Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods [1st ed.] 9783030321451, 9783030321468

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LITERARY CULTURES AND CHILDHOODS

Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods Edited by Nathalie op de Beeck

Literary Cultures and Childhoods Series Editor Lynne Vallone Department of Childhood Studies Rutgers University Camden, NJ, USA

Scholarly interest in the literary figure of the child has grown exponentially over the last thirty years or so due, in part, to the increased attention given to children’s literature within the academy and the development of the multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies. Given the crucial importance of children to biological, social, cultural and national reproduction, it is not surprising that child and adolescent characters may be found everywhere in Anglo-American literary expressions. Across time and in every literary genre written for adults as well as in the vast and complex array of children’s literature, ‘the child’ has functioned as a polysemous and potent figure. From Harry Potter to Huck Finn, some of the most beloved, intriguing and enduring characters in literature are children. The aim of this finite five-book series of edited volumes is to chart representations of the figure of the child in Anglo-American literary cultures throughout the ages, mapping how they have changed over time in different contexts and historical moments. Volumes move chronologically from medieval/early modern to contemporary, with each volume addressing a particular period (eg ‘The Early Modern Child’, ‘The Nineteenth Century Child’ etc). Through the aggregate of the essays, the series will advance new understandings of the constructions of the child and the child within different systems (familial, cultural, national), as communicated through literature. Volumes will also serve, collectively, as an examination of the way in which the figure of the child has evolved over the years and how this has been reflected/anticipated by literature of the time. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15353

Nathalie op de Beeck Editor

Literary Cultures and Twenty-FirstCentury Childhoods

Editor Nathalie op de Beeck Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, WA, USA

Literary Cultures and Childhoods ISBN 978-3-030-32145-1    ISBN 978-3-030-32146-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

I ntroduction: Literary Cultures and Twenty-­First-Century Childhoods  1 Nathalie op de Beeck

Part I Children’s Rights and Role Models  23  hildren’s Right to Participate: Insights from the Story C of Malala 25 Jonathan Todres  he Wisdom of Getting Involved: Civic Engagement in T Contemporary Egyptian Children’s Literature 41 Yasmine Motawy  right Pasts, Brighter Futures: Biographies for Children B in the Early Twenty-First Century 57 Clémentine Beauvais

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Part II Social Justice and Diversity in Literature for Young Readers  81  We Need Diverse Books”: Diversity, Activism, and Children’s “ Literature 83 Sarah Park Dahlen What Having Two Mommies Looks Like Now: Queer Picture Books in the Twenty-First Century109 Derritt Mason

Part III Representing Youth, Claiming Identity, and Exercising Agency 139  aughing Out Loud or Lost in the Woods? Tween Girl L Identity in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels for Children141 Nina Christensen  Ganesha Is My Best Friend”: Homological Boyhood “ in Hindi Mythological Animated Films163 Anuja Madan  razilian Childhood and Literature in the Age of Digital B Technologies183 Edgar Roberto Kirchof

Part IV Coming of Age in the Anthropocene 207  nimals in Children’s Development209 A Gail F. Melson

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 xamining Animal Bodies in War-Related Media for E Children235 Amy Ratelle  he Power and Potential: An Ecocritical Reading of T Twenty-First-Century Childhood253 Alice Curry Index267

List of Contributors

Clémentine Beauvais  is a senior lecturer at the University of York (UK). Her research and teaching revolve around contemporary children’s literature, creative writing for and with children, and literary translation. She is the author of The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (John Benjamins, 2015), and the co-editor with Maria Nikolajeva of The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature (2017). She has written many articles on the theory and criticism of children’s literature. Nina Christensen  is Professor of Children’s Literature and Head of the Centre for Children’s Literature and Media at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current research project, Children and Books—Enterprises and Encounters Studies in the Production, Uses, and Experiences of Books for Children in Denmark c. 1790–1850, is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. She co-edits the John Benjamins Publishing Company’s series “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition” with Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, and she is co-­editing the second edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature with Lissa Paul and Philip Nel (NYU Press). Her most recent articles in English are “Picturebooks and representations of childhood” (Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, 2018), “Co-creating Literature Across Media and Modes of Expression: Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘In the Children’s Room’ (1865) and ‘Dance, Dance, Doll of Mine!’ (1872)” (Forum for World Literature Studies 10.1. 2018), and “Follow the Child, Follow the Books:

