Mackey locale, they focus on other people (as we would expect of a highly social species), other creatures, and objects of interest (affordances). (“New ­Geography” 205) Easterlin says, “[I]t is not just that spatializations of the global, material dimensions of a story are typically unnecessary: they are a distraction from narrative concerns for readers and viewers, because they have no bearing on those concerns and therefore clutter the mind with extraneous information” (“New Geography” 203). The responses of the readers in my project suggest that readers create diverse personal strategies, either for relishing or for suppressing the “clutter” of excessive information about settings. The number of examples I provide is small, but large enough to demonstrate that any account of reading processes must be plural, that any singular positioning of what “the reader” does is misleading. Renate Brosch cites neuroscientific findings to develop a description that makes more allowance for individual variety, by distinguishing between what she labels as default and vivid forms of envisionment. She outlines some readerly options, “visualizations reach varying levels of intensity which could be located on a scalar continuum ranging from an automatic, but indistinct default visualization to intensive, highlighted and vivid images occurring intermittently” (“What We ‘See’” 136). Brosch describes default visualization as “the continuous, fluid, transient, and indistinct character of ongoing visualization during the process of reading… . It occurs when the activities of reading and comprehending are not foregrounded” (“Experiencing” 257). In the default mode, says Brosch, “features of the fictional world merge into a stream of images that never becomes as concrete as that in a movie but remains transient and indeterminate in ways that pictures and movies cannot” (“Experiencing” 258). She points out that: this optical poverty is not a lack but an advantage for the reading mind. It means that mental images during reading are polyvalent to an extent that real ones are not. Their indeterminacy allows constant transformation. Because visual indeterminacy ensures the adaptability of images to information received at a later stage, it is an enabling capacity, not a constraint… . Phenomenologically, readers do not register a lack or a deficit in experiencing the story world. (“Experiencing” 258) In contrast to this low-level progress through an indeterminately specified world, readers may sometimes be prompted to create a more detailed response: More vivid imaginings depend to a significant extent on textual triggers in the narrative. Some of these narrative devices demand close attention

Space, Place, and Readers  189 to the text, some take the reader by surprise. Vivid visualization due to increased attention occurs mainly in descriptive passages when the reader is cued by the narrative to shift from action—and movementoriented visualization to object- and description-oriented visualization. (“What We ‘See’” 136). In this chapter, for reasons of space, I will not pursue the neuroscientific backing for this description. Brosch makes it clear that readers who visualize tend to prefer either the spatial-progress/low-detail activities of the default or the high-resolution imagery she describes as vivid. These forms of processing take place in different sections of the brain, and everybody has access to both. Readers whose priority is for verbal rather than visual processing are less likely to prefer one mode over the other. This highly compressed account of readerly variation makes room for most of the responses described by readers in my project. It seems arguable that Rahina and Amy are verbal processors, with little interest in the visual potential of a text. Ying Yu and Riya, in their different ways, default to the vague until instructed otherwise by the text. Roman and Matt are much more attuned to noticing specific details and picturing an elaborated setting, although they both, especially Roman, overlook the connections between settings in favor of “knowing what it looks like.” Matt makes a more conscious effort than Roman to attend to the relationships between one setting and another. The paucity of Halia’s repertoire for visualizing rural Canadian settings makes it more difficult to pin down her preferred cognitive approach, but she was clear that her makeshift setting did not stop her progressing through her story. Moore and Schwitzgebel observe that “Systematic studies that explicitly focus on people’s self-reported conscious experiences are rare” (57). Their “experience sampling,” which prompted nearly 2,000 readers in three different studies to supply explicit reports on how they experienced a set of different texts, was much more systematic than my own qualitative work with readers mapping aspects of their literate youth. Their results support the inherently varied nature of reading processes. Their empirical project established consistent evidence to support four broad conclusions: people report very different types of experience while reading; people report variable experiences as they read; text type influences reported reading experience; and people report visual imagery more commonly than inner speech, though there was no uniformity. Their participants did not demonstrate improved memory in modalities they chose to highlight. Easterlin observes that our sense of place is always in development and defines an awareness of “place-in-process” as “the affective-conceptual construction of physical location that changes in light of events, experiences, and relationships” (“Place” 831). This concept, however, takes a person’s relationship with the real world as its referent; there is a place to

190  Margaret Mackey be experienced and it comes equipped with specific features and qualities. When the point of identification is a set of “nouns in a void,” it may be more useful to think of the verbal equivalent of “placing-in-process.” This formulation provides more scope for the nebulous end of the spectrum, represented here by Rahina and Amy. Their “placing” processes are very perfunctory, though it seems reasonable to assume they imagine that characters know where they are. As readers, Rahina and Amy simply have no interest in fleshing out any details of that setting. While the “place” of their fictions is almost completely undefined, they do activate a minimal sense of “placing.” “Place-in-process” suggests that ultimately there is some kind of “there” to be developed; “placing-in-process” can entail the slightest of cognitive gestures toward setting. In reading, as Bushell comments, “there is no grounded reference point,” a quality that she regards as “liberating in terms of the two-way dynamic that opens up” (272). Placing-in-process is a kind of “opening up” of the affordances of the text. Bushell says that readerly visualization is “an essential part of literature as a communicative act” (273), but I would argue that we may engage in placing-in-process through any sensory modality: perceiving a setting in terms of its visual components or its soundscape or how it feels to move through it. And any one of these processes may amount to little more than a flicker. The good news about private reading is that only the involved reader needs to be satisfied. Works Cited Brosch, Renate. “Experiencing Narratives: Default and Vivid Modes of Visualization.” Poetics Today, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp. 255–272, https://doi. org/10.1215/03335372-3868527 ———. “What We ‘See’ When We Read: Visualization and Vividness in Reading Fictional Narratives.” Cortex, vol. 105, 2018, pp. 135–143, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.cortex.2017.08.020 Bushell, Sally. Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatializing the Literary Text. Cambridge UP, 2020. Collins, Christopher. The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination. U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Daniels, Stephen, and Simon Rycroft. “Mapping the Modern City: Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham Novels.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 18, no. 4, 1993, pp. 460–480, https://www.jstor.org/stable/622561. Easterlin, Nancy. “’The New Geography,’ Material Science, and Narratology’s Space-Time Dichotomy: Notes toward a Geographical Narratology.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2018, pp. 197–214, https://doi.org/10.1515/ fns-2018-0018 ———. “Place-in-Process in Colm Toíbín’s The Blackwater Lightship: Emotion, Self-Identity, and the Environment.” The Palgrave Handbook of

Space, Place, and Readers  191 Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, edited by Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2017, pp. 827–854, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_32. Mackey, Margaret. Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Moore, Alan Tonnies, and Eric Schwitzgebel. “The Experience of Reading.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 62, 2018, pp. 57–68, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. concog.2018.03.011 Zoran, Gabriel. “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative.” Poetics Today, vol. 5, no. 2, 1984, pp. 309–335, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1771935.

20 Child and Teen Demographics in Movement through the Fantastic Place of London Madison McLeod

Power and place are intertwined. More recently, the implications of power structures and the places that represent that kind of power dynamic have been at the forefront of studies on the geopolitics of language, gender, and sexuality (Milani and Lazar; Diabah). Equally, a number of criticallyoriented studies use identity markers such as class, race, and gender to identify the ways in which individuals live within society and its structures (Johnson-Bailey; Acker; Wright; Fine; Morales et al.; Gillborn). The intersection of those identity markers (Crenshaw) allows for a greater understanding of identity that aims to be expansive rather than reductive. Furthermore, “[t]he simultaneous consideration of multiple identity markers is vital for understanding their compounded impact on an individual’s social experiences” (Patterson 2) or in the case of this chapter, their impact on protagonist movement and experiences. While racial groups can be categorized using studies like the CLPE’s (CLPE Centre for Literacy), class is significantly harder to categorize. The concept of class is defined by researchers in a variety of ways including household income, educational attainment, and eligibility for receipt of governmental financial assistance, but no single way fully captures the term. A protagonist’s class or, my preferred term, socio-economic status, is even harder to capture as no overarching data is available on fictional characters and their financial statements. Instead, markers of class must be delineated, and protagonists separated by those variables into a set of codable categories. Who, then, gets to be a protagonist in fantasy youth literature? A protagonist, “the chief character in a play or story” (Baldick), has long been the primary lens through which readers experience a novel. Although some novels have unreliable narrators for a protagonist—classic examples include Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951)—the importance and centrality of the protagonist remains. In fantasy fiction, the protagonist is also often the reader’s tie to “reality” as they too are experiencing the magic of the fantasy world for the first time. In this chapter, I argue DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-27

Child and Teen Demographics in Movement  193 that fantasy literature for children and teens is ripe for a re-examination of its selected protagonists, the role played by those protagonists and the privilege associated with being a main character. I demonstrate this by identifying the lack of diversity of both protagonists and movement in London-based fantasy youth literature and analyzing how those tropes contribute to creating and re-creating similar urban fantasies. While I have selected London as the geographic subject of my analysis because of its place in fantasy youth literature—no other city is used by so many urban fantasy authors, is familiar to so many, and has such a long and varied history to draw upon—my perspective and analysis on the construction of a protagonist can be applied to other literary genres and settings. Thus, it can contribute to a critical understanding of protagonists and the role they play, as main characters and vehicles for representation, in their own stories. Following protagonist trajectories and exploring the demographics of those protagonists, therefore, becomes essential to our understanding of how readers perceive these protagonists and, by extension, themselves. The mostly first-person narrative of youth literature immediately puts the reader into the protagonist-narrator’s shoes and invites the reader to accept the protagonist’s judgments and value system (Hourihan 38). This research seeks to reveal such narrators and protagonists for who they are not only demonstrating their age, sex, socio-economic status, and race but also placing them within the context of fantasy youth literature. Movement and the movements available to each protagonist become important, as they are revealed to be a product or manifestation of such demographic factors. Fantasy children’s and young adult literature set in London can be mapped using those codable categories to differentiate between types of trajectories. In this chapter, I use digital literary mapping to plot and investigate the paths of protagonists in fantasy literature for young people. And as I discuss below, the results are revealing. I wonder which protagonists are centralized and where they tend to congregate. And I wonder how London itself is defined and portrayed by the authors and characters of fantasy literature and those characters’ trajectories through the city. The texts I examine cover a wide range of “Londons”—from the dark, gritty London of The Dark Lady (Akala) and The Amulet of Samarkand (Stroud) to the mechanical, sooty, malodorous steampunk London of Cogheart (Bunzl) and The Dark Days Club (Goodman) to the more pretty, posh, and clever side of the city in Bewitching Season (Doyle). I read the books, coded them for geographic instances, and tweaked the coding to be “readable” by a digital mapping software called ArcGIS. ArcGIS uses the excel code I have created for each novel that includes latitude and longitude and the order in which a protagonist visits those places to create a trajectory line on a digital map of London. I placed strong limitations on this project, including the publication date of the novels (1991–2021), the insistence that they be

194  Madison McLeod fantasy for young people, and the requirement that most of the plot occur in London so that it be more easily mappable. The digital literary maps I create illuminate the relatively restricted, typically wealthy topography of London within which authors of fantasy literature for young people tend to let their protagonists roam. My maps show fantasy London overlayed on to the real. The maps illustrate starkly that areas of the city traditionally cast as the abode of the poor have remained constant in the last 100 years. They further show how most protagonists studiously avoid such areas as they pursue the fantastic. Not surprisingly, these protagonists are overwhelmingly white, and for the most part, affluent. It is only the rare character of a different ethnicity or socio-economic class who moves through the areas of the city eschewed or ignored altogether by most authors and their protagonists. Place and the mapping of it became an entry point into a discussion where race, ethnicity, and class intersect. While I follow sociolinguistic tradition when I use the terms “interplay” and “interaction” (Levon), I was also drawn to Pichler’s use of the term “intersect/ion(ality)” when I began to explore London maps of class, race, and ethnicity. I was also drawn to cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and Avtar Brah, as I embraced their approach to culture as a positioning and began to think of London as a “semiotic space with infinite class, caste, gender, ethnic and other inflections” (Brah 234). At the same time, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality prompted me to look at these demographic maps, protagonist trajectories, and coded socio-economic statuses concurrently. Bucholtz and miles-hercules maintain that this focus on systems of power and intersecting levels of oppression is lost in studies on language, gender, and race from an identity perspective (416). Thus, in this chapter, I approach the analysis of intersectional protagonist identities by examining demographic maps alongside the trajectory maps I have created of protagonists moving through London in fantasy youth literature. I argue that a focus on intersecting levels of oppression and discovery of systems of power can be lost in theoretical and literary research on space and place. This does not have to be the case, however, as Pia Pichler’s reflections on the intersections of gender, language, race, class, and place demonstrate. In this section, I approach the analysis of intersectional identities of protagonists by examining trajectories at an ideological level. In particular, I overlay the trajectories of protagonists onto maps that divide London by class, ethnicity, and race and examine all four simultaneously. One way that a connection between place, race, ethnicity, and class in London has been made is to examine the discourse and intersecting identities in the spontaneous talk of young Londoners (Pichler). My trajectory data reveals how these intersecting identities of race, ethnicity, and class can be represented on a map of London, and how that is represented

Child and Teen Demographics in Movement  195 and interpreted in fantasy youth literature set in London. I have found many examples where protagonists avoid certain locations in London, ignoring the areas around them that have multi-layered racial and economic meaning well beyond the denotation of place references (see Pichler and Williams). As I will show, an incorporation of race, ethnicity, and class into maps of London provides a useful departure for an exploration of intersectional protagonist identities and trajectories, including the avoidance of predominantly Black and working class areas of London. Among the 66 novels that comprise the corpus, a three-tiered socio-economic classification was created for coding efficiency and specificity. The three categories of class are: low, where the protagonist mentions hunger, poor living conditions, or other socio-economic difficulties; middle, where the protagonist enjoys comfortable living conditions but not excessive or extraneous wealth; and high, where the protagonist shows markers of extreme wealth like multiple properties, introductions to the queen, membership in a community of people with no need to work or within a society of those possessed with a noble title and referred to as Lord or Lady. However, I am mindful that the moveable nature of class as a variable prompts scholars such as Ferri and Connor to acknowledge class as a “floating signifier,” meaning it is identified in a variety of ways by a range of individuals that cannot be considered without other identity markers such as gender and race (Gillborn, “White Working Class” 476). For this chapter, then, I follow Ferri and Connor’s suggestion and combine race and class in a series of maps and use literary markers to define the socio-economic status and race of protagonists. This section explores the role that these poorer areas of London, shown in Figure 20.1, play in fantasy youth literature set in London. Figures 20.2–20.4 display those poverty areas in black circles, with protagonist trajectories plotted based on socio-economic status. Each level of socioeconomic status is then coded from lightest to darkest: low socio-economic status is in Figure 20.2, middle socio-economic status is in Figure 20.3, and high socio-economic status is in Figure 20.4. It is evident that fantasy youth literature presents a very specific worldview, unequally distributing the privilege of experiencing or possessing magic among the socio-economic classes (Thomas). As worldviews and culture change, so too would one expect its literature to evolve. Yet this appears not be so, in the case of the fantasy literature for children and teens that comprises the corpus. It is worth considering “what kinds of economic lives are presented as normal and therefore desirable” in fantasy youth literature (Jones 43, emphasis in original). When one does, it emerges that the majority of the protagonists represented in this corpus live very different lives from that of the average reader. An overwhelming number of protagonists are wealthy and reside in the West End. While

196  Madison McLeod

Figure 20.1 All trajectories alongside points of poverty map. Figure constructed by author in ArcGIS.

Figure 20.2 Low socio-economic status trajectories and points of poverty map. Figure constructed by author in ArcGIS.

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Figure 20.3 Middle socio-economic status trajectories and points of poverty map. Figure constructed by author in ArcGIS.

Figure 20.4 High socio-economic status trajectories and points of poverty map. Figure constructed by author in ArcGIS.

198  Madison McLeod some of these protagonists’ homes project class privilege, others come into their wealth after they discover the magical. Harry Potter goes from an orphan wearing his beastly cousin’s hand-me-down clothes to a boy of visible inherited wealth when he accesses the sizeable inheritance that his parents have left him in the magical world. Conversely, the combination of these figures shows that there are greater limits placed on the mobility of high socio-economic status characters than on their counterparts in other classes. Protagonists of a high socio-economic status move within a relatively insulated space, though within that space they tend to move more frequently than those of other socio-economic statuses. For example, the data underlying Figure 20.3 reveals that some of these protagonists venture to upward of 30 locations. The London of fantasy youth literature where the protagonist is of a high socio-economic status is not, as Franco Moretti posits, “more than the sum of its parts” and is not revealed to be “a larger [and] more complex” city than we know (Moretti 86). Rather, it turns out that movement of such protagonists through London is relatively confined and predictable. Race is a crucial factor which impacts and alters movement through a city. Race can dictate where one lives, works and the spaces which are accessible to you. While 40.2% of the population of London reports to belong to an ethnic minority category (Greater London Authority), the novels themselves do not represent those demographics. Here the CLPE’s Reflecting Realities project is particularly useful (CLPE Centre for Literacy). The Reflecting Realities project surveys ethnic representation within UK children’s literature. As mentioned in the table above, fantasy youth literature is not representative of the lived demographics of London. This is also where mapping the locations into which protagonists venture also has a racial component as seen by the maps of ethnic diversity above. Therefore, when comparing trajectories, it is interesting to see where the mostly white protagonists of fantasy youth literature do not venture. In these maps, the darker the color, the more of that ethnic minority lives in that area. When comparing Figures 20.1 to Figures 20.5–20.8, we see that protagonists do not traverse the areas of London which are predominantly Black, shown by the darkening of the gradient in Figure 20.5 and that those areas are in particular South and East of the Thames. To demonstrate the differences between the ethnicity maps and my trajectory map, it is best to compare and contrast the trajectory map in Figure 20.5 to the density maps of Figures 20.6–20.8. While the Victorians rarely visited those places, one would expect modern protagonists to be more than capable of doing so. Protagonists navigate through Asian areas of London (see Figure 20.6) like the West End

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Figure 20.5 Black, African, Caribbean, Black British Ethnicity Map of London. Figure source for Figures 20.5–20.8 is the London Demographics Map Portal at https://mangomap.com/demographics; data source is the Greater London Authority, https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/ londons-population. Available in the public domain.

by Richmond and near Hyde Park, but these protagonists and the other characters of these novels are rarely of Asian or Arab descent. While Asian and Arab minorities live in these affluent areas of London, areas which are often travelled into or through or in which protagonists live, their stories are not included within these spaces. Protagonists not only do not see Asians or Arabs within these spaces, but also do not even interact with any Asian or Arab characters within their lived spaces. These demographics are not only silenced, as noted previously, they are effectively erased from the London portrayed in fantasy youth literature. The combination of these maps clearly shows the disparity and failure to showcase and promote equity and diversity in fantasy literature for young people. The genre even lags behind picturebooks, in addition to various genres of chapter books, in the use of diverse protagonists. As demonstrated by the maps above the demographics of London, the demographics of fantasy youth literature, and the findings of the CLPE, are at odds with each other. There is a stark discrepancy between the

200  Madison McLeod

Figure 20.6 Asian and Asian British Ethnicity Map of London. London Demographics Map Portal; Greater London Authority. Available in the public domain.

Figure 20.7 Mixed Ethnicity Map of London. London Demographics Map Portal; Greater London Authority. Available in the public domain.

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Figure 20.8 Other Ethnicity Map of London. London Demographics Map Portal; Greater London Authority. Available in the public domain.

protagonists portrayed in fantasy youth literature and the actual demographics of the city of London. There is also a clear reticence by authors and protagonists of fantasy youth literature to venture into the areas of London which are demographically and culturally different from their own identities. Undertaking a mapping analysis of this corpus of 66 novels has allowed the dominant protagonist stereotype in contemporary fantasy youth literature set in London, particularly in the last 20 years, to emerge: an affluent, Caucasian, teenage girl toying with and discovering her own agency and power. It is worth noting that these observations are just an initial foray into the construction, interpretation, and utilization of these maps as an element of literary scholarship and criticism. The maps that I have drawn, using information gleaned from these novels, show the multi-layered indexicality of place references that can be found when novels are examined and depicted through the combined filter of demography and trajectory. Stated differently, maps can be an important lens through which to view protagonists’ experience of place, race, ethnicity, and class, and to consider the impact that those protagonists and their experiences have on young readers. The findings of this research make clear that fantasy youth literature continues to represent its main characters as privileged members

202  Madison McLeod of the traditionally dominant demographics associated with England: the white, affluent, middle, and upper classes. A study of the movements and maps of protagonists of fantasy youth literature has both revealed new representations of London and uncovered the ways in which movement and mapping are valuable sources of inquiry. This research is but an initial foray into digital literary scholarship, a field of vast possibility that is expanding even as it is being written. I hope that this research inspires others and shows not only the necessity for innovation, diversification, and reinterpretation within literary scholarship, but that the tools and methods for such innovation exist. Works Cited Acker, Joan. “Inequality Regimes.” Gender & Society, vol. 20, no. 4, Aug. 2006, pp. 441–464, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243206289499 Akala. The Dark Lady. Hodder Children’s Books, 2021. Baldick, Chris. “Protagonist.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th ed., Oxford UP, 2015. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. Routledge, 1996. Bucholtz, Mary, and deandre miles-hercules. “The Displacement of Race in Language and Gender Studies.” Gender and Language, vol. 15, no. 3, Oct. 2021, pp. 414–422, https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.20882 Bunzl, Peter. Cogheart. Penguin Books, 2016. CLPE Centre for Literacy. “Reflecting Realities Research.” 2022, https://clpe.org. uk/research/reflecting-realities. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Standford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299. Diabah, Grace. “A Battle for Supremacy? Masculinities in Students’ Profane Language Use.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, Oct. 2020, pp. 260– 280, https://doi.org/10.1177/1060826520905096 Doyle, Marissa. Bewitching Season. Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, 2008. Ferri, Beth A., and David J. Connor. “Talking (and Not Talking) about Race, Social Class and Dis/Ability: Working Margin to Margin.” Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 17, no. 4, Aug. 2014, pp. 471–493, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2014. 911168 Fine, Michelle. “Troubling Calls for Evidence: A Critical Race, Class and Gender Analysis of Whose Evidence Counts.” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, Feb. 2012, pp. 3–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353511435475 Gillborn, David. “Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 3, Mar. 2015, pp. 277–287, https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800414557827 ———. “The White Working Class, Racism and Respectability: Victims, Degenerates and Interest-Convergence.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, Feb. 2010, pp. 3–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071000903516361

Child and Teen Demographics in Movement  203 Goodman, Allison. The Dark Days Club. Speak, 2016. Greater London Authority. “London’s Population: Greater London Authority (GLA).” London Datastore, https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/londons-population. Accessed 3 June 2022. Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity and Its Future, edited by Stuart Hall et al., Polity, 1992, pp. 273–325. Hourihan, Margery. Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. Routledge, 1997. Johnson-Bailey, Juanita. “The Ties That Bind and the Shackles That Separate: Race, Gender, Class, and Color in a Research Process.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 12, no. 6, Nov. 1999, pp. 659–670, https://doi.org/10.1080/095183999235818 Jones, Stephanie. “Grass Houses: Representations and Reinventions of Social Class through Children’s Literature.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education [Online], vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 40–58. Levon, Erez. “Integrating Intersectionality in Language, Gender, and Sexuality ­Research.” Language and Linguistics Compass, vol. 9, no. 7, July 2015, pp. 295–308, https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12147 London Demographics Map Portal. “Welcome to the London Demographics Map Portal.” Data provided by the Greater London Authority, https://mangomap. com/demographics. Accessed May 2022. Milani, Tommaso M., and Michelle M. Lazar. “Seeing from the South: Discourse, Gender and Sexuality from Southern Perspectives.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 21, no. 3, June 2017, pp. 307–319, https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12241 Morales, Danielle X., et al. “School Bullying, Body Size, and Gender: An Intersectionality Approach to Understanding US Children’s Bullying Victimization.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 40, no. 8, Nov. 2019, pp. 1121– 1137, https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2019.1646115 Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel. Verso, 1997. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955. Patterson, Ashley N. “Listening for Silences: Discursive Constructions of Class within Reflections of Black Male Study Abroad Travelers from the USA.” Linguistics and Education, vol. 68, Apr. 2022, p. 100954, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. linged.2021.100954 Pichler, Pia. “Intersections of Class, Race and Place: Language and Gender Perspectives from the UK.” Gender and Language, vol. 15, no. 4, 2021, pp. 569–581, https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.21524 Pichler, Pia, and Nathanael Williams. “Hipsters in the Hood: Authenticating Indexicalities in Young Men’s Hip-Hop Talk.” Language in Society, vol. 45, no. 4, Sept. 2016, pp. 557–581, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000427 Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Little, Brown and Company, 1991. Stroud, Jonathan. The Amulet of Samarkand. Corgi Childrens, 2011. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York UP, 2019. Wright, Julia. Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race and Nation. Ashgate, 2011.

21 Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation Smiljana Narančić Kovač

Translations of children’s literature usually offer readers in the target ­culture information about the source culture of the original text by conveying its settings. Sometimes the original storyworld is anchored in a specific national culture by means of toponyms or other indicators of a real geographic and historical context. Such indicators include names of countries, cities and villages, as well as those of the people or the language spoken by characters. The readers of translated texts are exposed to diverse components of another culture in relation to their own. However, adapting the settings to the target culture is equally common, especially in children’s literature. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the changes of the original places in the storyworlds of different translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) into Croatian and of Croatian dramatizations based on this book. Storyworlds are anchored in a specific national culture by means of toponyms, indicators of a real geographic and historical context, languages, personal names and other references to a specific context. In translation, such items undergo a cultural transposition of different degrees, “along a scale between the extremes of exoticism and cultural transplantation” (Hervey and Higgins 33). They may be taken over from the original “with minimal adaptation, thereby constantly signaling the exotic source culture and its cultural strangeness” (34), replaced by expressions “with similar cultural connotations” (33), that is, “rewritten in a target culture setting” (34). Other strategies include generalization and omission, when naming a place or a country is avoided. The basic distinction is that of the methods of domestication or foreignization (Venuti 20), but this distinction is not subtle enough. It has been shown, for instance, “that the same proper noun in the same text does not always have the same import, and this distinction will be reflected in the translations” (Kibbee 316). As Javier Franco Aixelá puts it, a culture-specific item rendered in a source text depends “not just on itself, but also on its function in the text, as it is perceived in the receiving culture, i.e., insofar DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-28

Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation  205 as it poses a problem of ideological or cultural opacity, or ­acceptability, for the average reader … in the target culture” (58). Accordingly, it has been shown that the toponym “Vienna,” transferred in translations of the same novel into different languages and at different historical times, has different meanings depending on the target culture, i.e., that the reader’s interpretation of the settings (place and time) largely depends on the cultural and geopolitical context of the target culture (Narančić Kovač, “Where Hlapić Lived” 209). When Carroll supported the first translations of Alice into other languages, he was in favor of setting his story in target cultures (see Weaver 33ff). Our goal is to see whether translators and adaptors turned Alice’s into a Croatian world, or if she remained a girl from England. The secondary world in Alice in Wonderland is a fantasy world, strongly related to the primary world, set in England, particularly in Oxford and its surroundings. This is established by means of references to England and the English language, and indirect references to the actual cultural and political contexts and personal experiences, including private jokes (Gardner). In the analysis of Alice translations and theatrical adaptations, the renderings of explicit and implicit indicators of space and place are considered in comparison with the original text. The results are interpreted with respect to implications for understanding the storyworlds in target texts. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in nine different Croatian translations published over a period of 72 years (1944–2016), but only five represent full-text original translations selected for our analysis. Over 20 performances of Croatian adaptations of Alice have been recorded since 1976, including an ice-skating show, dance and multimodal performances, puppet theater and live performances. The manuscripts of six dramatizations are available for analysis. The information about our corpus is given in Table 21.1. Translations The explicit references to the source culture in the source text are divided into three categories: naming the language used by characters, toponyms and specific places and historical and cultural indicators of the country of origin (given below with immediate linguistic contexts and with page references to the 1865 edition of Alice): 1 The language the characters speak 1.1 “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (… for the moment she quite forgot to speak good English). (15) 1.2 “Perhaps it doesn’t understand English,” thought Alice. (25)

Text

Title

Translated/Adapted by First Appearance/Performance Year

Translations

Alica u Zemlji Čudesa Alisini doživljaji u Začaranoj zemlji Aličine pustolovine u Zemlji čudesa Alisa u Zemlji čudesa Alica u Zemlji čudesa Alice u zemlji čudesa

Dramatizations

Alice u Zemlji Čudesa Alisa u Zemlji Čudesa Alice in Wonderland Alisa: Prema motivima „Alise u Zemlji Čudesa“ Lewisa Carrolla [Based on the motifs of L. Carroll’s Alice in W] Alisa (prema onoj u Zemlji čudesa L. Carrolla [based on the one by L. Carroll]) Alisa u Zemlji Čudesa Prema prijevodu Antuna Šoljana [Based on the translation by Antun Šoljan]

City: Publisher / Theater

First Performance

Mira Jurkić (Mirko Jurkić, verses) Anton Glavina (Velimir Milošević, verses) Antun Šoljan

1944

Zagreb: Matica hrvatska

1975

Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša

1985

Zagreb:

Predrag Raos Luko Paljetak Borivoj Radaković

2001 2002 2016

Zagreb: Mozaik knjiga Zagreb: Kašmir promet Zagreb: Edicije Božičević

Božo Kukolja Želimir Prijić Davor Žagar Ana Tonković Dolenčić

1976 1979 1997 2000

Zagreb Puppet Theatre Rijeka Puppet Theatre Rijeka Puppet Theatre Zagreb: &TD Theatre – performance arts theatre

Saša Anočić

2004

Ivor Martinić

2017

Zagreb: City Theatre 30 Oct. 2004 Trešnja – performance arts theatre 16 Nov. 2017 Zagreb Youth Theatre – performance arts theatre

15 April 1976 None 7 March 1997 16 Nov. 2000

206  Smiljana Narančić Kovač

Table 21.1  Croatian Translations and Adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation  207 1.3 “Speak English!” said the Eaglet. (32) 1.4 The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. (100) 2 Toponyms and specific places 2.1  London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome is—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! (20) 2.2 … wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea. (20) 2.3 The further off from England the nearer is to France. (152) 3 History and culture 3.1 “I daresay it’s a French mouse, came over with William the Conqueror.” (25) William the Conqueror … Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia 3.2  and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, … to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William and offer him the crown. William’s conduct at first was moderate. But the insolence of his Normans … (30–32) 3.3 … the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him. (34) Table 21.2 shows that the translators approach these references in two ways: the expressions are either taken over (transferred from the original) or replaced by adapted expressions (having a similar cultural meaning in the target culture). The translators in the twentieth century generally show more inclination toward domesticating method, and those after the turn of the century choose to remain close to the source text. All the translators in our corpus maintained a high level of professionalism in their work (one omission of 1.1. by Jurkić is an exception). All the translators rendered the information in category 3 faithfully or with minimal changes. This means that they considered the references to historical and cultural facts as knowledge shared among Western civilization cultures, which both source and target culture belong to, a kind of common heritage, so that direct transfer does not make the notion of place foreign, but extended; especially Shakespeare (3.3.), known in Croatia as an English author, but primarily belonging to world literature. In contrast, references to the eleventh century (3.1. and 3.2.) would not be familiar to Croatian child readers, so that translators provide notes to explain them, all except Šoljan and Radaković, who offer the content which is simply unfamiliar, just another item to wonder about. A similar interpretation applies to the rendering of item 2.1., simply transferred in all the analyzed translations. There is no need for adaptation

208  Smiljana Narančić Kovač because this is basic geographical knowledge, and child readers in both England and Croatia should understand the joke. The earlier translations include adaptations of items 2.2. and 2.3., which is consistent with their general tendency toward blurring the place of Alice’s origin, except for Glavina’s text, where Alice’s trip was to the English coast, and the countries connected with the English Channel are named in the Mock Turtle’s Lobster Quadrille song. Šunjić and Šoljan vaguely send their Alices “to the seaside,” which becomes a reference to Croatian context—this is a popular way of spending summer holidays, and the Adriatic Coast is automatically implied. Raos and Paljetak preserve the original wording, while Radaković makes an exception and generalizes 2.3. by removing specific toponyms: “The further off from one, the nearer you are to other shores”.1 Šoljan offers a similar solution, “The further you are from one [shore], the sooner you’ll sit on the other,” and Jurkić takes generalization to a new level, “The further we fall, all is closer there.” The authors of earlier translations consistently adapt the first group of indicators, with one exception (1.2., where Glavina maintains that the mouse may “not understand English”). In Jurkić the Mouse simply “does not understand,” and in Šoljan, he might “not understand our language.” Yet, fragment 1.1. has been adapted by all translators (save the abovementioned omission), which results in the neutralization of the source culture. Glavina turns “English” into “mother tongue,” Šoljan informs us that Alica was “so surprised that she also forgot to speak for a moment,” Raos relates that she forgot “all about grammar,” while Paljetak and Radaković explain she forgot “how to speak correctly.” The fragment 1.3. is faithfully transferred by Raos only, and for the next fragment (1.4.) Radaković joins him. Other solutions offered for 1.3. are: “Speak reasonably!” (Jurkić), “Speak clearer!” (Glavina), “Speak our language!” (Šoljan, Paljetak, Radaković). The sentence about the Hatter’s remark (1.4.) is adapted: “it was well said, but it seemed not to make any sense” (Jurkić), “the remark seemed not to make any sense, but it was still deliberate” (Glavina), “It seemed to her that the Hatter’s words did not make any sense, yet there was no doubt about it that she speaks the language correctly” (Šoljan), and “That … did not make any sense, and yet, it was still entirely correct grammatically” (Paljetak). The analysis shows that Croatian translators generally avoided mentioning the English language directly, because each of them neutralized the meaning of the word “English” by avoiding it at least in one of the analyzed fragments, but not one of them replaced it with Croatian or any other specific language. Therefore, it is doubtful that they aimed at proper domestication, especially as they kept most of the original references to the source culture and history. Despite Raos’s joke about an Englishman who was served coffee on the Adriatic coast (116), there is no intention to

Year

Translator

1 The Language Transfer

1944

Jurkić

1975

Glavina

1985

Šoljan

2001

Raos

2002

Paljetak

2016

Radaković

1.2.

1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.2. 1.2. 1.4.

Adapted 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.1. 1.3. 1.4. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.1. 1.1. 1.3. 1.4. 1.1. 1.3.

2 Toponyms or Places

3 History and Culture

Omitted

Transfer

Adapted

Transfer

1.1.

2.1.

2.2. 2.3.

3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3.

2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.1.

2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.1. 2.2.

2.2. 2.3.

2.3.

3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3.

Adapted

Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation  209

Table 21.2  Explicit Indicators of Place in Croatian Translations of Alice in Wonderland

210  Smiljana Narančić Kovač turn the original place where Alice lives to a place in target culture, quite the opposite, Alice remains an English girl in Croatian translations of the novel, and she speaks her own language, even though we are not always aware it is English. The indirect references to the source culture are numerous, so that only a selection of examples has been used here to illustrate the main tendencies. Overall, some concepts are transferred from the original in all translations, such as “croquet,” which is consistently translated by the Croatian equivalent “kroket.” Currency (pound) is taken over from the original, except in Šoljan, where the farmer’s dog Alice mentions as “worth a hundred pounds” (27) becomes “vrijedi zlata” (“is worth its weight in gold”). Miles and feet are mostly transferred from the original, but Šoljan and Radaković replace them with kilometers and meters, and Raos turns inches into centimeters. While the taste of the drink-me beverage (11) is more-orless transferred from the original with minimal cultural adaptation, Šoljan, for instance, turns “cherry-tart” into “cherry strudel,” and “comfits” into “candied fruit.” Jurkić substitutes honey biscuits for several sweetmeats, and Raos replaces “barley sugar” with “caramel,” “treacle” with “jam,” and “bread crumbs” with “flour,” as that is how people fry fish in Croatia. Proper names are also indirect indicators of a certain culture, and the analysis of names in Croatian translations of Alice (Narančić Kovač, “Character Names”) revealed a wide range of divergent translation strategies. Yet, the character names in the primary storyworld have been transferred from the original either literally or with minimum adaptation. In general, indirect references to the source support the finding that the changes introduced in individual translations do not turn the original settings into a Croatian place, but only neutralize some of the indicators. Dramatizations In Croatian adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, there are no explicit indicators of place except for a mention of William the Conqueror in Prijić. On the whole, the dramatizations are more or less creative and free in their interpretation of the story. The texts can be divided according to the levels of deviation from the original. Kukolja, Prijić and Žagar follow the original plot, leaving out some scenes and combining others. Martinić and Anočić represent a larger deviation from the original, and Tonković Dolenčić keeps only a few connections to the original. All of them keep these characters: Alice, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts and the Mock Turtle, their names adapted to the target culture (trans­ ukolja, lated). The March Hare and the Dormouse are missing only in K the Cheshire Cat in Martinić, and the Cook in Tonković Dolenčić.

Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation  211 Of the three adaptations in the first group, Prijić and Žagar are more faithful to the original than Kukolja. There is no particular emphasis on any specific place. Kukolja focuses on the stealth of the cakes in an original way: the Queen orders cakes from Frog the Cook, who makes some pepper biscuits. She makes them “from flour, pepper and sometimes from ground chilli peppers.” The Cat (there is no mention of Cheshire at all) sneezes a lot and tries to conceal that this is caused by the pepper cakes. The Cat is accused of stealing the cakes at the trial. This innovation carries an indirect implication to the target culture: “paprenjaci,” pepper biscuits, are traditionally made on the Croatian island of Hvar. Chili pepper powder is not used, but it carries a connotation of Slavonia, a Croatian region where it is used in various dishes and sausages. Kukolja adds some Croatian proverbs (“Silence is golden”), a playground formula for divination (“Čiri-ba, čiri-bu”, a Croatian equivalent of “Abracadabra”), and some military language when soldiers enter: “Left-right! … One-two … ­One-two! … Company halt, stop! … Relax! … Salute to the right!”. These are slight, but recognizable indicators of the target culture. Besides, “a piece of the seacoast” is mentioned, where three “huge birds” are quarrelling (a Parrot, a Pelican, and a Flamingo). Croatia is a Mediterranean country, so the seashore, coast or beach are immediately connotative of the Adriatic, regardless of the exotic birds. Anočić and Martinić approach the original with more freedom, and their texts are almost grotesque. Martinić introduces three additional Alice characters: the Brave Alice, the Wise Alice and the Emotional Alice. The story is situated in the fantasy world only. When Alice meets the White Rabbit, she cannot remember her own name. It is “on the tip of my tongue,” so it runs away. The Queen wants to give her a name (in the manner of Rumpelstiltskin), and Alice refuses to accept her suggestions, either common Croatian names: Mirna, Spomenka, Elizabeta (a reference to two great British queens, as well), Tihana, Anđela and Anđelika, or invented nonsensical names, similar to some that really exist: Anđislava (Miroslava), Anđimira (Vladimira), Anđabel (Izabela), Anđinindža (based on Ninja Turtles), Anđamarija (Anamarija), Anđastazija (Anastazija) and Anđalena (Magdalena). The naming of Alice becomes a production of indirect indicators of the target culture. At the trial, still nameless Alice is accused by the Duchess for not liking the soup of words. When the Queen threatens to cut off her head, Alice cuts off the Queen’s head in a completely unexpected reversal of circumstances. The only reference to place is vague, but still indicative of sea or water, when the White Rabbit calls, “Board on! Board on! Last call! The ship sets off in a minute!” Martinić adds one character to fit, the Sea-Gull. Anočić adds new characters, mild political satire, intertexts referring to target culture, language games and bizarre events. A parody of the poem

212  Smiljana Narančić Kovač “How Antun-tun Lives” by Grgur Vitez, a childhood favorite, is blended with a nursery rhyme. His Mad Tea Party has coffee, the prime socializing beverage in Croatia, and the Queen organizes competition in “Pig Throw” (a reference to the old rural game of Stone Throw typical of some parts of Croatia). At the coffee table, the Dormouse tells a story about three sisters, Đurđa, Manda, and “their sister from Poland,” which consists of Manda peeling 7 kilos of potatoes. The language abounds in colloquialisms, vulgarisms and rude expressions, alongside Croatian conversational idioms and proverbial expressions. The saying “Prošla baba s kolačima” (“The old woman with cakes has passed”) (The ship has sailed, Missed shot) is where the character of Baba s kolačima comes from, just as the March Hare comes from an English phrase. The names of two lobsters are Adria and Jadranko, being direct references to the Adriatic Sea. Thus, there are implicit, but rather clear references to Croatian space, and Alice belongs to it more than in any of the previously analyzed texts. And the bizarre event? The Queen orders the Executioner to behead himself: “The executioner took the axe and tried to cut off his head more than twice, but it hurt him, and he continued to sob even harder.” Finally, the dramatization by Tonković Dolenčić is only inspired by Alice in Wonderland, although some details are linked with the novel. Alice finds herself on a sandy beach, where “nothing happens.” A connection with “bathing machines in the sea” (see item 2.2. above) appears in the stage instructions: “The machine is a choreographed scene in which the beach is transformed into a wonderland. Characters from the beach become characters from Wonderland and create a living picture with their bodies. Alice goes after the Rabbit. He sees the ‘machine’ and climbs on it.” This text clearly defines space but remains undetermined regarding place. On the beach, Alice experiences the heat, the scorching sun, the swishing sea and the siren of an ocean liner. The event is the forest fire, “It should be extinguished. Pine forest. Hectares. Strangers used to come there and hang hammocks”, and further, “The cones exploded. Then it caught the olives.” This is reminiscent of the Croatian coast and frequent forest fires. The story becomes more abstract when different spaces are introduced. When Alice becomes small, the smallest in the world, she finds herself in the world of microbes, molecules, quarks and fractals, she becomes invisible, almost non-existent: “Look at Alice particle, she does not even have a trajectory! Take her to the Infinity!” She talks with the Cat about prions, Mad Cow Disease, isolation and disinfection. When she becomes huge, the biggest in the world, she is in space, ready to “play billiard with planets and pocket them into black holes.” She says, “I will float in weightlessness until I freeze from loneliness.” She talks with the White Rabbit about a place made of ice he dreams of: the Antarctic. Alice shares coffee with the Mock Turtle and they read clips from newspapers about the war and

Where Does Alice Come from? Places in Translation and Adaptation  213 devastation on the eastern front, about a catastrophic earthquake, forest fires and draughts. Thirsty people form a water queue. Alice meets a group of homeless people. In the end, Alice is at the beach again, thinking, “In the blue sky, there is only one sun. One Beach. One life.” While the spaces in this text are symbolic, and thus universal, extending to the whole world and representing threats to human existence, lack of real communication and compassion, they are also indirectly indicative of Croatian places. The analyzed dramatizations set the story in places which are close to the target culture, based on indirect indicators of place. Most are rooted in the target language and lore, making Alice at least a little bit a Croatian girl and modifying the original, turning it into a new whole. It has been shown that the source culture may become less prominent in the storyworld of the target text when the indicators of place are neutralized. This may put the readers in the source and target cultures in a similar position and allow for partial identification of the storyworld spaces with own cultural space. It has also been found that the potential of ­Alice’s ­Adventures in Wonderland as a world classic keeps inspiring new ­interpretations which new readers may adopt in their own ways. Note 1 The back-translations from analyzed texts are by the author of this chapter.