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Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to a Child-Centred History of Danish Children’s Literature 1790–1850” (with Charlotte Appel, IRCL 10.2, 2017). Alice  Curry  is the founder of Lantana Publishing, an award-winning independent publishing company that gives aspiring Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic authors a platform to publish, where she has commissioned award-winning picture books by authors and illustrators from nearly 25 countries. As a former academic lecturer, Alice has authored Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction (Palgrave, 2012) and co-­ edited the Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2016) and an issue of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature (January 2013). Alice is the 2017 winner of the Kim Scott Walwyn Prize for women in publishing. Sarah Park Dahlen  is an associate professor in the MLIS Program at St. Catherine University. She co-founded and co-edits the open-access journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature with Gabrielle Halko, she co-edited Diversity in Youth Literature with Jamie Campbell Naidoo, and she co-edited the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly’s Special Issue on Orphanhood and Adoption in Children’s Literature with Lies Wesseling. Her next books address race in the wizarding world with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Asian American youth literature with Paul Lai. Colleagues may find her at sarahpark.com, @readingspark, and at #Ravenclaw and #DiversityJedi. Edgar Roberto Kirchof  is a faculty member in the Doctor of Education and Cultural Studies program at the Lutheran University of Brazil (ULBRA). He holds a master’s degree in communication sciences from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil (1997), and PhD in Linguistics and Literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2001). He completed his postdoctoral studies in semiotics at the Kassel University, Germany, in 2006. His current main research interests focus on Semiotics, Cultural Studies, and Digital Literature for Children. Among his main recent publications are “Brazilian Children’s Literature in the Age of Digital Culture” (The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature, eds. John Stephens, Celia Abialil Belmiro, Alice Curry, Li Lifang, and Yasmine S. Motawy, 2018) and “Livros para crianças na era digital: Dos e-books aos book apps” (Travessias e travessuras na literatura infantil e

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juvenil: (trans)formação de leitores, eds. Renata Junqueira de Souza and Berta Lúcia Tagliari Feba, 2018). Anuja  Madan  is an assistant professor in the English Department of Kansas State University, where she teaches courses in World Literature, Global Comics, and Children’s Literature. She received her PhD in English from the University of Florida and her MPhil and MA in English from Delhi University. She has published a co-authored book, Notes of Running Feet: English in Primary Textbooks with Prof. Rimli Bhattacharya, Sreyoshi Sarkar, and Nivedita Basu, as well as articles on Jean-Luc Godard and picturebook retellings of the Mahabharata. Her most recent articles, on mythological Indian animation films and Indian graphic novels, have been published in John Stephens’ anthology The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature, in Michele Abate and Gwen A.  Tarbox’s Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, and in the South Asian Review special issue on South Asian Graphic Narratives (39.1-2). Derritt  Mason is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary, where he teaches and researches at the intersections of children’s literature, queer theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of a book on queer young adult literature and culture (forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi) and the co-editor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (Fordham University Press, 2019). Derritt has also published essays in venues including Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, English Studies in Canada, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Gail  F.  Melson is Professor Emerita at Purdue University in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies and in the Center for the Human-Animal Bond, and she has served as Visiting Professor at Radcliffe College, Tufts University, and Hebrew University (Jerusalem). She received her BA cum laude from Harvard University and MS and PhD in psychology from Michigan State University. Dr. Melson has authored 4 books and more than 65 articles and book chapters, and her book Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Harvard UP) has appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and French language editions. She lectures frequently on the role that animals, nature, and technology play in children’s development; consults on issues related to children, nature, technology, and animals with non-