Works Cited Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan, 1865. Franco Aixelá, Javier. “Culture-Specific Items in Translation.” Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Román Álvarez and María del Carmen-África Vidal, Multilingual Matters, 1996, pp. 52–78. Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Alice. 1960. Wings Books, 1995. Hervey, Sándor, and Ian Higgins. Thinking French Translation. Routledge, 2002. Kibbee, Douglas A. “When Children’s Literature Transcends its Genre: Translating Alice in Wonderland.” Meta, vol. 48, no. 1–2, 2003, pp. 307–321. Narančić Kovač, Smiljana. “Character Names in Croatian Translations of Alice in Wonderland.” Children and Languages Today, edited by Željka Flegar and Ivana Moritz, Vernon Press, 2019, pp. 157–180. Narančić Kovač, Smiljana. “Gdje je živio Hlapić: transformacije mjesta radnje s gledišta ciljnih kultura (Where Hlapić Lived: A Transformation of the Settings from Viewpoints of Target Cultures).” Hlapić u bijelom svijetu (Hlapić in the Wide World), edited by Smiljana Narančić Kovač, University of Zagreb, 2019, pp. 193–212. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. Routledge, 1995. Weaver, Warren. Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland. 1964. Martino Publishing, 2006.

22 Canon Out of Place Centering Lived Realities in Neurodivergent Middle Grade Literature Jennifer Slagus The notion of knowing one’s place, or feeling when things are out of place, indicates more than just spatial referents; it implies a metaphoric “sense of the proper” (Cresswell, In Place 3). This properness determines and defines whether “something or someone belongs in one place and not in another” (Cresswell, In Place 3). Children’s literature that is deemed as proper—as in place—is afforded influential staying power and read as authentic, over time it becomes the “standard and standardizing” canon (Kidd 44). Literary canon at large is place-creating and place-reiterating. Because narratives locate identities, which are inherently entwined with place (Charlton et al. 65–66), it matters which narratives are sticky and privileged as canon. A problem arises when the prescriptive canon itself is out of place, when it claims to represent authentic stories about certain ways of being, but in actuality, just furthers the deliberate invisibility of marginalized people. This invisibility of embodied perspectives is the case for much of the canonical middle grade literature featuring neurodivergent characters. Neurodivergent youth, like all children, strive to “understand how to belong and to what extent they can belong” (Habib and Ward 3) in their inhabited spaces/places. That is why belonging and place-identity are important considerations for middle grade readers (typically 8- to 12-years old), as fictional representation can work to inform their future self-imaginings and potentiality (Prince 699). Young readers create and relate to the possible worlds found in their literature, yet those worlds are limited by and “constructed out of worlds created by others” (Charlton et al. 68). The literary worlds in neurodivergent middle grade books are often constructed by neurotypical authors who do not share the same lived reality. While neurotypical authors, like all authors, of course, retain the right to create realistic fictional characters, the problem with the neurodivergent characters they create is that they are not realistic; they tend to be stereotypical, misrepresentative, and lacking agency. Thus, while reading engages one’s place-identity (Charlton et al. 68), literature can foster an inability to develop agency and find belonging unless the literary place is thoughtfully DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-29

Canon Out of Place  215 constructed by well-informed authors. Yet because there is limited space— on publishers’ forthcoming rosters, on library shelves, on literary gatekeepers’ “to be read” piles—neurodivergent authors (and readers) are rarely allowed to belong in places where their stories are being told. The Illusion of Inclusion Recent diversity and inclusivity movements within children’s publishing, such as We Need Diverse Books (2014) and #OwnVoices (2015), have provided at least a semblance of access to historically silenced voices but many still remain unheard. Since 2018, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center has reviewed over 10,000 titles (above picturebook level) to document diversity representation. Of the analyzed books, only 226 (2.17%) feature a cognitively/neurologically disabled main or significant side character (“CCBC”). When assuming what subsection of those titles feature neurodivergent representation at the middle grade level, it is clear that readers’ options are slim. And though many literary gatekeepers have engaged honestly with inclusivity movements, others have co-opted the energy as a marketing tactic (WNDB), while still excluding neurodivergent lived experiences from the page. There are many excellent neurodivergent writers willing and able to tell their own embodied stories; however, neurotypical authors of neurodivergent narratives still dominate what is published and promoted. In a recent “best” neurodivergent book list featuring 34 authors, only ten authors (29.4%) identify as neurodivergent, and 24 (70.6%) are either neurotypical or have not publicly disclosed (Umesi). Though identity disclosure is intimately challenging to navigate, it offers a solidarity between the neurodivergent reader, character, and author. Embodied authors who take on the possible risks of self-identification allow their work to function as both literary and real-world reflections, communicating a valued and valuable place for neurodivergent experiences. Focalizing a Canon Out of Place One’s sense of belonging is “manifest through the layering of everyday practices over time—which, in turn, also create place” (Farrugia and Wood 213). It is through this repetitive layering that young people develop their place-identity, which works to define who one is to themself and who they are to others (Proshansky and Fabian 22, 24). In this way, young peoples’ feelings are encoded toward whether they belong—within a story’s setting, within their library, and within the world. For neurodivergent readers, the ways neurodivergent characters are treated layer and intertwine into their internalization of how, and where, they too fit into the narrative.

216  Jennifer Slagus As Mieke Bal explains in Narratology, narrative focalizers “are the agents of perception and interpretation” (8). Both characters’ and readers’ abilities to find their place (in life and in fiction) hinges on what Cresswell calls “a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world” (Place 18). Thus, it matters which character is privileged to do the seeing and knowing as the focalizer dictates “the relation between who perceives and what is perceived” which introduces bias and limitation for the remaining characters (Bal 7, 135). It is through the focalized protagonist that the author creates literary place in terms of both the setting and how characters are allowed to move within it (Tally 97). The absence of canonical neurodivergent protagonists—especially those written by embodied authors—informs neurodivergent readers that their way of being is not one with which to positively identify as they are not afforded the agency to see, know, and understand their own place in the world. Because there are so few middle grade titles featuring neurodivergent characters, the canon is small; Rules (2006), by a neurotypical author Cynthia Lord, is the one that dominates. Since its publication—over 15 years ago—it has become a canon-maker and canon-reproducer in one. Rules is a Newbery Honor book (2007), New York Times bestseller, considered “Scholastic Gold,” and a Twitter search for the title reveals it is still read in libraries, classrooms, and book clubs abound. Despite its popularity among general readers, neurodivergent readers express their discontent for Rules and its harmful, dehumanizing portrayals of autism (Entz). While Rules is renowned as one of the “best” books about a neurodivergent character, the neurotypical sibling, Catherine, is privileged as the protagonist focalizer. David, the stereotypically autistic brother, plays but a supporting role as a foil and conflict tool. Catherine creates rules for David, suggesting ways to suppress his neurodivergent behavior to make her difficulties go away. In the two times the story directly references autism, both are layered with painful language that limits who David is allowed to be and to what (little) extent he can belong as himself. Within the first ten pages Catherine wishes “someone would invent a pill so David’d wake up one morning without autism, like someone waking from a long coma … he’d be a regular brother … a brother who’d give back as much as he took” (Lord 8). She ends with what, to her, is a devastating realization: “there’s no pill” (Lord 8). As readers watch through the focalizer’s eyes “and will, in principle, be inclined to accept the vision presented by that character” (Bal 135), Catherine’s view of David is the one that reads as reliable. It reads as “proper” and in place (Cresswell, In Place 3). Later in the novel, Catherine layers more distaste for her brother’s neurodivergent way of being. Catherine details how she wishes to reach into David’s head so she can find “the broken places in his brain, turning knobs or flipping switches. All his autism wiped clean” (Lord 140). Through the language of eugenic cleansing, Catherine reveals that she believes David,

Canon Out of Place  217 as-is, is not worth being around nor being alive. As there exists no David without autism, removing his neurodivergence would kill his personhood. What Lord is doing here is reinscribing a microaggression against disabled people. By perceiving David as helpless and needy, with little concluding redemption to right his mistreatment, Lord feeds the pipeline that supports dehumanizing and eugenic thought, “clearly sending the message that it is better to be dead than” disabled (Keller and Galgay 253). This kind of micro-eugenics sentiment could inform macro-eugenics against neurodivergent people, especially when the work has reached the massive, canonical status that Rules has. Rules reflects a real-world connection as, in the book’s back matter Q&A, Lord notes she is the parent to an autistic son and an allistic daughter. She explains that the story’s focalizer, Catherine, is “more like me than my daughter” (203), revealing a connection between her beliefs and Catherine’s actions. The authorial choice reflects the writers’ beliefs and identity, and readers are active in decoding those choices within the text (Charlton et al. 68–69). Neurodivergent readers would not need to do extraneous outside research to uncover that the author á la protagonist of this harmful, popularized novel feels their erasure and bullying is in place. Thus, it is worth questioning why Lord did not choose to write a story that centers the experiences of her disabled child. And what that marginalization means for autistic readers, like Lord’s own son, who are gathering behavior expectations and dictated social structures of place and belonging (Cresswell, In Place 3) through this repressive representation. It likely means that young readers receive a limited “future imagining of self (‘Who will I be?’)” which is “inextricably bound up with place (‘Where will I be?’)” (Prince 699). Rules leaves readers to wonder whether they, like the characters in their books, will only ever be in the same future place where their family and classmates ostracize and bully them. When literary places look a lot like young readers’ hometowns, and when the characterization seems a lot like them, but no one intercepts the character’s mistreatment, the message is clear that it is accepted behavior. It communicates that they too deserve to be in that unhappy place. And that, maybe, they would be better off if they stopped reading, or even stopped existing. Neurodivergent-Embodied Counternarratives As canonical novels, like Lord’s, ostensibly promoted for their inclusion of neurodivergent characters, typically position those characters on the margins, the neurodivergent reader who instinctively identifies with those characters positions themself there too. What they see is a future possibility where they must assimilate to find belonging because their inherent way of being is unwanted and unwelcome (Prince 699). That is why a story’s

218  Jennifer Slagus focalizer is critical. Neurodivergent readers’ sense of belonging, the very possibility to find their place, is affected by who is allowed to tell the story (in terms of both the author and the main character). It is necessary to instead encourage counternarrative options—that are both by and about neurodivergent people—which “talk back” to the dominant narrative and do not leave neurodivergent existence in disrepair. Counternarratives, as Nelson explains, are a form of “narrative repair” (qtd. in Charlton et al. 67). They work to (re)center the voices of those with lived realities to support what they are writing. As narratives locate identity and give them presence and place, which in turn affects the construction of social identities (Charlton et al. 66), middle grade books affect more than just those reading them; they layer and reiterate social perspectives and assumptions about neurodivergent people. Embodied counternarratives can work to repair the foundation of misrepresentation in canonical stories, and instead tell neurodivergent young people that their way of being is not villainous, but rather contributes value and beauty into the world. (Re)placing the Canon The middle grade novel Forget Me Not (2017) offers neurodivergent readers a sense of belonging in spaces where their story is being told. In this dual-POV novel, the neurodivergent perspective of Calliope, a tween with Tourette syndrome (TS), is in focus as she navigates a world that believes it is better if she hides. Author Ellie Terry, who also experiences TS, based Calliope’s experiences on her own lived experience (328). Calliope’s perspective, told in verse, works to upset negative perceptions of TS. Though she is relentlessly mocked and bullied by her classmates for her tics and co-occurring trichotillomania and compulsions, Terry positions Calliope as a focalized character with agency (Bal 28). In Greek mythology, Calliope is the Muse of eloquence and epic poetry because of her beautiful voice. In Forget Me Not, Calliope is bullied at school because of her vocal tics and echolalia as she repeats her teacher’s words to feel and test the syllables (Terry 120–122). Calliope counters the idea that neurodivergence should be seen negatively (like it is in Rules), as something to hide, and she explains: I’ve always thought it sounded silly— what Dr. Flagner said. Because wouldn’t talking about something make it better understood? … Dr. Flagner was wrong.

Canon Out of Place  219 Mom was wrong. Their advice was wrong. Trying to hide my Tourette’s only backfired, big time. (Terry 226) In Terry’s back matter author’s note, she explains that her own diagnosing neurologist told her that she should hide her TS so people do not treat her differently, but like Calliope, she realized discussing her experience would only help others understand (328). It is through this sharing of her embodied experience that Terry is creating a meaningful place and belonging for other neurodivergent people. She strengthens the solidarity between reader, character, and author. Despite neurotypical onlookers telling Calliope (and Terry) to hide her TS, just as David is told to hide his autism to fit in, Calliope’s agency is apparent. She works toward telling her mom that she does not want her hair cut short, even though her tics and trichotillomania cause her to pull it out, and says, “One of these days / I’ll speak up” (Terry 110). This is another point of departure from Lord’s attempt at David’s story; Calliope does speak up (Terry 305), and other characters speak up for her too. When Jinsong—who narrates Forget Me Not’s second perspective in prose—first realizes his new neighbor is his new classmate, he pretends they had not already met while his friends call her “Freak Girl” (Terry 31). As the secondary focalizer, neurotypical Jinsong’s feelings and character development run parallel to Calliope’s and at no point in the narrative are either characters speaking over or limiting the other’s possibility. In fact, Jinsong’s early embarrassment toward Calliope’s TS transitions into understanding and admiration. When he later hears his younger brother asking about Calliope’s winking tic, he intercepts and supports her. Jinsong tells his brother, “If people are bothered by her tics … they’re the ones who have a problem, not Calli” (Terry 218). This interception reveals a love and respect that David is not fortunate enough to receive in Rules. Much of Calliope’s bullying happens at school, though her mom and doctor encourage her TS suppression elsewhere too (Terry 19, 26, 30). Children spend much of their lives in schools and at home, making both key to the development of place- and self-identity (Proshansky and Fabian 33). When neurodivergent young people are bullied at school, like Calliope, or bullied at home, like David, or bullied in their reading, the layering and successive repetition can fuel place-aversion in these uncomfortable spaces (Farrugia and Wood 213; Proshansky and Fabian 24; Tally 22) leaving no loving place to which they can escape. Forget Me Not offers a literary escape point where young readers are respected and valued; it fosters the necessary narrative repair that rebuilds negative internalized and social perceptions of neurodivergence. The impact of this mental and emotional rebuilding is seen in

220  Jennifer Slagus readers’ response to Terry’s narrative. While autistic readers of Rules express that David’s story “hurt to read” (Entz), young readers with TS share their happiness over Calliope’s, stating “no one really cares about people like me that are weird. They don’t understand that I can’t help it but now I know there are some people that do care” (Terry Twitter). This care and understanding seems simple—as if it is just a single reader sharing their feedback—but its impact is far greater. Terry could have left Calliope’s story as one where she simply accepts being bullied, but because she shares similar lived experiences with Calliope, she supports readers like her by offering the space for Calliope’s agency to change the narrative. When Calliope’s family moves again at the end of the novel (a common occurrence), she discloses her neurodivergent identity to her new classmates for the first time and is met with warmth (Terry 324). Unlike in David’s story, Calliope—representing both the character and spirit of the neurodivergent reader—is supported in making those changes. It demonstrates a love and trust between Calliope and surrounding characters, as well as between Calliope and the author. Embodied narratives, like Terry’s, work to counter a canon out of place and speak to the firsthand experiences of being neurodivergent. And they are far less likely to discuss neurodivergence in the stigmatizing ways that neurotypical-authored texts seem to do. These embodied narratives story a neurodivergent way of “seeing, knowing, and understanding the world” (Cresswell, Place 18) as something worth belonging to. They intertwine the importance of carving out meaningful space on young readers’ bookshelves with the opportunity to find and belong within one’s place through intentional, authentic representation. Embodied counternarratives welcome neurodivergent readers as-is and communicate that they deserve to be alive, and their stories ought to be shared. Neurodivergent-centering literature has the power to improve the lives of middle grade readers. Though it may seem like a big task—to fundamentally change the way neurodivergence is viewed within children’s publishing—this restructuring can be accomplished through a kind of genuine love that bell hooks called “a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect” (54). Neurodivergent young people deserve that combination; they deserve a chance to see their own story as in place, told with care. Only then it is possible for readers of those stories to discover ways of seeing and valuing their place in the world. Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 4th ed., U of Toronto P, 2017. “CCBC Diversity Statistics Book Search.” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/diversity-statistics-book-search/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023

Canon Out of Place  221 Charlton, Emma, et al. “Place-Related Identities through Texts: From Interdisciplinary Theory to Research Agenda.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2011, pp. 63–74. Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. U of Minnesota P, 1996. ———. Place: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Entz, Riki. Review: Rules by Cynthia Lord. 12 Apr. 2015, https://disabilityinkidlit. com/2015/04/12/review-rules-by-cynthia-lord/. Accessed 14 Jan. 2023 Farrugia, David, and Bronwyn E. Wood. “Youth and Spatiality: Towards Interdisciplinarity in Youth Studies.” YOUNG, vol. 25, no. 3, Aug. 2017, pp. 209–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308817712036 Habib, Sadia, and Michael R. M. Ward. “Introduction: Investigating Youth and Belonging.” Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging, edited by Michael R. M. Ward and Sadia Habib, 1st ed., Routledge, 2019, pp. 1–11. hooks, bell. All about Love: New Visions. Harper Perennial, 2000. Keller, Richard M., and Corinne E. Galgay. “Microaggressive Experiences of People with Disabilities.” Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact, edited by Derald Wing Sue, Wiley, 2010, pp. 241–67. Kidd, Kenneth. “Classic.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel et al., 2nd ed., New York UP, 2021, pp. 44–47. Lord, Cynthia. Rules. Scholastic, 2006. Prince, Dana. “What about Place? Considering the Role of Physical Environment on Youth Imagining of Future Possible Selves.” Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 17, no. 6, July 2014, pp. 697–716 https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.836591. Proshansky, Harold M., and Abbe K. Fabian. “The Development of Place Identity in the Child.” Spaces for Children, edited by Carol Simon Weinstein and Thomas G. David, Springer US, 1987, pp. 21–40. Tally, Robert T. Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Indiana UP, 2019. Terry, Ellie. Forget Me Not. Square Fish, 2017. Terry, Ellie [@ellieterrybooks]. “Tears as I Received This from a Young Reader w/ #Tourettes. ‘I Am So Happy You Wrote This Book Because No One Really Cares about People Like Me That Are Weird. They Don’t Understand That I Can’t Help It But Now I Know There Are Some People That Do Care.’ #TheReasonIWrite.” Twitter, 9 Mar. 2020, 1:13 p.m., twitter.com/ellieterrybooks/status/ 1237063897217224704 Umesi, Afoma. “35 Best Middle-Grade Books with Neurodivergent Characters.” Reading Middle Grade, 19 Nov. 2020, https://readingmiddlegrade.com/middlegrade-books-with-neurodivergent-characters/. Accessed 14 Jan. 2023. WNDB. “Why We Need Diverse Books Is No Longer Using the Term #OwnVoices.” We Need Diverse Books, 1 June 2021, https://diversebooks.org/why-weneed-diverse-books-is-no-longer-using-the-term-ownvoices/. Accessed 14 Jan. 2023.

Part VII

Virtual and Archival Spaces

23 “The Ickabog Illustration Competition” Showcasing Reader Responses and a Transnational Poetics of Place Željka Flegar J. K. Rowling’s The Ickabog (2020), a “political fairy tale,” had long been in the making, but was released online in installments during the spring of 2020 lockdown to, as Rowling explained in the Foreword, help children who had been “stuck at home, unable to attend school or meet their friends.” Moreover, Rowling and her team included her readers as co-­ creators of the book by inviting children to submit their illustrations that were inspired by the fairy tale and its characters. The winners of the contest would get the opportunity to have their work published alongside Rowling’s story. Many of the initial 60,000 submissions and comments from various parts of the world can be found on Rowling’s Twitter account. The book came out in print on November 10, 2020, with illustrations by the 34 winners of each competition (judged by the publishers) in two different editions—the British one by Hachette UK featuring the winners from the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and India; and the Scholastic US edition with the winning illustrations from the United States and Canada. The book has since been translated into over 26 languages (The Ickabog—JKR), each edition adorned with its own ­illustrations—the first translations into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese were illustrated by children from those territories and judged by publishers in each territory. All the royalties were donated to Rowling’s Volant Charitable Trust to support vulnerable groups impacted by Covid-19. As a literary guide to critical thinking, with its corrupt antagonists, the myth of the monster in the swamp, and children as active agents in the story, The Ickabog is deeply embedded in its cultural context as a cautionary tale and empowerment narrative, contrasting the simultaneously vibrant and predatory nature of contemporary media landscapes. In this sense, The Ickabog documents how the world impacted the creation of a literary work as well as how the work of literature affected global culture. However, it is also a highly aesthetic achievement characterized by the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-31

226  Željka Flegar collaborative creation of a unique imaginative geography and poetics of place that was publicly showcased at global levels. Culture, Place, and Imaginative Geography Cultural Poetics, also known as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, emphasizes context and culture surrounding a work of literature. In 1996, Lynne Vallone claimed that the study of children’s literature is by nature interdisciplinary and can use the methods of New Historicism, “not only to illuminate the literature written for children but also to discover the child-reader (actual or fantasized), the perhaps child-like author, and the psychological, social, political, and historical grounding that produces both” (297). The cultural poetics of the digital era is closely tied to its virtual places and spaces, i.e., its “convergence” and “participatory culture” as defined by Henry Jenkins, what James Gee calls “affinity spaces” and collaboration on the one hand, and social and cultural discord, trauma, and instability on the other. Similarly, poetics of place encompasses a wide range of artistic endeavors, such as visual arts, photography, performance arts, architecture, poetry, and literature, and how they relate to place, space, and the environment. In his discussion of literature, geography, and place after postcolonial studies, Eric Prieto advocates the need to move “in the direction of world literature or transnational or global studies” (139). Accordingly, Clare Bradford defines transnational readings as texts that “address and are informed by diverse and complex influences, sometimes from a variety of cultures and languages” (113). This becomes especially apparent in virtual places and spaces in which global collaboration and display are a common practice. Virtual places and spaces are neither easily mappable nor traceable; they are largely defined by their users and the places from which they come. However, both virtual and fictional places are marked by their own “imaginative geography.” Aïda Hudson explains that imaginative geography is dependent on one’s perspective or “what is seen in the mind’s eye” (1), “whether it is a moving place like a train, a character like the old Italian, or a stationery place like the farmhouse created within the imaginative geography of the author” (2). Although Edward Said’s original definition in Orientalism (1978) relies on imagining the boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar (54), the imaginative geography of The Ickabog relies on the transgressing of boundaries in pursuit of recreating and interpreting a common narrative. If, as Tim Cresswell claims, place is “a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world” (11), the young contributors’ artistic adaptations of Rowling’s tale enabled the creation of a specific imaginative geography through the interplay of genre, modality, liminality,

“The Ickabog Illustration Competition”  227 adaptability, translocality, and transnationality. Although reader-response theories and reader responses have been thoroughly researched, discussed, and recorded (see, for example, Margaret Mackey’s chapter in this collection), rarely is there a place where readers’ responses to a single story are artistically showcased in collaboration with the author and with a specific cultural context in mind. Therefore, both the cultural and the aesthetic aspects of The Ickabog Illustration Competition can be observed for its complexity and relevance. The Virtual Spaces and Places of The Ickabog The Ickabog project was a cognitively collaborative activity engaging readers’ imagination, which is central to the construction of mental models and images that we create while reading stories (Quinlan and Mar 467). For Yi-Fu Tuan, “undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with meaning” (6) and art can capture the understanding of how people locate themselves in place and space (202). However, the project also highlighted the ambiguous nature of digital endeavors in both their socially collaborative and unsettling aspects. The nature of Rowling’s virtual spaces is not unlike what readers had fictionally encountered over two decades ago in the Harry Potter series. In “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,’” Sarah K. Cantrell reads the ambiguous places and spaces in the Harry Potter books using Michel Foucault’s theory of “heterotopias” and Gilles Deleuze’s “any-space-whatever” to highlight ways “in which ambiguous spaces in our world require the same mental agility and critical flexibility” (195) that the characters in the series encounter. This instability and contradiction has also been the key feature of The Ickabog competition: the first chapters were released online on May 26, 2020, only days before the Rowling social media controversy and accusations of transphobia began. What followed was a fascinating media juxtaposition that played out on Rowling’s Twitter account. While Rowling’s fandom experienced much social and cultural upheaval, children and their parents from all over the world were eagerly submitting The Ickabog illustrations. The young illustrators’ urge to recreate the story and compete for a chance to have their work published created a specific poetics of place, the one whose geography and agency were based on transforming space that Tuan denotes as freedom into place that offers security (3). As in her previous work, through the story’s settings, characters, and themes, Rowling created places and spaces of refuge, networking, and collaboration as well as those where limits and agency are tested—both the characteristics of the Harry Potter series and of the “Harry Potter web” (Flegar 176–177) that promoted fan fiction and reader participation from its beginnings.

228  Željka Flegar In the Foreword, Rowling writes: The idea for The Ickabog came to me a long time ago. The word ‘Ickabog’ derives from ‘Ichabod’, meaning ‘no glory’ or ‘the glory departed’. I think you’ll understand why I chose the name once you’ve read the story, which deals with themes that have always interested me. What do the monsters we conjure tell us about ourselves? What must happen for evil to get a grip on a person, or on a country, and what does it take to defeat it? Why do people choose to believe lies even on scant or nonexistent evidence? Like the Harry Potter series, The Ickabog “plays with generic forms and boundaries toward a similar theme: the value of moral agency, born from sympathy for others” (Westman 94). Rowling takes her readers to the utopian kingdom of Cornucopia ruled by King Fred the Fearless who “was said to be generous, smiled and waved whenever anyone caught sight of him, and looked awfully handsome in the portraits that were distributed throughout the kingdom…” (Rowling UK 13). Although “the country seemed to run itself” (13), the order is disrupted by the King’s corrupt advisors who spread fabrications and fear for personal gain, thereby destroying the kingdom’s prosperous cities. Much like the children who confront the villains and the monster in the story, child readers were invited to contemplate complex and difficult themes of oppression, manipulation, and agency. The artistic responses were creative and diverse, with children sending portraits of characters, depictions of settings, detail-based illustrations, such as still life drawings and paintings, and even Lego figurines (see Figure 23.1). Drawing on places of both networking and isolation, The Ickabog competition allowed the readers to turn space into place and showcase their interpretation of the tale. Furthermore, each of the artists chose a segment that appealed to them most, transgressing the boundaries of home and contributing to the imaginative geography of Cornucopia. Under the circumstances of social and cultural change, The Ickabog co-creators virtually located themselves in place through the artistic use of fairy tale elements and motifs. Fairy Tales and Trauma According to Jack Zipes, “Fairy tales are predicated on a human disposition to social action—to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs while we try to change and make ourselves fit for the world” (9). Fairy tales’ archetypal structure, adaptability, and ability to provide children with a sense of justice and empowerment in an often-unfair world

“The Ickabog Illustration Competition”  229

Figure 23.1 Examples of the winning illustrations, originally available on The Ickabog website. Reprinted by permission.

has enabled them to remain at the center of adaptation practices in the modern world. Even though Rowling told the BBC that The Ickabog as a modern-day fairy tale was not “intended to be read as a response to anything that’s happening in the world right now” (“J. K. Rowling Unveils”), it was brought down from the attic after a decade because of the global crisis of Covid-19 and (un)intentionally provided an affinity space for children in times of crisis. In his exploration of children’s use of fairy tales in the context of traumatic experiences of war, Donald Haase uses Zipes’s “theory of the fairy-tale home” to conceptualize “how the ambiguous spaces of fairy tales are used by children to map their own geographical landscape under fire and to project onto that landscape a reconstituted home” (361). Although Haase primarily discusses fairy tales in the context of war trauma, such mappings can be applied to the pandemic’s isolation and confinement, fear, loss of human life, economic and social crises, and transformations of place. Moreso in 2020, the trauma was marked by “the violation of psychological and social boundaries” (Tal 234) with home becoming at the same time the area of confinement and a public space where work and schooling took place, and a place of both comfort and discomfort in which families tried to keep everyone out while at the same time inviting everyone in. Under such circumstances, fairy tales may become an “interpretative device” (Haase 365) and a “template for the actual experience of human displacement and a perception of a defamiliarized geography” (363) through contemplating places of separation, danger, violence, imprisonment, and return.

230  Željka Flegar The Ickabog contains poignant portrayals of spaces, places, and landscapes by child artists depicting abstract concepts that accompany the themes of the book. The illustration of the protagonist Daisy Dovetail mourning the loss of her parents by a 12-year-old contestant from the United Kingdom, for example, is a silhouetted figure set against the bright multicolored moon and its “glorious heavens” (Rowling UK 164). Equally, each of the contestants contributed a snippet of the plot or a theme: the warmth of fire captured in a lavishly decorated interior contrasts with the snow outside, which is telling of a king who is out of touch with what is going on among his people (239), whereas the emptiness of a lonely and abandoned inn is starkly contrasted to the colorful palette of the building itself, representing the joyful times of the past (198). The isolation of imprisonment is captured in an empty cell filled from top to bottom with grayish and brownish bricks, “A freezing chill … stealing into the dungeons through its one high, tiny, barred window” (205). On the other hand, the restoration of order is depicted through the colorful landscape of Ickaby, “the fifth great city of Cornucopia [that] came into being” (282). While showcasing reader responses, The Ickabog presents us with artistic depictions based on mental models and images of young readers that are far from utopian projections. The empty and abandoned spaces and places in the selected illustrations reflect maturity and complexity that leave a lot to interpretation. Especially striking is the image of blood and feathers by a seven-year-old contestant from India inspired by the attack of Ickabog Defence Brigade on the butcher’s residence (147; see Figure 23.2). User reviews on Amazon highlight the crossover nature of the story, its darkness and its political plots. As a book that was “written to be read aloud, but was suitable to be read alone by children between seven and nine” (“J. K. Rowling Unveils”), The Ickabog addresses readers of all ages through the act of reading or being read to. Based on the winning illustrations, the story has obviously prompted a gripping understanding of complex concepts by even the youngest contestants. Adaptation and Transformative Placing The artistic depictions of Rowling’s tale reveal a variety of resources and impressions that convey attachments, connections, meaning, and experience, and a “rich and complicated interplay of people and the environment” (Cresswell 11). Even though this chapter primarily looks at the first two editions of the book, what is apparent already in the Hachette and Scholastic editions, is that “readers bring to texts suppositions and assumptions based on their own locatedness in specific places and times” (Bradford 113) and that “considerations of the relationship between identity and screen cultures must address how this intersectionality manifests

“The Ickabog Illustration Competition”  231

Figure 23.2 “Imagine the neighbours’ horror when they found… the blood and the feathers” (Rowling UK 147) by Aria, age 7, India. Reprinted by permission.

in cultural production itself, and how it is complicated by the identities of the people who craft the texts” (Massood et al. 7). I would, however, emphasize the “complexity” rather than “complicatedness” of identities in contemporary digital cultures that requires imagination to, likewise, temporarily relinquish the idea of boundaries and difference. Accordingly,

232  Željka Flegar The Ickabog contains numerous examples that demonstrate different ways in which the protagonists and antagonists were perceived and depicted by the contestants. The portraits of Lady Eslanda, one of the heroines of the story, reveal that the young artists drew on different cultural and media models in the process of filling narrative and cognitive gaps, thereby adding their own interpretations to Rowling’s characterization. Eslanda, who is described in the first chapter to be “as dark and beautiful as [king] Fred was fair and handsome” (Rowling UK 14), is depicted in the young artists’ portraits from the United Kingdom, Australia, and India as dark-haired and light-skinned, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, and even green-eyed, as well as wearing formal and informal attire from different historic periods. In the portrait from the US edition, Eslanda resembles Tiana from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009) (Rowling US 84), which suggests that the young artist likely associated Lady Eslanda with the qualities of assertiveness, industriousness, and ascension to higher status. Eslanda, whose most distinct features are bravery and integrity, was captured at times very differently, depending on the locatedness and the background of the illustrator (see Figure 23.3). The villains mostly shared geometric, angular, and pointy features that have been traditionally used to denote evil (likewise utilized in Disney’s animated features). The demagogue Lord Spittleworth who “was very thin, cunning and clever” (Rowling UK 14) and “a man who knew how to turn a situation to good use” (35) is on more than one occasion presented using distinctly geometric features (73, 81). However, his friend Lord Flapoon, “who was so enormous that it required six men to heave him onto his massive chestnut horse” (14), is presented by an 11-year-old contestant from New Zealand in a renaissance-like portrait and holding a giant drumstick as well as like a Rajasthani prince in the Indian submission on Twitter. Yet, the narcissistic, selfish, and cowardly King Fred the Fearless in both editions appears childlike and benign, adorned with bright-colored outfits (Rowling UK 27; Rowling US 12). The amount of detail that the children put into the illustrations speaks of various strategies of the imagination, such as what Fauconnier and Turner define as “conceptual blending.” The depiction of Hetty the maid by a contestant from India (Rowling UK 92) contains an intricately designed head covering that could be a head wrap, a hat, or a turban, combining different markers of status, gender, and ethnicity. The Ickabog, whom “some made [it] snake-like, others dragonish or wolf-like” (19) and its greenish fur was a source of inspiration for many illustrations, from frightening to cartoonish. Some contestants provided more context. For example, the myth of the Ickabog and the schematic representation by the invented Professor Fraudysham was playfully depicted by a young artist from Washington,

“The Ickabog Illustration Competition”  233

Figure 23.3 “A few days later, Lady Eslanda was walking alone in the palace rose garden” (Rowling UK 159), by Sofia, age 12, Australia. Reprinted by permission.

similar to a dragon with black scales, “white gleaming eyes,” “deadly fangs,” a “poisonous spike,” and “razor sharp” claws, two elephants tall (with the artist’s note “Run elephants run!”) (Rowling US 94). As a representation of false propaganda, it works in the humor and the absurdity of the attempts to exert power over the frightened population of Cornucopia. Through the young illustrators’ efforts, The Ickabog became home to multiple perspectives and complexity of reader responses in times that demanded freedom, security, and meaningful interactions.

234  Željka Flegar Different and complex responses to the same story show us how differently readers perceive and process narratives. Many more examples are also showcased in the translations of The Ickabog. The overwhelming response to Rowling’s tale was in part due to social and cultural circumstances, but also intrinsic motivation to participate in a common narrative. By creating the transnational imaginative geography of Cornucopia and reconstructing home, The Ickabog competition instituted a specific poetics of place—one based on locatedness, circumstance, and affinity. As a cautionary tale of tangible demagogy, manipulation, and misinformation, The Ickabog can be viewed as a document of the time when the world was locked down. However, it is foremostly a testimony to the powers of literacy, art, collaboration, and media convergence in places and spaces where media and technologies can be used as tools for collaborative storytelling, healing, and creating. The participation of The Ickabog Illustration Competition’s prosumers is a literary record of a transnational culture and a poetics of place that draws on diverse mental models and images as a source adaptation, innovation, and transformation. Works Cited Bradford, Clare. “Made in New Zealand: Place and Enchantment in Margaret Mahy’s Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 39, no.1, Spring 2014, pp. 111–120, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2014.0008 Cantrell, Sarah K. “’I Solemnly Swear I Am Up to No Good’: Foucault’s Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-Spaces-Whatever in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.” Children’s Literature, vol. 39, 2011, pp. 195–212, https://doi.org/10.1353/ chl.2011.0012 Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. Basic, 2002. Flegar, Željka. “The Alluring Nature of Children’s Culture: Fairy Tales, the Carnival, and the World Wide Web.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 8, no. 2, 2015, pp. 169–184, https://doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2015.0166 Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning A Critique of Traditional Schooling. Routledge, 2004. Haase, Donald. “Children, War and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 24, no. 3, 2000, pp. 360–377, https://doi.org/10.1353/ uni.2000.0030 Hudson, Aïda. “Introduction.” Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography, edited by Aïda Hudson, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019, pp. 1–22. The Ickabog—JKR—J. K. Rowling’s Stories. J. K. Rowling Website Limited, 2021, https://stories.jkrowling.com/theickabog/ “The Ickabog: A Warm and Witty Fairy Tale Adventure to Entertain the Whole Family.” Amazon. Amazon.com, 1996–2022. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ickabog-fairy-tale-adventure-entertain-Christmas/dp/1510202250. Accessed 20 Sept. 2021.

“The Ickabog Illustration Competition”  235 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York UP, 2006. “J. K. Rowling Unveils The Ickabog, Her First Non-Harry Potter Children’s Book.” BBC News, 26 May 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainmentarts-52809600.amp. Accessed 1 Oct. 2021. Massood, Paula J., et al. “Introduction: Intersections and/in Space.” Media Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures, edited by Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Duke UP, 2021, pp. 1–18. Prieto, Eric. “Place after Postcolonial Studies.” Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, edited by Eric Prieto, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 139–152, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318015_6 Quinlan, Joshua A., and Raymond A. Mar. “How Imagination Supports Narrative Experiences for Textual, Audiovisual, and Interactive Narratives.” The Cambridge Book of the Imagination, edited by Anna Abraham, Cambridge UP, pp. 466–478. Rowling, J. K. The Ickabog. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020. ———. The Ickabog. Scholastic, 2020. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1978. Tal, Kali. “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, U of Iowa P, 1991, pp. 216–250. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977. Vallone, Lynne. “Introduction: Children’s Literature and New Historicism.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 102–104, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.1096 Westman, Karin E. “Blending Genres and Crossing Audiences: Harry Potter and the Future of Literary Fiction.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 93–112. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. Routledge, 2012.

24 Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature From Mysterious Dusty Libraries to Cities Made of Books Maretta Sidiropoulou Literary Representation of Reading and Reading Spaces According to Evelyn Arizpe, children’s literature primarily aims to present a favorable perspective on reading, an idealized reading experience to guide and enhance a child reader’s self-development and their connection to the world (3). Likewise, the value of reading as an essential function is emphasized by many authors and theorists (Elkin 153). Nevertheless, can we say that literary representations of reading and reading spaces shape the way in which we experience reading? Do the images and concepts of reading that we encountered as emerging readers affect our lived experience? And does our joy of reading reflect those spaces while we developed as readers? In children’s literature, there is a connection between reading and physical locations. This includes traditional reading spaces like libraries, as well as non-traditional or imaginary spaces where reading occurs. The way reading is represented in children’s picturebooks influences our understanding of what reading is and where it can take place. A child’s perception of space undergoes distinct phases according to Piaget’s theory in The Origins of Intelligence in Children. During the first two years of life, children develop an understanding of space through sensory experiences, such as touch and sight. This process enables them to grasp concepts like scale and the relationship between objects and their own bodies. In the subsequent stage, between the ages of 2 and 7, children begin to employ symbols to represent objects and events. They use words to describe things and create drawings. Through direct interaction with objects, children construct their spatial perception. Moreover, they start developing the ability to mentally represent objects and comprehend basic spatial relationships, even in the absence of physical stimuli (Piaget x). Later, as children acquire even more stimuli through play and socialization, the understanding of social norms of place is also improved. DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-32

Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature  237 Children’s experiences of space can be seen as an active and ongoing process of production, shaping, and transforming the world around them in ways that reflect their own needs and desires. Within children’s literature in the Western world, there is a long history of characters who are readers or who have become readers by the end of the book, having derived pleasure in the process. Most of these texts emphasize that the act of reading is a significant activity. In Arizpe’s study, Hateley observes that the development of computer games and other forms of interactive reading and playing in the twenty-first century is linked to the publication of picturebooks and “metareading” (7)—reading about books, reading, and readers in the act of reading (McGilloway 9). In Greece, we have recently observed a growing number of books about readers, the joy of reading, and the printed book (Noula 9). This means that early readers encounter representations of reading through books. One might say that this is a self-referential process of feedback that cultivates a love of reading. In this process, it is vital to provide a space for the child reader to have imaginary adventures in which books and elements connected to book culture lead to the pleasures of reading (Arizpe 11). The images and connections of specific spaces to particular behaviors and activities are represented through text and illustrations in children’s books. In some books, these ideas are presented from a different perspective, calling the reader to reframe and even challenge them. In The Giveaway Library (2019) by Antonis Papatheodoulou, Dikaios Hatziplis, and Myrto Delivoria, a little boy called Sophocles visits the library for the first time with his father. The cover of the book presents the library as a colorful neoclassical building. Sophocles decides to borrow a small book from the library. The borrowing process is described as particularly important. Here the librarian says, “Have a good read and remember that once you’ve read it, you should return it to us!” The librarian is presented as an important figure that oversees the boundary that separates the inside from the outside of the library. Radford and Radford (299) highlight that librarians maintain order in libraries and are often perceived as gatekeepers in popular culture. Similarly, an adult companion is required to access the library. Sophocles’ father appears at the beginning of the story, participates in the reading of the book, and at the end of the story accompanies Sophocles on his way to return the book to the library. The illustration of Sophocles depicts the process of choosing a specific book from a multitude of books. From the book that Sophocles picks emerges not only a plethora of figures of heroes (e.g., a fearless knight) but also several creatures of his own invention (e.g., a wireless potato, a robot sandwich, etc.), and some exciting new words. When Sophocles realizes that he must return the book to the library, he regrets that he will have to part with it. When he goes to hand the book in to the librarian, it becomes clear to him that he must return the book and

238  Maretta Sidiropoulou all the friends that he had made while reading it; their secrets, the words that he had learned, the jokes that he had laughed at, and everything that had captivated him. The story ends when Sophocles says, “But then you’re not a lending library, you’re a Giveaway library!”1 This statement carries several implications. The shift in the meaning of the word “library” is more than simply an adjective change—it complements the meaning by attributing a further quality to the library. Sophocles’ declaration adds multiple dimensions to the function of the library, enhancing its original meaning that changes the identity of the space and place. The book at the time of its return to the library represents both a physical object and the book’s content—in other words, the material medium that is returned, and the experience of reading that is unique, have an impact on the lives of readers (Sidiropoulou 18–19). To further explore the concept of the library as a reading space (or better as space-time place), one might turn to the concept of heterotopia. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theories in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, libraries can be seen as heterotopias in which time does not stop accumulating. The library is a heterogeneous space that operates between the private and the public, cultural space and public space, and leisure space and workspace. A library can be seen as a place within a juxtaposed collection of skills, networks of communication, and power relations that constitute regulated systems. In libraries, there is a strong connection between time and space. Libraries are spatio-temporal units—they are spaces that accumulate time on multiple levels. In other words, different times co-exist within the library. First, the space itself has a history (this is more obvious in old library buildings). Second, books as objects have historicity, they are a part of history. Third, another dimension of a parallel co-existing of imaginary time emerges from the historicity of the books’ references and content. The final dimension is the temporality of readers who consume their (free) time in the library. Stocked at the site of the library, this interconnection of different parallel times seems to be experienced very strongly by subjects who shape the experience of reading (Sidiropoulou 41). Heterotopias presuppose the existence of an opening–closing system, which both isolates them and makes them accessible. One must participate in a ritual every time one finds oneself in the library. We cannot enter the library without a special pass (a library card) and we can only detach an object (book) after a certain procedure (borrowing). This procedure is referenced in the figure of the librarian who reminds the child of the limited time of his loan and implies the consequences of possibly neglecting to return the book. By tradition, signs for “Silence” are almost everywhere in libraries. This word silence is usually written in bold capitals and reminds library users of the

Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature  239 unbreakable rule—the library is governed by the condition of silence. Reading based on this principle is a solemn and serious activity, which requires discipline, effort, and attention. Of course, there are other ways of reading (e.g., in any part of the house or on a park bench) in locations of secondary and leisurely reading activities. These activities can also often be potentially subversive, insofar as they sometimes show disrespect for texts (Bollmann 24–25). Foucault’s Micro-Physics of Power offers a nuanced and complex analysis of power relations, emphasizing the ways in which power operates at multiple levels and is embedded in social relationships and interactions. An important aspect of Foucault’s analysis of power is the idea of resistance. Foucault argues that power is not absolute or total, and that individuals and groups have the ability to resist and challenge dominant power structures (Foucault 79). On this theoretical basis, we can recognize a new “modus legendi” (mode of reading) whose representatives are mainly young readers (Cavallo 431). Reading in this new context implies a completely free and individual posture (e.g., lying on the floor, leaning against the wall, or sitting under study desks) “to shape an intimacy space” (Petite 165). Such forms of reading could be considered subversive power relations that take place in everyday life. In Foucault’s view, subversive power relations can take many forms, from small acts of resistance registered in everyday life to larger-scale movements and revolutions (Foucault 98–99). Such a sensory or embodied experience of space is advocated by the Little Guide to Books (2020) by Stavroula Pagona and Daniela Stamatiadi. Aimed at young readers (3–6 years), it is in line with Piaget’s idea of how a child structures space. Having gone through the stage of exploring their own body, children begin to build spatial reference systems and establish their own personal space in the world. Here, the illustrator has cleverly placed young readers outside a clearly defined or recognizable space, thus iconographically implying that reading activity can take place anywhere. The body itself creates reading spaces within which we sometimes recognize the interior of a house and sometimes we see elements that characterize an outdoor space. This book works as a manual that covers various ways of using a book. The protagonist, Little Eddie, is convinced that books are not only used for reading. Thus, he presents us with all the ways to enjoy books. In The Giveaway Library, although the adults are peripheral figures, they are the ones who set the rules. For example, the librarian is explicit about returning the book, and Sophocles’ mother and father remind him that the day has come to return it. In contrast, in the Little Guide to Books the child sets the rules, challenges them, and creatively remakes them. This is also reflected in the narrative—in the Little Guide to Books, we hear the child’s voice because the book is written as a first-person narrative, while The Giveaway Library employs a third-person narration to tell the story. Therefore, this book belongs to the category of books where, as

240  Maretta Sidiropoulou Arizpe says, “fictional child readers teach their peers how books should be treated, read and enjoyed” (3), thereby giving agency to child readers. To a great extent, this book embraces a very modern interpretation of reading. This interpretation can be linked to the broadening of the concept of reading engagement and the deconstruction of the concept of the book in general. When this deconstruction occurs, the book becomes open to new considerations and the reading spaces are expanded. Reading as pleasure becomes a field of action that allows for disengagement from the effort to conform (Bayard). Little Eddie says that “[W]ith a book you can serve your friends invisible lemonade and imaginary cookies.” Reading is placed everywhere and is seen through a sensory and social lens. Just as in the phenomenological approach, space is understood and given meaning through lived and embodied everyday human experiences and emotions. The boy is depicted in different bodily positions and in different moods when reading books, which highlights the physicality of reading. Perec places reading in specific spaces and connects it to the context: to read is not only to read a text, to decode points … It is at the same time the noise of the subway or the rocking of the carriage on the train, the heat of the sun on a beach and the voices of children playing in the distance, the feeling of hot water in the bathtub, the waiting of sleep. (182) The Little Guide to Books also reveals that “[W]hen a book opens its mouth it can suck up all the boredom in the room” (16). The book as an object is sometimes presented as an entrance to a parallel world, sometimes as a hiding place, while the act of reading becomes a means of action and escape. Reading interacts with the space in which it is placed, affects it, and ultimately alters it. A similar direction is taken in Varemarestan (2014) by Ioanna Bouldoumi and Emilia Kontaiou. Note that Varemarestan is a fictional word that translated would probably sound like “Boredom Shire.” Although it is an older edition, this book clearly aims to promote a love of reading, but it does so in a subversive way. It talks not only about our right to read but also our right not to read. Recommended for ages 6–9, this is a chapter book with illustrations in black and white. Piaget claimed that in this period children form a range of images for their own mind maps. This book challenges the established understanding of reading and many times challenges the difference between reading and not reading (Bayard 39). In the fictional country where the story takes place, books have alternative uses, which affects the ways in which spaces and relationships are structured. This is a place made of books where books have lost their primary function. People’s interest is focused on the materiality of books, while their content has no use. For instance, the protagonist, a writer of fiction who is struggling with a creative block, encounters a stranger upon arriving in the

Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature  241 country who kindly offers to provide him with accommodation in his own home. Inside his house there are books everywhere, but in a utilitarian or decorative role: books tied together as a seat, a curtain made of book pages glued together, books used for kindling in the fireplace, books used as fans to cool off on hot days, and books used as trays to serve coffee. As a consequence of this inventive yet odd usage of books, many familiar places have become uncanny. For example, a bookstore has been converted to a “grocery bookstore,” where a “book-grocer” wraps books in greaseproof paper by the kilo, but not for reading purposes. This supports Nancy’s analogy of a bookshop being similar to a perfumery or a patisserie. Nancy points out that a reader in a bookshop does not read or reads very little, but instead leafs through, looks and feels, tastes, inhales and smells the books (38). The cooperation of the senses is indispensable for the perception and experience of space: “This place has turned books into utilitarian objects for everyday use,” and Varemarestan into a paradoxical place to live. Materiality affects human behavior, creating a framework of experience and discouraging some forms of social contact while encouraging others. Space is both a result and a means of social action, and thus limits it as well as enables it (Tilley 60). Metareading: On Shaping Reading Experience The representation of reading spaces in literature can reveal a society’s beliefs and expectations about literacy practices and can shed light on the potential long-term effects on children’s perceptions of reading. It is interesting then to explore not only how the experience of reading spaces is determined by dominant ideologies (i.e., culture, philosophy, religion, and politics) but also how the description of reading spaces in literature is employed to express, broadcast, or deconstruct reading experience (Klooster 3). ­Consequently, how might children be affected in the long term when they are exposed to depictions of reading in children’s books? Some possible correlations may help us gain a deeper understanding of this problem. Representation (i.e., the ability to describe or imagine) is crucial in the production of meaning, which “enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events” (Hall 17). The ways in which acts of reading are represented and the ways in which books are culturally situated within books reveal a great deal about a society’s expectations and beliefs about literacy practices. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre supports a reconciliation between mental space (i.e., the space of the philosophers) and real space (i.e., the physical and social spheres in which we all live) (4). This idea can be reflected in reading action because reading can be seen as both a mental and physical activity. Reading creates mental spaces in the mind of the readers,

242  Maretta Sidiropoulou while at the same time it is taking place physically somewhere outside of the readers themselves. This means that a reader is bi-located, which means that they are simultaneously present in two different places (i.e., a mental and real space). This idea also correlates to the view of books as objects because they belong in an intermediate zone—placed between the intellectual and the material sphere. This special nature of books deeply affects and defines the processes of their use (Sidiropoulou 117). As Papazian claims, internalizing cognitive and emotional processes of reading may be key to becoming an actual reader—that is, someone who reads willingly for pleasure, someone who seeks books for information and experience (72). More specifically, related studies have focused on whether positive representations of reading and reading picturebooks have influenced the attitude of future readers toward reading. McGilloway showed that incidental images of reading are more likely to express reading as an everyday occurrence for preliterate children, making them more relatable, while transformative narratives portray a “romance of reading” (85), which carries a message that “acts of reading are explicitly linked to personal development and triumph of adversity” (Hateley 2). This contributes even further to Arizpe’s argument that the portrayal of fictional readers in picturebooks visually represents the act of reading printed books, which serves as a way for adults to envision how they believe children should engage with books during their early years (3). Children’s literature can and often does stage readings. Even though this field is dominated by adults’ ideas of desired readings, the stake is to provide a positive yet always open reflection of reading and allow children to desire to imagine themselves as readers. This work hopes to stimulate further discussion in this direction. Note 1 All the quotes from primary texts are translated by the author from Greek.

Works Cited Arizpe, Evelyn. “Mediating the Act of Reading through Picturebooks and Fictional Readers.” Mediation and Children’s Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Anne Marie Hagen, Lehigh UP, 2022, http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/264477/2/264477.pdf Bayard, Pierre. How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. Translated by Elpida Loupaki, Athens: Patakis Publications, 2008. Bollmann, Stefan. Women Who Read Are Dangerous. Translated by Pelagia Tsinari, Athens: Potamos Publications, 2007. Bouldoumi, Ioanna. Varemarestan [Βαρεμαρεστάν]. Illustrated by Emilia Kontaniou, Athens: Psichogios Publications, 2014.

Places and Spaces of/for Reading in Children’s Literature  243 Cavallo, Guglielmo. Reading in the Byzantine Ages. Translated by Smaragda Tsohantaridou and Paolo Odorico, Athens: Agra Publications, 2008. Elkin, Judith. “Children as Readers.” Teaching Children’s Fiction, edited by Catherine Butler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 152–171. Foucault, Michel. The Micro-Physics of Power. Translated by Lila Troulinou, Athens: Ypsilon Publications. 1991. ———. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Architecture/Mouvement/ Continuité, 1984. Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications & Open UP, 1997. Hateley, Erica. “Reading: From Turning the Page to Touching the Screen.” (Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, edited by Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, and Roderick McGillis, Springer, 2013, pp. 1–13. Klooster, Jacqueline. “Introduction: The Ideologies of Lived Space, Ancient and Modern.” The Ideologies of Lived Space in Literary Texts, Ancient and Modern, edited by Jo Heirman and Jacqueline Klooster, Ginkgo Academia P, 2013, pp. 3–15. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson Smith, Blackwell, 1991. McGilloway, Mélanie. Metareading in Picturebooks: The Potential of Positive Images of Reading as a Gateway to Bibliophilia. 2017. Roehampton University, MA thesis. Nancy, Jean-Luc. On the Commerce of Thinking-Of Books and Bookstores. Translated by David Wills, Fordham UP, 2009. Noula, Dorothea. Depictions of Reading in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Study, Register, Presentation. 2022. University of West Attica, MA thesis. Pagona, Stavroula. Little Guide to Books [Μικρός Οδηγός Βιβλίων]. Illustrated by Daniela Stamatiadi, Athens: Ikaros Publications. 2020. Papatheodoulou, Antonis, and Dikaios Hatziplis. The Giveaway Library [Χαριστική Βιβλιοθήκη]. Illustrated by Myrto Delivoria, Athens: Patakis Publications, 2019. Papazian, Gretchen. “Reading Reading in the Early Reader: Mindset, Emotion, and Power.” The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, edited by Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec, Routledge, 2016, pp. 71–87. Perec, Georges. Espèces d’Espaces. Translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis, Athens: Ypsilon Publications, 2000. Petite, Michele. “Reading, Citizenship, Identity.” Aspects of Reading, edited by Mairi Leontsini, Athens: Nisos Publications, 2000, pp. 147–176. Piaget, Jean. The Origins of Intelligence in Children. Translated by Margaret Cook, International UP, 1952. Radford, Gary P., and Marie L. Radford. “Libraries, Librarians, and the Discourse of Fear.” The Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 3, Jul. 2001, pp. 299–329. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/4309528. Sidiropoulou, Maria. Reading as a Cultural Construction: Negotiations of the Use of Books. 2015. University of the Aegean, PhD thesis. Tilley, Christopher, et al., editors. Handbook of Material Culture. Sage, 2006.

25 Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series Lance Weldy

Pilgrimages in the First Season of The Flying House Anime Series In his Introduction to Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan argues how experience helps to distinguish between the concepts of space and place, noting that “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). We can apply his concepts to openly Christian texts that are marketed to children because of how they emphasize experiential spirituality and also add spiritual value to specific places mentioned in the Christian Bible. Tuan notes that “Place is an organized world of meaning” (179). For Christian media marketers, this meaning can be actualized through adapting the Bible into immersive formats, including digital pilgrimages to revered places mentioned in the Bible. This kind of organized world building can be found in The Flying House, which originally aired on the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in the 1980s and focuses on the adventures of three children who travel back to the time of Jesus. In my chapter, I investigate the evangelical strategies of The Flying House series by focusing on how select episodes of the first season nurture the children’s spiritual growth through various pilgrimages as they continue their extended quest to return to their physical home. Along the way, I incorporate Tuan’s approaches to time and place as a means of appreciating the evangelistic nature of the show. Through this case study, I seek to highlight an understudied subgenre of evangelical media produced for children in the 1980s. The Flying House Series, Pilgrimage Studies, and Place Scant scholarship has been written about The Flying House series. It was produced in collaboration between CBN and Tatsunoko Productions as a “follow-up” to a similar time-travel series called Superbook. Flying House aired initially in 1983 and 1984 on CBN (“Flying” IMDB; “Flying” DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-33

Pilgrimages in the First Season of  The Flying House Anime Series  245 Tatsunoko; Hessek and Price 10). With 52 episodes, this anime series adapts various Bible stories from the New Testament into an immersive evangelizing experience for the audience and the protagonists. The show’s theme song explains the opening episode and the extended plot of the series: Justin Casey and siblings Angie and Corkey Roberts find a time-traveling house owned by Professor Bumble and his robot sidekick, S.I.R. (Solar Ion Robot). S.I.R. accidentally activates the time machine, and the five characters find themselves repeatedly attempting to return home, making this an unintended, extended pilgrimage that allows the characters and the viewing audience a chance to witness some of the major biblical highlights about Jesus with some additional stories focusing on the Apostle Paul. A typical episode begins with the house teleporting to a new location, the professor staying behind to repair the machine, and the children exploring their new surroundings to discover well-known Bible stories that teach them spiritual lessons. Usually, they learn these lessons vicariously through a character they befriend who directly experiences the familiar biblical account, such as Jairus’ daughter (who is given the name Maya) in Episode 9. While the children enjoy their adventures, their overarching quest is to return to their twentieth-century home, as evidenced by the ending lyrics from the theme song, “I just want to get back home again.” The Flying House illustrates pilgrimage and Tuan’s discussion of time and place as the main characters consistently attempt the return home, which is not successful until the series’ last episode. John Eade and Evgenia Mesaritou define pilgrimage as “a journey undertaken by people around the world to and from one or more places that they consider to be particularly special or meaningful.” Hillary Kaell’s definition includes the desire “to obtain access to the divine” (20), and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a period of travelling or wandering from place to place” (“Pilgrimage,” 2nd def). The Flying House functions as an interesting mixture of these three definitions: the children episodically interact with what the writers consider “particularly special or meaningful” moments from the New Testament, specifically in having “access to the divine” when literally interacting with Jesus in various episodes. Further, for 52 episodes, the non-biblical characters are forced to “wander” to multiple places with an unplanned itinerary as they learn more about “the divine.” Moreover, this time-travel narrative about biblical sites illuminates Tuan’s conversation about time and place when underscoring the evangelistic meanings of the series. In his chapter “Time and Place,” Tuan discusses three approaches to consider how “time and place are related” (179), which we can connect to the pilgrimage motif in Flying House: the use of goals in finding a place, the amount of time spent in a certain place, and finding identity in places of the past. Through the children’s pilgrimages

246  Lance Weldy to specific places, we can observe their spiritual growth through the lens of Tuan’s approaches. The next section of this chapter looks at how the opening episode sets the tone about the series’ pilgrimage and evangelistic intent. Unintentional Extended Pilgrimage to the Time of Jesus The first episode, “Blast off for the Past,” indicates the importance of biblical geographies soon after the group has been transported unawares back in time. While the children and S.I.R. use the observation balloon to investigate their surroundings, Angie says, “I’ve never seen land that looks like this before,” which lets the audience know that the geography is unknown to them and still needs to be studied. Next, the children discover a grassy terrain and a flock of sheep, which provides a visual connection to the local shepherds who misinterpret the landing of this balloon as an indication that Justin is their Messiah. Eventually, the kids and S.I.R. meet Mary and help her attend to her cousin Elizabeth’s childbirth. After the baby is born, the children learn from Zacharias, the father, that he had lost his voice because he had doubted “the power of God and was stricken dumb until this moment” (“Episode 1”). Though we are not told where this story is happening, we do receive our first indication of a place-name when Mary tells Corkey that she has a husband, Joseph, who lives in Nazareth. Periodically throughout the episodes, S.I.R. acts as the show’s voiceover narrator. Near the end of this episode, he says in his robotic grammar, “Information Update: We have witnessed a great event of history. Data supports theory that baby will be known as John the Baptist.” Once the children and S.I.R. have returned to the flying house and explain what they have witnessed, the professor says, “That means my time machine has brought us back to around the time of Jesus.” This important articulation for the children and the viewers indicates the specific cultural geography of early Christian history and also serves as the catalyst for the crew’s extended pilgrimage (back to Bible times) punctuated by episodic pilgrimages (within Bible times) that lasts for four seasons. This multi-layered pilgrimage reinforces what Tuan says about goals in relation to time and place: “Goal is both a point in time and a point in space” (179). For this crew, their practical goal is to return to their twentieth-century homes, while the show’s overall goal is to lead to the Kingdom of God. This scene also reinforces the overarching tenor of the show’s approach to casting children being evangelized by observing the biblical account of God’s power, such as Zacharias’ muteness until the birth of his son. Though the professor serves as an absent-minded adult figure in this series, he recognizes the historical figure of Jesus; the children do not and begin

Pilgrimages in the First Season of  The Flying House Anime Series  247 their evangelical education through this extended pilgrimage. This next section briefly categorizes some of the ways the first season of the series prioritizes modeling Jesus’ behavior through the different pilgrimages. Modeling Jesus’ Behavior through Pilgrimages Tuan’s second approach to time and place considers the amount of time it takes to “form an attachment to place” (198) through experience. For the purposes of this section, we can consider how the children’s episodic encounters with Bible characters, places, and stories provides first-hand spiritual edification. First, we can consider how the first season of The Flying House promotes Jesus’ behavior of compassion toward the abused, not from a physical pilgrimage by the children, but rather from an oral narrative about pilgrimage retold amongst themselves. “The Good Samaritan” is arguably one of the more recognizable parables for contemporary Western audiences, and in Episode 11, “Neighbors,” Jesus tells this story found in Luke 10 about a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who is severely beaten and robbed. In this episode, a merchant selling oil to the traveler asks him why he would take this trip to Jericho, noting that “The road to Jericho must be the worst road in the world. It’s full of robbers! Do you really expect to get there without getting robbed?” While this specific detail about the dangerous path is not mentioned in the biblical account, it is consistent with the story found in scripture where Jesus says, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead” (Luke 10:30). In this case, it reveals the potential danger of traveling during this time period while also reinforcing the main message from this popular story: we should be compassionate toward abuse victims, even those who despise us. (In this episode, the traveling man openly disdains the Samaritan before leaving on his journey). After the story is told, Justin says, “As Jesus said, we should all be that way,” reinforcing the series’ intent that the children and viewers model Jesus’ behavior. The second kind of pilgrimage highlights Jesus’ compassion toward the poor. Near the beginning of Episode 3, “Lost and Found in Time,” S.I.R. narrates crucial geographic information in his robotic grammar about the city of Nazareth: “Nazareth located on plain of Galilee between Mount Tabor and Mount Carmel. Place where Jesus spent his childhood fulfilling prophecy that he would be called a Nazarene. At this time, city has many beggars and thieves.” After their flying house lands near Nazareth, Justin and Angie walk there in the hopes of seeing Jesus (after witnessing his birth in Episode 2). However, when they arrive at the city, they see various shots of run-down exteriors of alleys along with unhoused, dirty older men on

248  Lance Weldy the streets. Angie asks, “Justin, are we safe?” And a little later Justin says that “this place looked much more beautiful when we saw it from the top of the hill.” Their uneasiness about this place prompts them to leave the city, but on their way out, they see Jesus as a toddler, who gives food to a beggar who has been smacked to the ground. For a contemporary Christian audience, Nazareth sounds like a historically relevant city to visit because of its connection to Jesus’ life. A simple internet search for travel tours of Nazareth corroborates this notion: “Nazareth during Jesus[’] time was a small village, and of little interest … [,] but due to Jesus growing up and having his childhood here as mentioned in the New Testament, Nazareth today is a thriving large town” (“Tour Nazareth”). As Justin remarks, the appearance of the city in this episode differs from its reality. The reason is unclear for this choice of painting the town of Nazareth as poverty-stricken and filled with heartless citizens. The famous saying in John 1:46 is not addressed in this episode—“Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?”—but this verse might be a possible way to depict how even famous cities need to show compassion for the poor. This episode is yet another form of didactic intent by positively showing Jesus’ behavior for the audience to emulate. Moreover, this incident invites application of Tuan’s third approach for viewing place and time: developing identity. He remarks, “What can the past mean to us? People look back for various reasons, but shared by all is the need to acquire a sense of self and of identity” (186). By visiting well-known historical cities like Nazareth on their pilgrimages, the children (and viewers) become aware of sacred places in biblical geographies and are encouraged to join a religious community as self-identified Christians. The third example of pilgrimages connects to a larger evangelical message for children to be strong against temptation, which can be found in Episode 5, “Speak of the Devil,” when Jesus takes his own pilgrimage into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Foreshadowed at the end of Episode 4, “Voice in the Wilderness,” Jesus has traveled to the wilderness, and the children are concerned for his safety. S.I.R. begins Episode 5 by letting the audience know that they are camped by the Jordan River. When Angie asks the professor for help in locating Jesus, he pinpoints the area and says, “There’s your wilderness. 30 miles long in all.” This wilderness site has no biblically-provided place-name for evangelized children to identify, thereby emphasizing didactic lessons rather than the place that evokes those lessons. The children and S.I.R. journey through the wilderness and witness Jesus being tested by Satan. They also find themselves pulled into different nightmares when they fall to Satan’s temptations. First, Corkey and Justin try turning bread into stone and find themselves in a dream sequence that begins with their gorging on colorful candy and then turns to their running from monsters in a gray surreal landscape. Next, Angie surrenders to

Pilgrimages in the First Season of  The Flying House Anime Series  249 the second temptation about accepting riches in exchange for worshipping Satan, and she experiences a similar dream sequence as she enjoys her opulent jewels before screaming as her crown morphs into Medusa-like snake heads. As the biblical account from Matthew 4 attests, Jesus resists all three temptations, but this episode heavily focuses on the children enduring harrowing nightmares related to their own temptations. After Jesus rebukes Satan for a third time, the children’s nightmares end, and Jesus wakes them up from their dreams. The children find themselves outside of the wilderness in a grassy, welcoming place, and Justin says they were “so greedy, we deserved what we got.” Angie adds, “Thank goodness Jesus was nearby to help us.” The significance of this episode lies in the way it directs the evangelistic experience through the pilgrimage of Justin, Angie, and Corkey. Out of the 13 episodes of Season 1, this episode is one of the few that directly affects the twentieth-century children. As I mentioned earlier, the episode template usually involves the three children being evangelized more vicariously by witnessing hardships of a biblical character they meet on their pilgrimages. Instead, this episode shows the three children directly committing a sin, experiencing first-hand punishment, and then verbally articulating their epiphanies about their actions. This change in focalization could factor into the intent for audience evangelization. As R. Christopher Heard notes, “young viewers watching these series may identify more with the ongoing non-biblical characters than with biblical characters, who appear episodically” (272). In other words, because Justin, Corkey, and Angie experienced the nightmare firsthand, the viewing audience is more likely to internalize this evangelizing message of being more like Christ and resisting the temptation to sin. Additionally, Tuan’s second approach about time and place applies to this example when he says, “While it takes time to form an attachment to place, the quality and intensity of experience matters more than simple duration” (198). The nightmare sequences in this episode certainly count as one of the most intense experiences the children endure in the first season, which reinforces their first-hand attachment to Jesus and his spiritual lessons. Conclusion The majority of this season focuses on the children learning more about the behavior, teachings, and persona of Jesus as they travel to many recognizable pilgrimage sites, such as Bethlehem in Episode 2; Jerusalem in Episode 3; Caperneum in Episodes 7, 9, and 13; and the Sea of Galilee in Episodes 3 and 13. As a testament to the powerful draw of these sacred sites, these aforementioned places are still available to visit in the twentyfirst century with the help of Holy Land tour companies (“Ten”).

250  Lance Weldy Whether the children personally experience danger or witness conflicts being resolved at these sites, the children slowly become evangelized because of the work of Jesus. Episode 4 highlights how this form of physical pilgrimage can be spiritualized about a place in eternity. In an early scene, John the Baptist is baptizing converts in the Jordan River when the children experience another direct form of evangelism. A nearby man says, “Hey, you children there, don’t you want to go to Heaven too?” They respond enthusiastically. When their friend Joab asks, “Mister, what do you do to get to Heaven?” the man replies, “Confess your sins and say you’re sorry for them. But you have to mean it if you want to get to Heaven.” At this point, the evangelical message about the afterlife seems pretty clear and well-received by the children. However, this message implodes once the children begin confessing their sins to each other about stolen candy bars and broken tennis rackets, which results in the three of them making a scene. John the Baptist responds to this spectacle by saying, “I’m afraid there are some who are not yet ready for the Kingdom of Heaven.” His tone is slightly ambiguous, perhaps meant to be a mixture of annoyance about childhood behavior and humor toward childhood evangelism: not all children reach the age of accountability at the same time. Perhaps Justin, Angie, and Corkey need more time and pilgrimages to better appreciate and receive the evangelistic message. As Kaell notes, “For pilgrims, the Holy Land trip is an especially rich field of encounter and imaginative production precisely because it is both a return to the past and a projection into the future” (3). Justin, Angie, and Corkey literally actualize this kind of pilgrimage experience as they return to the time of Jesus to better understand how to become more like him as they prepare for the future in the Kingdom of Heaven. Tuan’s first approach to time and place also applies here when he specifically mentions the Israelites and the Kingdom of Heaven in the context of goals, noting that “Religions of transcendental hope tend to discourage the establishment of place. The message is, don’t hang on to what you have; live in the present as if it were a camp or wayside station to the future” (180). By wandering from place to place back in Bible times and internalizing their experiences, these children become slowly educated about their souls’ future destination in eternity. Works Cited Eade, John, and Mesaritou, Evgenia. “Pilgrimage.” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthro­pology.  https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0195.xml. Accessed 17 Jul. 2022. “Episode 1: Blast Off for the Past,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 1. CBN,  https://secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/­ season1/344296. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018.

Pilgrimages in the First Season of  The Flying House Anime Series  251 “Episode 2: Star Spangled Night,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 2. CBN, https://secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/ season1/344336. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 3: Lost and Found in Time,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 3. CBN, https://secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/ season1/344341. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 4: Voice in the Wilderness,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 4. CBN, https://secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/ season1/344351. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 5: Speak of the Devil,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 5. CBN, https://secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/ season1/344356. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 7: Military Secrets,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 7. CBN, https:// secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/season1/ 34436. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 9: Another Life,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 9. CBN, https:// secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/season1/344381. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 11: Neighbors,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 11. CBN, https:// secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/season1/ 344401. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “Episode 13: The Greatest,” The Flying House, Season 1, Episode 13. CBN, https:// secure.cbn.com/partners/video/premiumcontent/kids/flyinghouse/season1/ 344416. Accessed 22 Oct. 2018. “The Flying House.” IMDB.com, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083417. Accessed 12 Jul. 2022. “The Flying House.” Tatsunoko Productions, https://tatsunoko.co.jp/works/theflying-house. Accessed 15 Jul. 2022. Heard, R. Christopher. “Drawing (on) the Text: Biblical Reception in Animated Films.” The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film. Part 1, edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 267–283. Hessek, Scott, and Phil Price, “Japan Enjoys CBN Show.” The Rome News-Tribune, 20 Aug. 1982, p. 10. Kaell, Hillary. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. NYU Press, 2014. “Pilgrimage, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP, June 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/143868. Accessed 26 July 2022. “Ten Days Holy Land Tour Travel to Israel.” Holy Land Tours Travel, https:// www.holylandtourstravel.com/index.php/ten-day-christian-holy-land-traveltour-to-israel. Accessed 22 July 2022. “Tour Nazareth during Your Trip to the Holy Land.” Holy Land Tours Travel, https://www.holylandtourstravel.com/index.php/christian-holy-land-tourstravel-guide/item/5-nazareth. Accessed 22 July 2022. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

26 An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations for Young People Elizabeth Garri

American children’s and young adult literature has historically included mostly white, CIS, middle-class, and able-bodied characters, serving as a space that primarily affirms the values and experiences of the majority. Christopher Myers describes this lack of diversity in media for young people as an “apartheid of literature,” a pattern “in which characters of color are limited to the townships of occasional historical books that concern themselves with the legacies of civil rights and slavery” (7 SR). Myers’ commentary builds upon analytical frameworks posed by his scholarly predecessors, providing a new way to consider contemporary literature for young people as it reflects and shapes the American cultural landscape. In particular, his commentary echoes Rudine Sims Bishop’s comparison of literature for young readers to windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Myers adds yet another analogous function to this list: maps. Stories represent and mold the landscapes that young people occupy in their lives and imaginations. Much as people use maps to decide where to go and how to get there, children use stories to “create … an atlas of their world … [and] of their possible destinations” (Meyers 7 SR). Thus, it is inherently problematic when large portions of the population—any child who does not fit the “mainstream” American image—are excluded from these maps and are left, as Myers states, to “naviga[te] the streets and avenues of their lives with an inadequate and outdated chart” (7 SR). With this in mind, I explore here the landscape of children’s culture as it expands to include stories that do the cultural work of providing future-looking maps. I am particularly interested in contemporary adaptations of classic texts, stories for young readers in which authors are making a concerted effort to rework the “classics” into responsible cultural maps and capturing the shifting cultural landscape that is gradually expanding to include voices and stories of young people who have traditionally been excluded from the spaces of media. All stories, texts, and works of art exist in a web of conversations; they reflect many differing, complex, and overlapping ideological constructs— DOI: 10.4324/9781003355502-34

An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations  253 including perceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in society. However, adaptations and retellings, stories that have been reimagined and reinterpreted in a different medium and/or for different audiences, have an additional layer to consider. Such works not only exist as part of the overarching web of story, but also as reflections of their source, or hypotext, and “translations” to new mediums and cultural contexts (Stam 62). Moreover, adaptations permeate many aspects of American children’s culture, as demonstrated by the abundance of American films, theater, and books marketed to young audiences that draw inspiration from folk and fairy tales or other “classic” sources. Thus, adaptations serve as a prime medium for authors and other artists to redraw and expand the conventional borders of media for young people, functioning as a tool for incorporating diverse characters into the map of the literary canon and allowing for children from traditionally marginalized backgrounds to view themselves in spaces from which they are typically excluded. The roles that children from traditionally marginalized populations see themselves in are extremely limited, but this is especially true in “classics” and fantasy works. Since most children’s literature features white, ablebodied, heterosexual, middle-class characters, when authors, filmmakers, or other artists adapt and reimagine texts to include more diverse characters, it reflects an evolving understanding of whose voices and stories matter in our society, of who belongs in the maps of mainstream American culture. Hence, works of children’s media with diverse characters, and especially adaptations, are often the result of conscious efforts to include and expand the spaces in which individuals from traditionally marginalized populations are seen, to create a map of possibilities for all children that encompasses both the mundane and spectacular. While BIPOC characters are seldom included in fairy tale and fantasy works, their presence in realistic fiction tends to be confined to a space in which success is limited to the “surreal and improbable” chance of becoming a rapper or professional athlete (Myers 7 SR). However, some works, like Ibi Zoboi’s Pride, a retelling of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, paint a much broader map of possibilities. Zoboi’s novel tells the story of Zoe Benitez, the second of five daughters in an Afro-Latinx family living in a “hood” of New York City. When a rich African American family moves into a renovated mansion across the street, Benitez is immediately distrustful of their sons, who embody the threat urban gentrification poses to her rapidly changing neighborhood. Although readers can recognize the inspiration Zoboi derives from Austen’s 1813 novel, Zoboi does not merely replicate this story. Instead, she reimagines and recontextualizes it in innovative ways, transforming Austen’s work into a contemporary tale which simultaneously presents a feminist-minded love story and invites readers to consider the characters’ struggles with Black identity.

254  Elizabeth Garri By presenting many different representations of African Americans, including a bright, yet problematic young man from the projects, an AfroLatinx Santería-practitioner and landlady, and an eldest daughter of a working-class family who returns home for the summer after her first year at college, Zoboi portrays a varied landscape of experience and cultures within the overarching African American demographic, complicating the notion of a homogenous “Black experience.” Meanwhile, Zoboi also depicts a culturally significant urban neighborhood as it undergoes a historic socioeconomic shift, representing a space central to many children’s experiences but rarely portrayed in media for young people. Zoboi’s work highlights how an influx of funds from wealthy newcomers in urban centers can lead to displacement of community members as the latter struggle to afford a higher cost of living, changing the physical places to which they have access, and hence, the landscapes of their experiences. Thus, Pride embodies the maps of children’s and young adult culture not only by adding to the body of works that depict the lives of young African Americans in a realistic setting, but also by capturing a place in transition. Adaptations and retellings in realistic fiction with BIPOC characters are also present in contemporary films and theatrical performances. For example, a 2021 NBC special, Annie Live!, casts an African American actress as its eponymous lead, adding to a long line of adaptations based on the orphan who first appeared as a comic strip character in the 1930s Chicago Tribune. The comic’s original orphan featured bright red hair, pale skin, and freckles, characteristics most commonly associated with people of Irish ancestry, an ethnic group that was itself stigmatized at the time of publication (Godio). Thus, even the cartoon Annie worked to create a more inclusive map of American culture, rendering contemporary adaptations with colorblind casting doubly appropriate. Even though Annie Live! does not significantly revise the plot of its most direct hypotext, a 1977 Broadway musical, casting “little orphan Annie” with an African American actress is still significant. In another medium, this change without additional revisions to reflect the character’s culture would be akin to putting “books in blackface” (Harriot), but theater is unique in that it is intended to be reproduced and performed with minimal changes. Moreover, the work heeds recent calls to diversify casting in theater, as industry professionals ask, “How can we have a country we perceive as multi-ethnic, and yet we still have shows and still make assumptions about an overwhelmingly white audience… ?” (qtd. in Beckerman). Thus, Annie Live! exemplifies how adaptations often reflect or respond to the cultural moment in which they are situated, creating a work suiting “the ‘rightness’ of the historical moment” (Hutcheon 143). The musical expands the map of children’s culture in two important ways. The first is by presenting a story of an economically disadvantaged

An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations  255 African American protagonist living in New York City and including commentary on socioeconomic stratification, adding to the body of stories that include children of color and working-class people within the landscapes of children’s media. The second is centered in the physical and cultural space of theater; casting a young African American lead demonstrates that children of color can and should be included in theatrical spaces. Hence, Annie Live! creates more inclusive spaces in American children’s culture in both media and the real world. Both Pride and Annie Live! bring more diverse representation into the conventionally-white spaces of children’s culture, allowing their hypotexts to “evolve … to fit new times” (Hutcheon 176). Yet, while these works map realities of children who have often been excluded from the landscapes of popular media, they are both “classic” stories retold in New York City with African American characters, and hence themselves exclude several demographics—including, but of course not limited to, other BIPOC populations, members of the LGBTQ+ community, persons with disabilities, and the not-insignificant portion of African American children who do not live in north-eastern urban settings. Yet not every story can reflect all identities, and some may simultaneously challenge one set of cultural misconceptions and invoke stereotypical or problematic images of another population. Furthermore, as important as it is for children’s literature to include places that reflect the lived experiences of all children, it is perhaps equally important that it includes children from diverse backgrounds in the landscapes of fantasy. As Tolson argues, “children of color have the right to read stories that offer an image of themselves soaring into magical adventures and fantastic worlds” (44). Thus, we must examine the next level of incorporating more diverse characters into the landscapes of children’s literature: contemporary (often urban) fantasy and magic realism. One story that has worked to expand the cartography of contemporary fantasy is The Witches, a 2020 Warner Bros film based on Roald Dahl’s novel by the same name. Dahl’s original work follows the story of an orphaned boy who encounters witches on a seaside vacation and must act quickly to prevent the villains from turning every English child into a mouse. The Warner Bros’ film follows roughly the same plot but is set in Alabama in the late 1960s and predominantly features African American actors as its top-billed cast. Robert Zemeckis also hints at the socioeconomic barriers present for BIPOC Americans without making racial differences a central conflict of the film. For example, when the protagonist’s grandmother decides to visit a seaside hotel, she claims it will be safe because “only rich white folks” go there and witches, as a surrogate for other evils of the world, tend to prey on easier targets. Hence, this rendition of Dahl’s work presents a fun yet subtly nuanced film, transporting

256  Elizabeth Garri the story to a new landscape in which the audience experiences the excitement and danger of magic in an otherwise-realistic setting that includes people of color. Nevertheless, this adaptation is not entirely unproblematic. Zemeckis’ work visually implies that witches’ “claws” look like hands with missing fingers, and the film received backlash for its insensitive portrayal of limb differences. This representation perpetuates problematic stereotypes that characterize people with physical differences as villains and contributes to the social stigma of disability. Thus, The Witches film demonstrates how adaptations can at once convey both productive and reductive ideologies, simultaneously incorporating greater diversity into the maps of American children’s culture and reinforcing barriers for those who are still excluded. The Witches is far from the only text that has been retold in contemporary fantasy. For example, L. L. McKinny draws inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in her young adult novel A Blade So Black. In McKinny’s work, Alice is not a fanciful prepubescent white girl who stumbles upon a rabbit hole, instead she is an adventurous African American teen recruited to fight “nightmares” from Wonderland. McKinny’s Alice appears both as a hero in a dangerous, twisted version of Wonderland and a regular teen in Atlanta navigating real world challenges and grieving the loss of a parent. Notably, A Blade So Black does not simply use an African American main character in the context of an otherwise de-racialized story, one in which characters of color are distinguished only by appearance. Rather, McKinny develops Alice’s Black identity and a sense of place by including elements of African American culture and contemporarily relevant concerns. McKinny features African American Vernacular English dialect, a form of English with distinct grammatical rules and structural patterns prominent in African American communities, in much of her dialogue, describes and celebrates Alice’s natural hair and offers commentary on the threat posed by police violence to BIPOC Americans. Hence, A Blade So Black at once expands Carrol’s Wonderland to include the story of a young Black woman and develops a sense of the protagonist’s place in both physical space and culture. Adaptations subverting the borders of fantasy and reality may also take the form of magic realism, a narrative mode “associated with … tales of those on the margins of political power” and one which is “suited to exploring … and transgressing … boundaries” (Bowers 31). One example of such adaptation is Anna Marie McLemore’s young adult novel, The Mirror Season, which incorporates elements of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” in a story that centers about a queer Latinx girl. In The Mirror Season, Graciela Christales attends a predominantly white, rich private school on scholarship and works at her family’s pastelaria. But when she is assaulted at a party, she loses her “gift” of knowing what

An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations  257 sweets her patrons need and begins to find objects transformed into shards of broken mirrors in the world around her. As the broken glass invades Christales’ world, McLemore emphasizes how Christales’ identity and experiences shape her perceptions of and relationship to the places she occupies. Christales is “almost … but not quite” like the other students at her school (McLemore 179), as her “brown, queer body [is] always measured against pale freckled ones” (44). Thus, Christales experiences the school differently than her peers; she is a student there, yet she feels like an outsider. In addition to the marginalization Christales experiences at school by virtue of her identity, the assault has introduced jagged edges of glass into her world, rendering the places she once felt safe in fragmented reflections of what they once were. Thus, McLemore utilizes magic realism to explore Christales’ feelings of alienation from her environment and incorporate a Latinx character into the space of fantasy. While realistic fiction works often represent the physical spaces of young peoples’ worlds, contemporary fantasy and magic realism for young people begin to bridge the gap between stories rooted in physical space and those that exist only in the maps of imagination. Thus, as adaptations in these genres redefine and “[expand] the boundaries” of texts (Martin 88), they place culturally significant stories at the nexus of fantasy and the spaces which young people actually occupy. Such adaptations certainly play a role in developing a more inclusive cartography of children’s culture, yet they still do not fully incorporate young people into the landscapes of story. For this, we must turn to adaptations in fantasy, fairy tale, and science fiction. Adaptations creating more inclusive landscapes of fantasy are present in several forms, yet children’s picturebook adaptations of fairy tales appear especially popular, perhaps due to the genre’ cultural significance and association with modern childhood. For example, Boo Stew adds a multiracial town, “Toadsuck Swamp,” to the maps of children’s fantasy through the story of “Curly Locks.” Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp by Mercer Mayer replaces the often demure Red Riding Hood figure with a clever young Black girl who manipulates villains into doing her work. And The Girl Who Spun Gold presents a “West Indian variant” of a tale most recognizable to American audiences as “Rumpelstiltskin” (Hamilton 40). Each of these books incorporates BIPOC characters into the landscapes of fairy tale in a different way. While Boo Stew creates a new fictional town and Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp incorporates a Black protagonist, The Girl Who Spun Gold challenges the traditionally Eurocentric maps of American fairy tales by adapting a story from a cultural tradition not often represented in American children’s literature. Such different approaches to adapting fairy tales likely reflect “deeply personal as well as culturally and historically conditioned” motivations for adaptation (Hutcheon 95);

258  Elizabeth Garri yet, they also demonstrate how adaptation as “an act of appropriating or salvaging texts” can create landscapes that better reflect the identities and cultural sensibilities of contemporary audiences (Hutcheon 20). Furthermore, adaptations of fantasy and science fiction also include films that reshape the maps of media for young people, including the 2018 film A Wrinkle in Time. In DuVernay’s film, like the 1962 young adult science-fiction novel it adapts, the protagonist, Meg, and her younger brother, Charles Wallace, travel to distant planets to save their father. They “tesser” light years away in mere seconds, encounter fantastic landscapes with anthropomorphic flowers that “speak” in color, and travel to the desert planet of Camazotz where they successfully fend off “the IT”—a dark cloud of evil spreading darkness throughout the universe. However, unlike the novel, where the characters are coded, as almost all children in science fantasy are, as white by default, DuVernay’s film features a biracial Meg. Additionally, Charles Wallace, who is adopted in the film, is played by an actor of Filipino descent. Thus, DuVernay brings children of color into far-off corners of an imagined galaxy, incorporating them into the maps of science fiction. In turn, the film conveys both an artistic and socio-political message about creating media that reflects the diverse backgrounds and identities of today’s young people—suggesting that children of color, and indeed all children, should see people who look like them exploring the furthest reaches of the stars and their imaginations, discovering new lands, and creating their own paths. Hence, despite how adaptations are sometimes thought of as simple “remakes” of stories that have already been told, such works are actually complex creative products that arise from interactions of their hypotexts, cultural sensibilities of time in which they are produced, and ideological agendas of their authors. Adaptations can bring representations of the actual landscapes of children’s experiences into the maps of children’s culture, as in realistic fiction; bring elements of magic into the lives of characters, as in contemporary fantasy and magic realism; and bring children of all backgrounds and identities into the landscapes of imagination. Such works reshape the cartography of American children’s culture to include broader representation and create future-looking maps for young people whose identities have traditionally been excluded from the cultural spaces of “classic” media. They offer all children a “more expansive landscape upon which to dream” as they navigate the real and imagined spaces of American media and beyond (Meyers 7 SR). Works Cited Annie Live! Directed by Lear deBessonet and Alex Rudzinski, NBC, 2 Dec. 2021, www.nbc.com/annie-live. Accessed 26 July 2022.

An All-White World? The Cartography We Create in Adaptations  259 Beckerman, Jim. “Broadway in 2021 Will ‘Have So Many Black Voices.’ Theatergoers, Pros Say It’s about Time.” Northjersey.com, 24 Aug. 2021. www. northjersey.com/story/entertainment/2021/08/24/black-actors-playwrightsready-make-impact-theatre-2021/7889394002/. Accessed 26 July 2022. Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. ­ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/longwood/detail. action?docID=199376. Godio, Mili. “Racial Representation in the Media: How Annie Is More Than Just a Remake.” UF Prism, 11 Feb. 2015, ufprism.com/2015/02/11/racial-representationin-the-media-how-annie-is-more-than-just-a-remake. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022. Hamilton, Virginia. The Girl Who Spun Gold. Blue Sky P, 2000. Harriot, Michael. “Books in Blackface: Barnes & Noble Celebrates Black History Month by Showcasing White Books.” The Root, G/O Media Inc., 5 Feb. 2020, www.theroot.com/books-in-blackface-barnes-noble-celebrates-black-his1841473226. Accessed 26 Jul. 2022. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/longwood/detail. action?docID=1016075. Martin, Cathlena. “Charlotte’s Website: Media Transformation and the Intertextual Web of Children’s Culture.” Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities, edited by Rachel Carroll, Bloomsbury, 2009, pp. 85–95. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/longwood/detail. action?docID=766047. Mayer, Mercer. Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp. Illustrated by 1st Aladin Paperbacks ed., Simon & Schuster, 1997. McKinny, L. L. A Blade So Black. Imprint, 2018. McLemore, Anna Marie. The Mirror Season. Macmillan, 2021. Myers, Christopher. “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.” New York Times, 16 March 2014, p. 7 SR. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/newspapers/ march-16-2014-page-7-sr/docview/1932865259/se-2. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, Rutgers UP, 2000, pp. 54–76. Tolson, Nancy D. “Dreaming in Color.” Radical Teacher, no. 81, Apr. 2008, pp. 43–45. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&A N=31967812&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Washington, Donna L. Boo Stew. Holiday House, 2021. The Witches. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Warner Bros Pictures, 2020. A Wrinkle in Time. Directed by Ava DuVernay, Walt Disney Studios, 2018. Zoboi, Ibi. Pride. Harper Collins, 2018.

Contributors

Hatice Bay studied English Literature at METU, Turkey, and graduated with a PhD in American Literature from the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include city literature, literature of immigration, historical fiction, ecofiction, and road narratives. She is currently an independent researcher. Her recent publications include “Racial Melancholia and Poetics of (Im)mobility in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.” Time, Space and Mobility, edited by Konstantinos D. Karatzas, Warsaw: IRF Press, 2018, pp. 83–88, Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul: Exploring the Heterotopic and Third Spaces in Paul Auster’s and Orhan Pamuk’s City Novels. Peter Lang, 2020, and “Moving Beyond Appalachia: Social Mobility in J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 9, Dec. 2021, pp. 8–18. Rhonda Brock-Servais is a Professor at Longwood University where she regularly teaches courses in Young Adult Literature and Children’s Literature. She is also an affiliate faculty member of Hollins University’s Children’s Literature MA. Finally, she is an editor for the international journal Children’s Literature in Education. Patrick Ness is currently one of her favorite YA writers. Heather K. Cyr is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University in 2017 with a dissertation on real-world landscapes in children’s fantasy literature and has published on Rick Riordan’s works and presented conference papers on spaces and places in children’s literature from museums to gardens. Heather has been fortunate to attend the University of Antwerp Children’s Literature Summer School in both 2018 and 2019. Currently, she’s working on a critical edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden with Dr. Shelley King of Queen’s University.

262 Contributors Melanie Duckworth is an Australian of British heritage who grew up on the lands of the Kaurna and Boandik people in South Australia. She now lives in Norway and is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Østfold University College. Her research interests include Australian literature, children’s literature, and ecocriticism, and her work has been published in IRCL, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Australian Literary Studies, and Environmental Humanities (forthcoming), as well as several edited books. She is co-editor of Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2021–2022) and is currently working on the biography of Australian children’s author Christobel Mattingley. Željka Flegar is an Associate Professor at the University of Osijek in Croatia, where she teaches and engages in research in English language and literature, media, and drama. She has published articles on the linguistic and narrative aspects of children’s literature and culture, adaptations, and popular media. She co-edited, with Ivana Moritz, the collection Children and Languages Today: First and Second Language Literacy Development (Vernon Press, 2019). Her work has been published in International Research in Children’s Literature (IRCL), Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature in Education, and other international publications. Since 2020, Flegar has been a member of the editorial board of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Longwood University, USA (2021). Kathleen Forrester is an SSHRC-supported PhD candidate in Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education. Studying under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Marshall, she researches kinship in children’s literature through a queer ecology framework. She has an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of British Columbia and a Graduate Certificate in Children’s Literature from Deakin University (Australia). In 2017, her middlegrade manuscript, Jaida Wood, was longlisted for the international Times/ Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition. Kathleen has published peer-reviewed papers on topics related to children’s literature in the International IBBY journal, Bookbird, in the Canadian journal, Jeunesse, and most recently in the open-access journal, Barnboken. Elizabeth Garri is a Communication Sciences and Disorders major, Children’s Literature minor, and Cormier Honors Student at Longwood University. Her research interests center on children’s literature as a reflection of social norms, especially with respect to the role of diversity and inclusion in mainstream American culture.

Contributors  263 Caroline Hamilton-McKenna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her research centers on spatial examinations of contemporary YA literature and the ways in which adolescent readers engage with those texts in classrooms. Through a combined theoretical framework of feminist cultural geography and critical mobilities, she considers how teaching spatial tools of literary analysis in secondary schools might offer young people opportunities to critically explore their own relationships to everyday spaces, places, and communities—including their potential to transform them. Her work has been published in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; English Teaching: Practice and Critique; and Children’s Literature in Education. Smiljana Narančić Kovač is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her research interests include comparative literature, the narrative, children’s literature, and picturebook theory. She served as the PI for a national research project about children’s literature translations (2015–2018). Her works embrace a theoretical treatise on picturebook as a narrative (a monograph in Croatian, 2015) and numerous papers and chapters in various relevant publications, including The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, editor, 2018), Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships (Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, and Irena Barbara Kalla, editors, 2021), Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks (Nina Goga, Sarah Hoem Iversen, and Anne-Stefi Teigland, editors, 2021), and Political and ­Cultural Changes and Transformations in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Children’s Literature (Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Farriba Schulz., ­editors, 2023). She edited and co-edited several books, including Translations of Children’s Literature: A View from Croatia (with Ivana Milković), in Croatian (2019). She is the Head of the Centre for Research of Children’s Literature and Culture (Zagreb, Croatia) and the Editor-in-Chief of Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture. Margaret Mackey is a Professor Emerita in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She has written numerous books and articles about young people’s literacies and literatures in a variety of media. Her most recent book is One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography (2016), which has a significant spatial focus. Her newest book is with Bloomsbury Academic in 2022: Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections. Michael J. Martin is a Professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University where he teaches courses in American literature, Young Adult

264 Contributors literature, and literary theory/criticism. He has published his work in such journals as Studies in American Naturalism, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, MidAmerica, and The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Chris McGee teaches Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Longwood University in Virginia, along with courses on film and popular culture. His research interests include children’s detective fiction and horror films for an adolescent audience. He is the author of the forthcoming Full of Secrets: Detective Fiction for Young Readers. Madison McLeod completed an MA in English (1850s to the Present) at King’s College London in 2017 and completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023. Her research interests center around the digital mapping of protagonists in children’s fantasy literature, mythology in children’s literature, and the intersection of feminist studies and children’s literature. The methodology on which her research is based has been published in “An Initial Foray into Digital Mapping of London in Children’s and Young Adult Literature” in International Research in Children’s Literature journal’s Research in Action series edited by Kimberley Reynolds. Her publications include “Architecture and Magic – Mapping the London of Children’s Fantasy Fiction” in Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks edited by Jill Rudd, Torsten Schmiedeknecht, and Emma Hayward and the forthcoming “London as a Magical Location in the Harry Potter Series” in The Ivory Tower, Harry Potter, and Beyond edited by Lana Whited. Emma K. McNamara is completing a doctorate at Ohio State University focusing on representations of girlhood, feminist narratology, and young adult romance. She has Master’s degrees in Secondary English Education and Children’s Literature from the University of the District of Columbia and Simmons College, respectively, and is dually certified in Culturally Responsive Literature Instruction from Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the chair of the Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, the coordinator of YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, and a member of the Children’s Literature Association Article Award Committee. She has published on Gossip Girl and urban theory and is a reviewer for Kirkus and Children’s Books Ireland. Jennifer M. Miskec is a Professor of English at Longwood University in Virginia, USA, where she co-directs the Children’s Literature English Major Concentration and Children’s Literature Minor and teaches several children’s and young adult literature and culture courses. Miskec also leads children’s culture study abroad programs to Croatia and Serbia and to South Africa. Miskec’s

Contributors  265 scholarly work is primarily centered on studies of contemporary American children’s and YA literature. Miskec co-edited, with Annette Wannamaker, a collection of essays on Early Readers, The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers (Routledge, 2016). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia (2019) and a Fulbright Specialist at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2022). Amber Moore is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include adolescent literacies, feminist pedagogies, teacher education, arts-based research, rape culture, and trauma literature, particularly YA sexual assault narratives. Her work can be found in journals such as Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Qualitative Inquiry, among others. Catherine Olver has recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis, “Ecoconscious: Skilful Sensing in Young Adult Fantasy Literature,” examines how contemporary fantasy novels’ sensory descriptions portray human characters participating skillfully in the more-than-human world. Ben Screech is a Lecturer in English and Education at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK. Ben’s recent publications include “An Interview with Hayley Long” (VOYA, 2019), “Unsilencing the Child” (PRACTICE, 2019), and “Mental Health in YA Literature” (Paper Lanterns, 2020). He has recently completed an ERASMUS+ research project exploring the relationship between disciplinary literacy and social and emotional learning. Ben was a Visiting Fellow at the International Youth Library in Munich in July 2023. Maretta Sidiropoulou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Sciences in the Early Childhood Democritus University of Thrace. Her field of study is “Reading and Writing: Teaching Approaches and Applications.” She is a member of the Collaborating Academic Staff at the Hellenic Open University teaching at the postgraduate program “Sciences of Education.” She is also teaching at the Interdisciplinary Post Graduate Program “Pedagogy through Innovative Approaches, Technologies and Education” at the University of West Attica. She is a member of the Hellenic Department of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) and also member of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA). Among her main scientific interests are literacy practices, visual texts and representation, and anthropological aspects of reading.

266 Contributors Jennifer Slagus (they/she) is a neurodivergent PhD student in Social/Cultural/Political Contexts of Education at Brock University, researching with the guidance of children’s literature scholar, Dr. Lissa Paul. Jennifer holds an MA in Library & Information Science from the University of South Florida and completed New York University’s Publishing Institute. Their research focuses on neurodiversity representation in the twenty-first century middle-grade prose and graphic novels. Jennifer lives in Ontario, Canada with their partner, three regal cats, and a vexing chowsky. Katharine Slater is an Associate Professor of English at Rowan University, where she teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature. Her most recent publication titles include “‘A Ghost You Can Feel and Hear but Never See’: Queer Hauntings in Emily of New Moon,” “Daisy Ashford and the Child Writer’s Use of Scale,” and “‘Lurched Forward and Stopped’: Last Stop on Market Street  and Black Mobility.” Her current book project examines the queer geographies of YA literature, arguing that queer female characters grow and move in ways that disturb sequential narratives of adolescent development. Ivy Linton Stabell is an Associate Professor of English at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York. She has published her research on early American children’s literature and modern children’s nonfiction in Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and several book collections. Björn Sundmark is a Professor of English literature at Malmö University (Sweden), where he teaches English literature and children’s literature. He is the author of the study Alice in the Oral-Literary Continuum (Lund UP, 1999) and the co-editor of four essay collections: Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), The Nation in Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2013), Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature: Where Children Rule  (Routledge, 2016), and Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature (Makadam, 2021). He is also one of the editors of The Companion to Jabberwocky in Translation (Evertype, 2022, in press). He was the editor of Bookbird – Journal of International Children’s Literature 2015–2018, served on the Swedish Arts Council 2013–2016, and was Chair of the Swedish August Jury 2016–2019. Meghan M. Sweeney is an Associate Professor of English at UNC Wilmington, where she teaches courses in children’s and adolescent literature and popular culture. In addition to her publications in a variety of children’s literature journals, she is the co-editor of a collection entitled Remaking

Contributors  267 the American College Campus and, most recently, co-author of an article in the Journal of Popular Music Studies on experimental children’s music. Jose Monfred C. Sy teaches Philippine studies in the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature of the University of the Philippines Diliman. He received his Master of Arts (Philippine Studies) and Bachelor of Arts (Comparative Literature), summa cum laude, from the same university. He is currently the Project Leader of the Program on Alternative Development of the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies. His research appears in Literary Cultures across the World (2018), Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies (2019), and Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2021). He also writes and translates children’s books and teaches at the Bakwit School for the Lumad with the Save Our Schools Network. Lance Weldy is a Professor of English and teaches classes in freshman composition and children’s and young adult literature. He has co-edited several collections of scholarship on children’s literature, including the C. S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia New Casebook and a special issue on Sexualities and Children’s Culture for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. His current research interests include the social construction of childhood sexuality and the multivalent nature of queerness and its relation to Christian fundamentalism. His latest publications include “The Queerness of the Man-Child: Narcissism and Silencing in Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof Series” and “Visual Identity and the Queer Aesthetics of Passing: Gay Teen Body Politics in Sebastian, Beautiful Thing, and Get Real,” both published in Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research. His most recent publication is the edited anthology, BJU and Me: Queer Voices from the World’s Most Christian University, published by the University of Georgia Press (June 2022).

Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. abandoned spaces 6, 40, 42, 45, 230 Aboriginal acrylic painting 125 Aboriginal art 123, 125, 127 adaptations: artistic 226; Croatian 205, 206, 210; cultural 210; evolutionary 187; theatrical 205; and transformative placing 230–234; and translation 204–213; for young people 252–258 adolescence 41, 45, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177; literary 79–85; overview 79; spatiality 80 adult companion 237 affinity spaces 226; see also space(s) Aixelá, Javier Franco 204 Akala: The Dark Lady 193 Alcott, Louisa May 174 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 8, 204–205, 206, 209, 210, 213, 256 alien bodies 18 Almqvist, Bertil: Barna Hedenhös på vinterresa i Sverige (The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children) 25–27, 26, 29 Altrows, Aiyana 89 America: cultural landscape 252; literary regionalism 31 American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 106 American children: culture 253; and young adult literature 252 American Indian Movement 146

The Amulet of Samarkand (Stroud) 193 Andersen, Hans Christian 256; “The Snow Queen” 256 Anderson, Benedict 21 Annie Live! 254–255 Anthropocene 7, 132–134, 136; children’s literature 132; re‑placing Indigenous land and children within 132–139 apartheid of literature 252 Arab minorities 199 ArcGIS 193, 196, 197 architecture 6, 59; and authority 65–66; domestic 63–64; fictional 59; literary 59 archival spaces 4 Arizpe, Evelyn 236–237, 240, 242 The Arrival (Tan) 151–160 artistic adaptations 226 Ashing, Inger 141 At the School Gate (Roldan and Martinez) 163, 166–168 authority 17, 59–66; and architecture 65–66; governmental 61–62; political 173 backfisch model 175–177 Bagong Lipunan (New Society) 162, 166–168 Baker, John 124 Bal, Mieke 216; Narratology 216 Banet‑Weiser, Sarah 89 Barkdoll, Jayme 39, 40

270 Index Barna Hedenhös på vinterresa i Sverige (The Winter Journey of the Hedenhös Children) (Almqvist) 25–27, 26, 29 Barthes, Roland 15, 153, 155 Bavidge, Jenny 51–52, 80; “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature” 51 becoming kin 119–120 becoming‑with, queer ecology of 114–115 Benitez, Zoe 253 Benjamin, Walter 160 Berens, Charlie 35 Beskow, Elsa: Olles Skidfärd (Olle’s Ski Trip) 22–24, 24 Bewitching Season (Doyle) 193 beyond the eco‑warrior child in children’s literature 7, 141–146 The Big Splash (Ferraiolo) 71 Billman, Carol 71 Bishop, Rudine Sims 36, 252 Black Mist Burnt Country exhibition of 2016 122 A Blade So Black (McKinny) 256 Blanco, Maria del Pilar 154 Boo Stew (Washington) 257 Bosio, Emilio 107, 108 Bouldoumi, Ioanna: Varemarestan 240 boundary mentalities 16 Bowman, Benjamin 146 Boyce, Frank Cottrell: The Unforgotten Coat 13–20 Bradford, Clare 114, 226; Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature 2 Brah, Avtar 194 Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World 142 Brochin, Carol 81 Brosch, Renate 62, 188–189 Buell, Lawrence 105 Building Children’s Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks 3 Bunzl, Peter: Cogheart 193 Burger, Glenn 19 Burke, Edmund 60–61 Buse, Peter 164

Bushell, Sally 187, 190 Butler, Judith 157 Butterly, Lauren 123, 129 canon 8, 214–220, 253; focalizing 215–217; maker 216; novels 217; (re)placing 218–220; prescriptive 214; reproducer 216; standard and standardizing 214 canonical neurodivergent protagonists 216 canonical novels 217 Cantrell, Sarah K. 227 Capin, Hannah: Foul is Fair 88, 91, 92 Carroll, Jane Suzanne 163; Landscape in Children’s Literature 2 Carroll, Lewis 204, 205, 256; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 8, 204–205, 206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 256 The Case of the Left‑Handed Lady (Springer) 73 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) 79, 192 Caulfield, Holden 79, 192 Cawelti, John G. 69, 71 Cecire, Maria Sachiko 2 Chandler, Karen 2 change of place 1, 2 Charlotte’s Daughter (Rowson) 177 Charlotte Temple (Rowson) 7, 171–177 Chicago Tribune 254 “Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism” (Jones) 51 children: demographics 192–202; picturebooks 113–120; re‑placing within the Anthropocene 132–139 The Children of the Anthropocene (Lack) 134 children’s culture 4–9, 255–258; abroad program in three easy steps 103–108; American 253, 255, 258; essays 2; landscape of 252; place 2, 3; spaces 3 children’s literature 3, 4–9, 253, 255; American 257; Anglo‑American 132; Anthropocene 132; beyond eco‑warrior child in 141–146; change of place 1;

Index  271 and culture 2; detective office 69–70; eco‑warrior child in 141–146; environmental 119, 142; home‑as‑sanctuary topos in 64; places and spaces of/for reading in 236–242; places in 1–2; progressive 169 Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography (Hudson) 2 Children’s Literature and New York City (Whyte and O’Sullivan) 3 Christales, Graciela 256–257 Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) 244 Clark, Catherine: Wurst Case Scenario 32–33, 35 class 36, 82, 104, 114, 194, 198, 201, 202; categories of 195; concept of 192; protagonist’s 192 CLPE (CLPE Centre for Literacy) 192, 198–199 Coats, Karen 5; “The End?: Approaches to Closure in Early Readers” 1 Cogheart (Bunzl) 193 Cole, Joanna 132; The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge 132 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 15 collaborative growth 175 collective feminist rage 88 Collins, Christopher 181, 183 The Concept of the Foreign (Saunders) 13 conceptual blending 232 Connor, David J. 195 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) 152, 153 convergence: media 234; places and spaces 226 Cooke, Trish: So Much! 13 Cooper, Brittney 89 Cooperative Children’s Book Center 215 Cortez, Ella 166 Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Lutz) 32 Country 122–130; multimodal expressions of 124–126; and place 123–124; and space 123–124

Crenshaw, Kimberle 194 Cresswell, Timothy 8, 21, 24, 29, 39–40, 42, 104, 172, 216, 217, 226; on children and detective office 68; on place 41; Place: A Short Introduction 1 The Cricket in Times Square (Selden) 96 critical mobilities 81, 84 croquet 210 culture 226–227; adaptation 210; American children’s 253; and children’s literature 2; digital 231; geography 80, 81, 84, 246; landscapes 2; participatory 226; poetics 226; transposition 204 Cutter‑Mackenzie, Amy 2 Czapnik, Dana 80–81; The Falconer 80–85 Dahl, Roald 255 Dairy Queen (Murdock) 31, 33, 37 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) 133–135, 145 Danforth, Emily: The Miseducation of Cameron Post 81 Daniels, Stephen 181 The Dark Days Club (Goodman) 193 The Dark Lady (Akala) 193 Davidson, Cathy 172, 174 default visualization 188 Deleuze, Gilles 227 Delivoria, Myrto: The Giveaway Library 237, 239 demographic maps 194 Derrida, J. 152, 155, 157, 163, 164 Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard‑Boiled Tradition (Walton and Jones) 72 detective criticism 70–74 detective fiction 70 Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Thomas) 70 detective office 68; children’s literature 69–70; sleuths 69 digital cultures 231 digital literary mapping 193 digital literary maps 193, 194 Dinter, Sandra 51 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 16–17

272 Index displacement 3–4, 7, 151–152, 157, 159, 229, 254 Diversity and Inclusion in Environmental Activism 146 Dobrin, Sidney 2 Dolenčić Tonković, Ana 206, 210, 212 domestic architecture 63–64 domestication 204, 208 Doughty, Terri: Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature 2 Dovetail, Daisy 230 Doyle, Marissa: Bewitching Season 193 dramatizations 204, 205, 206, 210–213 Dr. Seuss: The Lorax 113–114, 132 Dundas, Zach 69 DuVernay, Ava: A Wrinkle in Time 258 Earth Friends: Fair Fashion (Webb) 132 Easterlin, Nancy 187–189 Echterling, Clare 114, 143 Eckermann, Ali Cobby 122, 129n3 ecocitizens 114 ecofeminism 4 eco‑warrior 141–142, 144, 146 EDSA People Power Revolution 166–167 Edwards, Yvonne 125, 127 Eggers, Dave 39 Ellison, Ralph 31 embodied cognition 7 embodied counternarratives 217–218, 220 embodying epistemologies of home in They Say Blue 115–118 empty spaces 123, 230 “The End?: Approaches to Closure in Early Readers” (Coats) 1 English language 205, 208–209 English‑language environmental picturebook 113 Enola Holmes series (Springer) 72–73 environmental picturebooks 143 epistemologies of home 115–118 Eric (Pratchett) 1 Eslanda, Lady 232, 233 Espiritu, Yen Le 151, 157 ethnicity 14, 15, 36, 194, 195, 198, 232; map of London 199, 200, 201 ethnic minority category of London 198

evangelical media 4, 8, 244 evolutionary adaptation 187 excessive information 188 experience sampling 189 Experiencing Environment and Place through Children’s Literature 2 The Extraordinary Life of Greta Thunberg (Jina) 142 fairy tales 228–230 The Falconer (Czapnik) 80–85 Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (Wojcik) 3 fantasy 4, 23, 27–28, 49; children’s 50, 52, 257–258; and contiguity 57; fiction 192; spaces 50, 257; works 253; youth literature 192–195, 198–199, 201–202 fantasy literature: of children 57, 193, 195; protagonists in 193; for young people 194, 199 Fauconnier, Gilles 232 feminists: cultural geography 81, 84; geography 81; rage 88–94; whirlpooling 88–91 Ferraiolo, Jack D.: The Big Splash 71 Ferreira da Silva, Denise 157 Ferri, Beth A. 195 fictional places 4, 226 Field, Hannah 2 Filipino Youth of The Bookmark, Inc. 165 fish stories 9n1 Fitzhugh, Louise: Harriet the Spy 96–102 Fitzsimmons, Phil 123 Fletcher, Charlie: Stoneheart trilogy 6, 49–57 floating signifier 195 Fludernik, Monika 62 The Flying House anime series 8, 244–250; modeling Jesus’ behavior through pilgrimages 247–249; pilgrimages in first season of 244; pilgrimage studies, and place 244–246; unintentional extended pilgrimage 246–247 focalized protagonist 216 Fontenot, Deseree 114

Index  273 foras 13 foreignization 204 foreignness: power and hierarchy 14; and theatricality 16; in The Unforgotten Coat 13–20 Forget Me Not (Terry) 218–219 Foucault, Michel 14, 18, 20, 227, 238; Discipline and Punish 16–17; Micro‑Physics of Power 239; The Order of Things 16; Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias 238 Foul is Fair (Capin) 88–94 Fountain, Ele 132; Melt 132 Freire, Paulo 108 “Fridays for Future” 142 From the Mixed‑Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Konigsburg) 96 Fulbright program 4, 9n2, 103 Fulton, Robert 171 Gaard, Greta 114, 143 gang rape 88–90 gang rape‑revenge 88–94 Gay, Roxane 89 Gee, James 226 geography 187, 226–227; cultural 37, 80, 81, 84, 246; feminist 81; imaginative 59, 61, 66, 226–227, 234; queer and rural 81; sub‑arctic 21 geospatial technologies 7–8 Gibson, Heather J. 105 The Girl Who Spun Gold (Hamilton) 257 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 89 Giroux, Henry A. 104, 107 Giugni, Miriam 135 The Giveaway Library (Papatheodoulou, Hatziplis, and Delivoria) 237, 239 Glenn, Wendy 81 “Global Citizenship Education and Humanism: A Process of Becoming and Knowing” (Guajardo) 108 Goade, Michaela 133, 143–144, 147n4 Goga, Nina: Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes 2

Gold, Hanna 132; The Last Bear 132 Goodman, Allison: The Dark Days Club 193 Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Inspiring Young Changemakers 142 Gordon, Avery 152, 159 Grand Tour tradition 103 Green, John 39; Looking for Alaska 39–45; on place and space 39–45 Green Acres Syndrome 32 Grella, George 71 “the Greta Thunberg effect” 120n3 Gringotts Bank 60, 61 Griswold, Jerry 69 Guajardo, Maria 108 Haase, Donald 229 Hall, Matthew 122 Hall, Stuart 194 Hamilton, Alexander 171 Hamilton, Virginia: The Girl Who Spun Gold 257 Haraway, Donna 115–116, 119 Harriet the Spy (Fitzhugh) 6, 79–80, 96–102 Harris, Kim 32 Harry Potter (Rowling) 59, 65, 66, 73–74, 184, 198, 227–228 Hatziplis, Dikaios: The Giveaway Library 237, 239 Hayward, Emma 3 Heard, R. Christopher 249 HerStory: 50 Women and Girls Who Shook up the World 142 Hertel, Ralf 17 heterotopias 227, 238 high‑impact practices (HIPs) 106–107 Hodgeson, Lucia 176–177 Honeyman, Susan E. 50–51 The Horn Book 147n1 “How to Save the World and Other Lessons from Children’s Environmental Literature” (Echterling) 114 Hudson, Aïda 2, 226; Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography 2 Hutcheon, Linda: A Theory of Adaptation 2

274 Index The Ickabog (Rowling) 8, 225–234 identity markers 192, 195 Ikeda, Daisaku 108 imaginative geography 59–61, 66, 226–227, 228, 234 imagined community 21, 29 inclusion 23, 50, 55, 143, 217; illusion of 215 inclusivity movements 215 Indigenous land re‑placing within the Anthropocene 7, 132–139 Indigenous presence 133 indirect references 205, 210 Infinite Jest 39 interaction 34, 106, 122, 123, 175, 194, 239 interplay 19, 80, 194, 230 intersect/ion(ality) 194 intersectional protagonist 194 “An Investigation of Experiential and Transformative Learning in Study Abroad Programs” (Strange and Gibson) 105 Isang Harding Papel (A Garden of Paper 2015) (Rivera and Joson) 163, 165, 166–168 It’s Like This, Cat (Neville) 96 Ivy and Bean Take the Case 68 Jackson, Kathy Merlock 3 Jansson, Tove: Moominland Midwinter 27; Moomin’s Winter Follies 28 janteloven 34 Jay‑Z 96 Jenkins, Henry 226 Jina, Divika 142; The Extraordinary Life of Greta Thunberg 142 Jones, Manina 72, 73; Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard‑Boiled Tradition 72 Jones, Owain: “Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism” 51 Joson, Rommel: Isang Harding Papel (A Garden of Paper 2015) 163, 165, 166–168 Kaell, Hillary 245, 250 Kaplonski, Christopher 15 Kay, Jilly Boyce 89 Keillor, Garrison 33; A Prairie Home Companion 33

Kelen, Christopher (Kit) 2 Keralis, Spencer 172, 177n1 Keys, Alicia 96 Keys, Wendy 81 Kidd, Kenneth 2 King Fred 228, 232 Kirby, Loll 132; Old Enough to Save the Planet 132 knowing, limits of 118–119 Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature (Doughty and Thompson) 2 Konigsburg, E. L. 96 Kontaiou, Emilia: Varemarestan 240 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) 15 Kummerling‑Meibauer, Bettina: Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes 2 Kusumagić‑Kafedžić, Larisa 108 Kwaymullina, Ambelin 123–124, 126, 129 Kwaymullina, Blaze 123–124, 126, 129 Lack, Bella: The Children of the Anthropocene 134 Landscape in Children’s Literature (Carroll) 2 Landscapes: of America and Australia 4; American cultural landscape 252; cultural 2; of Kuarna people 123; of literature and childhood 4; media 4–5; nostalgic 49–57; physical 31; spectral 4, 162–168; Swedish winter 29; of teenage consumer culture 82; urban 3, 79, 81 Larsen, Jonas 176 The Last Bear (Gold) 132 Lefebvre, Henri: The Production of Space 241 Lester, Yami 129n3 libraries 8, 104, 216, 236–239 limits of knowing 118–119 Lindstrom, Carole 132, 133, 134, 135, 137–138, 144; We Are Water Protectors 7, 132–139, 143 literary adolescence: contingent mobilities of 79–85 literary regionalism: and place studies 36–37

Index  275 literary scholarship 81, 201, 202 literary tourism 4, 7 Little Eddie 239–240 Little Guide to Books (Pagona and Stamatiadis) 239–240 living space 122–130 Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp (Mayer) 257 Lobster Quadrille song (Turtle) 208 Lolita (Nabokov) 192 London‑based fantasy youth literature 193 Looking for Alaska (Green) 39–45 The Lorax (Dr. Seuss) 113–114, 120n1, 132, 143 Lord, Cynthia: Rules 216–220 Lovett, Johnny 129n3 Lutz, Tom 31; Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value 32 Macbeth 88 Mackey, Margaret 3, 7, 62, 227 magic realism 255–258 The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge (Cole) 132 Malfoy Manor 64 Manne, Kate 89 Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes (Goga and Kummerling‑Meibauer) 2 Maralinga – The Aṉangu Story 122–130; multimodal expressions of country 124–126; place, space, and country 123–124; spatial histories, temporality, and relationships 126–129 Marcos, Ferdinand 162 Marcos, Ferdinand “Bongbong,” Jr. 162 Marshall, Elizabeth 81 Marshall, Ian 120n2 Martial Law: with picturebooks 162–163; spectral landscapes of 164–168 Martin, Michelle 2 Martinez, Nina: At the School Gate 163, 166–168 Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl 146 Massey, Doreen 81, 163

Massey, Geraldine 114 Mattingley, Christobel 122 Mayer, Mercer 257; Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp 257 McCloud, Scott 154 McGilloway, Mélanie 242 McKeithen, Will 115 McKinny, L. L. 256; A Blade So Black 256 McLemore, Anna Marie 256–257; The Mirror Season 256 media convergence 234 media landscapes 4–5 Medina, Carmen 81 Melt (Fountain) 132 memory 7, 45, 92, 151–152, 154 metareading 237, 241–242 #MeToo 89 MetroCom 165 Micro‑Physics of Power (Foucault) 239 middle grade literature 214–220 Midwest Survival Guide (Berens) 35 Might Magazine 39 Miller, Chanel 88 The Mirror Season (McLemore) 256 The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Danforth) 81 mobility 4, 6, 19, 81–82, 198; adolescent 79; student 104 Mock Turtle 208; Lobster Quadrille song 208 Moominland Midwinter (Jansson) 27, 29 Moomin’s Winter Follies (Jansson) 28 Moore, Alan Tonnies 189 Moretti, Franco 198 Morton, Timothy 116 multimodal expressions of country 124–126 multimodality 122–130 Murdock, Catherine Gilbert: Dairy Queen 31, 33 Myers, Christopher 252 My First Heroes: Eco Warriors 142 mystery 69, 119 Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita 192 Naidoo, Beverley: The Other Side of Truth 13 Nancy, Jean‑Luc 241 Nansen, Fridtjof 22–23, 29n2

276 Index Narratology (Bal) 216 nation 21–22, 29, 36, 157, 160, 173–174 The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations in Childhood 2 negotiative politics 81 neurodivergence 217–220 neurodivergent‑centering literature 220 neurodivergent‑embodied counternarratives 217–218 neurodivergent middle grade literature 214–220 neurodivergent youth 214 Neville, Emily Cheney: It’s Like This, Cat 96 New Historicism and Cultural Materialism 226 New York Times 216 Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist 98 Nielson Book Research 120n3 “#NoDAPL” (“No Dakota Access Pipeline”) 144 Nodelman, Perry 16; The Pleasures of Children’s Literature 2 Nordenskiold, Adolf Erik 22 nostalgia: landscape 49–57; reflective 49–50; restorative 49–50 The Nowhere Girls (Reed) 88–94 Nxumalo, Fikile 135, 137 O’Flynn, Siobhan 2 Old Enough to Save the Planet (Kirby) 132 Olles Skidfärd (Olle’s Ski Trip) (Beskow) 22–24, 24 opening–closing system 238 The Order of Things (Foucault) 16 Orem, Sarah 89 Orientalism (Said) 13, 15, 226 orientational specificity 62 The Origins of Intelligence in Children (Piaget) 236 O’Sullivan, Keith: Children’s Literature and New York City 3 Other/Otherness 16–19 The Other Side of Truth (Naidoo) 13 Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (Foucault) 238 outwardlookingness 85 Owen, Coco 14 #OwnVoices 215

Pacini‑Ketchabaw, Veronica 135–136 Pagona, Stavroula: Little Guide to Books 239–240 Pallasmaa, Juhani 59 Palumbo‑Liu, David 18 Papatheodoulou, Antonis: The Giveaway Library 237, 239 Papazian, Gretchen 242 The Papunya Schoolbook of Country and History 125 participatory culture 226 Payne, Philip G. 2 Peeren, Esther 154 People Power Revolution 162 Perec, Georges 240 Performing National Identity 16 Pfeiffer, Julie 9, 174–176, 178n7 Pfister, Manfred 16–17 Philippine Constabulary Metropolitan Command 165 Philippines 162–169 physical landscape 31 Piaget, Jean 239–240; The Origins of Intelligence in Children 236 Pichler, Pia 194–195 picturebooks 21–29, 162–163, 237; reading the past for the future 168–169; remembering Martial Law with 162–163; spectral landscape of Martial Law 164–168; spectral landscapes (spaces of presence‑absence) 163–164 Pini, Barbara 81 place(s) 181–190, 194, 226–227, 244; attachment 4, 7, 142, 144–145; and country 123–124; Cresswell on 41; fictional 226; Green on 39–45; of/for reading in children’s literature 236–242; and pilgrimage studies 244–246; poetics of 234; and power 192; and space 123–124; vs. space 39–40; transformative 230–234; transnational poetics of 225–234; in The Unforgotten Coat 13–20; virtual 226, 227–228; and youth identity 80 Place: A Short Introduction (Cresswell) 1 place studies 1–3, 5, 104; and literary regionalism 36–37

Index  277 placing‑in‑process 190 The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (Nodelman and Reimer) 2 poetics of place 226, 227, 234 poverty map 196, 197 power and place 192 Prager, Arthur 68–69 A Prairie Home Companion (Keillor) 33 Pratchett, Terry: Eric 1 presence 137–139; Indigenous 133; Simpson on 133 Pride (Zoboi) 253–255 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 253 Prieto, Eric 226 The Princess and the Frog (Disney) 232 The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 241 Promising Young Woman 89 protagonists: canonical neurodivergent 216; class of 192; focalized 216; homes project class privilege 198; intersectional 194; judgments and value system of 193; race of 195; trajectories 194 quality regionalism 33 queer and rural geography 81 queer ecology 113; of becoming‑with 114–115; possibilities of children’s picturebooks 113–120 race 193, 194, 198; of protagonists 195 Radford, Gary P. 237 Radford, Marie L. 237 Rad Girls Can (Schatz) 142–143 Ragostin, Leslie T. 73 rape‑revenge stories 89 readers 181–190; imagination 227; individual approaches 182; and neurodivergent 214, 215; responses 225–234; sense of locatedness 182 reading: emotional processes of 242; experience 241–242; incidental images of 242; internalizing cognitive 242; literary representation of 236–241; metareading 237, 241–242; places of/for 236–242; spaces 236–241 realistic fiction 4, 214, 253–254, 257–258

Rebel Girls 142 Reed, Amy 88 Reflecting Realities project of CLPE 198 reflective nostalgia 6, 49–50 Refugee Boy (Zephaniah) 13 regional books 36 regionalism 33, 36, 37; American literary 31; quality 33 regional writing 31, 36 Reid, Alan 2 Reimer, Mavis: The Pleasures of Children’s Literature 2 relationships 114, 115, 126–129 re‑placing Indigenous land and children within the Anthropocene 132–139 Research Ethics Board 182 restorative nostalgia 49–50 Ritskes, Eric 135 Rivera, Augie: Isang Harding Papel (A Garden of Paper 2015) 163, 165, 166–168; Si Jhun‑Jhun, Noong Bago Ideklara ang Batas Militar (Jhun‑Jhun, Before the Declaration of Martial Law 2001) 163, 165, 166–168 Roldan, Sandra Nicole: At the School Gate 163, 166–168 “romance of reading” 242 Romanticism 51 Rose, Deborah Bird 124–125 Ross, Suzanne 113, 114 Rowling, J. K. 59–66; Harry Potter series 73–74, 184, 198; The Ickabog 8, 225–234; Volant Charitable Trust 225 Rowson, Susanna: Charlotte’s Daughter 177; Charlotte Temple 171–177 Roy, Malini 2 Rudd, Jill 3 Rudman, Masha Kabakow 37 Rules (Lord) 216–220 Russel, Danielle 72 Rycroft, Simon 181 safe house 166, 167 Said, Edward 16, 226; Orientalism 13, 15, 226 Salinger, J. D.: Catcher in the Rye 80, 192

278 Index Saunders, Rebecca: The Concept of the Foreign 13 Savigny, Heather 88 Schatz, Kate 143; Rad Girls Can 143 schemas 183 Scherff, Lisa 40 Schmiedeknecht, Torsten 3 School Library Journal 32 Schwenk, D. J. 33–35 Schwitzgebel, Eric 189 science fiction 257–258 Selden, George: The Cricket in Times Square 96 self‑referential process of feedback 237 Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who 147n1 Seven Falls 68 Shakespeare, William 207 The Short‑Wave Mystery 70 Si Jhun‑Jhun, Noong Bago Ideklara ang Batas Militar (Jhun‑Jhun, Before the Declaration of Martial Law 2001) (Rivera and Vallesteros) 163, 165, 166–168 Simpson, Leanne 137–138 skiing: mythologized historical moments 21–22; national sport of Sweden 21–29 Skurnick, Lizze 40 sleuths 68, 69; professional status of 70, 72, 74 Snell, Heather 80 “The Snow Queen” (Andersen) 256 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 182 socio‑economic classification 195 socio‑economic status 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198 So Much! (Cooke) 13 space(s) 181–190, 244; abandoned 6, 40, 42, 45, 230; affinity 226; archival 4; and country 123–124; empty 123, 230; Green on 39–45; living 122–130; in phenomenological approach 240; and place 123–124; vs. place 39–40; of presence‑absence 163–164; reading 236–241; of/for reading in children’s literature 236–242; virtual 226–228; and youth identity 80

Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present 2, 72 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Tuan) 244 spatial awareness 187 spatial histories 126–129 Speck, Catherine 122 specters 153, 163, 164, 167, 168 spectral geographies 164 spectrality 4, 7, 152–153, 164 spectral landscapes/spaces of presence‑absence 163–164; of Martial Law 164–168 Spittleworth, Lord 232 Spivak, Gayatri 18 Springer, Nancy: The Case of the Left‑Handed Lady 73; Enola Holmes series 72–73 Stahl, Miriam Klein 143 Stamatiadi, Daniela: Little Guide to Books 239–240 Standing Rock Sioux Reservation 133 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe 133 Star Trek 93 Steinbock, Daniel 153 Stephens, John 3, 125 stereotypes 183 Stoneheart trilogy (Fletcher) 49–57 “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature” (Bavidge) 51 Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children’s Narratives 3 Storyworld(s) 8, 96, 98, 204, 205, 210, 213 Strange, Hannah 105 Straub, Peter 33–34 Stroud, Jonathan: The Amulet of Samarkand 193 study abroad 6, 103–108; defined 103; GCE through 107–108; goal of 108; high‑impact practices (HIPs) 106–107 sub‑arctic geography 21 Sundmark, Bjorn 2 Sunrise Movement 146 Sweden: skiing national sport of 21–29; winter landscape 29

Index  279 Talbot, Margaret 40 Tamaki, Jillian 113, 118; They Say Blue 113, 115, 117, 120 Tan, Shaun 151–153, 155, 156, 156–157, 158, 159 Tatsunoko Productions 244–245 Taylor, Affrica 133, 135–136 temporality 117, 126–129, 157, 158, 238 Terry, Ellie 218–220; Forget Me Not 218–219 theatrical adaptations 205 theatricality: and foreignness 16 A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon) 2 They Say Blue (Tamaki) 113, 115; embodying epistemologies of home in 115–118; limits of knowing 118–119 Thomas, Ebony 80 Thomas, Ronald R.: Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science 70 Thompson, Dawn: Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature 2 Thornycroft, Thomas 53 The Three Investigators 69 Thunberg, Greta 137, 141 Tolson, Nancy D. 255 Tourette syndrome (TS) 218–219 tourist gaze 177 “A Town Should Have Twenty‑Five People: Harriet M. Welsch’s Small‑Town New York City” 6, 96–102 transactional relationship 17 transformative placing and adaptation 230–234 translations 204–210, 206; explicit references to source culture 205–210; indirect references 210 transnational poetics of place 225–234 transnational readings 226 trauma 228–230 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 89 Tuan, Yi‑Fu 39, 64, 105, 227, 244–250; Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience 244 Tudor, Aslan 145; Young Native Activist 146 tumbang preso 165, 167–168

Turner, Mark 232 Twain, Mark 174 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 172 The Unforgotten Coat (Boyce) 13–20; foreignness in 13–20; place in 13–20 Unigwe, Chika 136–137 Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (Bradford) 2 urban landscapes 3, 79, 81 Urry, John 176, 177 Vallesteros, Brian: Si Jhun‑Jhun, Noong Bago Ideklara ang Batas Militar (Jhun‑Jhun, Before the Declaration of Martial Law 2001) 163, 165, 166–168 Vallone, Lynne 226 Varemarestan (Bouldoumi and Kontaiou) 240 Vasa, Gustav 21–22, 25 virtual places 226, 227–228 virtual spaces 226–228 visualization 188–189 Vitez, Grgur 212 Volant Charitable Trust 225 Walker, Jana L. 134 Walton, Priscilla L. 73; Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard‑Boiled Tradition 72 Wangari’s Trees of Peace 143 Washington, Donna L.: Boo Stew 257 Watson, Myra 124 We Are Water Protectors (Lindstrom) 132–139, 143 Webb, Holly 132; Earth Friends: Fair Fashion 132 Welsch, Harriet M. 96–102 We Need Diverse Books 215 West, Mark I. 3 Western civilization cultures 207 whirlpool(s)‑ing 88–90 White, Cameron 107 White privilege 83–84 Whyte, Padraic: Children’s Literature and New York City 3 Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism 2

280 Index The Witches (Zemeckis) 255–256 Wojcik, Pamela Robertson: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction 3 Wright, Kate 116 A Wrinkle in Time (DuVernay) 258 Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey (Zilcosky) 1 Wurst Case Scenario (Clark) 32–33, 35 WWI 103 Wylie, John 152, 164 Xu Daozhi 123 young adult (YA): culture 254; gang rape‑revenge texts 88; literature 3–4, 45, 81, 84, 89, 193, 252

Young Native Activist (Tudor) 146 Young Water Protectors: A Story about Standing Rock 145–146 youth identity: and place 80; and space 80 youth literature 193 Zemeckis, Robert: The Witches 255–256 Zephaniah, Benjamin: Refugee Boy 13 Zilcosky, John 1; Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey 1 Zimmerman, Michael 19 Zipes, Jack 228–229 Zoboi, Ibi 253–254; Pride 253–255 Zoran, Gabriel 187