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profit organizations and corporations; and serves as educational consultant to the award-winning app, VIRRY, which uses interactive technology to engage children with wild animals. Her blog for Psychology Today—Why the Wild Things Are—can be found at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ why-the-wild-things-are. Yasmine  Motawy  teaches Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo and is a translator, scholar, writer, editor, consultant, and writing coach in the area of children’s literature. She was on the board of the Egyptian International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) from 2012 to 2018 and served on the 2016 and 2018 Hans Christian Andersen Award juries and the 2017 Etisalat Award jury. In 2018 she was the recipient of the Mellon Foundation postdoctoral grant where she supported interdisciplinary Arabic language knowledge production around Egyptian children’s literature. Her other research interests include the metropolis, service learning, life narratives, and the creative writing process. Nathalie op de Beeck  is the author of Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-creator of the project Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition (Wayne State University Press, 2009). She has published in Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel, The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Her recent “Children’s Literature and the New Nature Study” (Children’s Literature in Education 49.1, 2018) and “Environmental Picture Books: Cultivating Conservationists” (in Naomi Hamer, Perry Nodelman, and Mavis Reimer’s More Words about Pictures, 2017) concern eco-social justice as depicted in literature for young readers. She is Associate Professor of English and directs the Children’s Literature and Culture program at Pacific Lutheran University. Amy Ratelle  is the editor of Animation Studies, the online peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS). She received her PhD in Communication and Culture, a joint program between Ryerson University and York University, and degrees in Film Studies from Ryerson University (BFA) and Carleton University (MA). Her monograph, Animality and Children’s Literature and Film was published in

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2015. Her research areas include animation, animality studies, c­ hildren’s literature and culture, and critical media studies. She is an academic administrator at the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. Jonathan Todres  is Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. He has authored numerous publications on children’s rights and is co-author of Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press).

List of Figures

The Wisdom of Getting Involved: Civic Engagement in Contemporary Egyptian Children’s Literature Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Amal Farah and illustrator Mustafa Hussein’s I Am a Human, p. 23 Amal Farah and illustrator Mustafa Hussein’s I Am a Human, p. 27 Fatma el Maadoul’s Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (I wish I were the Governor of Cairo), p. 11 Fatma el Maadoul’s Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (I wish I were the Governor of Cairo), p. 12 Fatma el Maadoul, Thawret el ‘asafeer (Revolution of the birds), p. 18 Fatma el Maadoul, Thawret el ‘asafeer (Revolution of the birds), p. 25

45 45 46 47 49 50

“We Need Diverse Books”: Diversity, Activism, and Children’s Literature Fig. 1

David Huyck et al.’s CCBC Infographic (Source: Huyck and Dahlen 2019)

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List of Figures

Laughing Out Loud or Lost in the Woods? Tween Girl Identity in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels for Children Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Roberto Innocenti’s depiction of “The Wood” in The Girl in Red by Aaron Frisch © Creative Editions (2012) 150 The main character Sophia confronted with multiple versions of girl- and womanhood in The Girl in Red by Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch 152 Cover of Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante: Pssst! © Høst & Søn (2013) 154 The main character Viola’s nightmare of uncontrolled bodily change in Herzog and Clante’s graphic novel Pssst!156

Introduction: Literary Cultures and  Twenty-­First-­Century Childhoods Nathalie op de Beeck

In the midst of a turbulent century, how are we to characterize twenty-­ first-­century literary culture and childhood? How might we understand the ways literary depictions of imaginary and actual young people inform our lived experiences and influence our policies and our metaphors? Two decades into the new millennium, we belong to a world population of more than 7.5 billion people, about 30 percent of whom are under the age of 18 and legally classified as minors—the children and youth of literary cultures moderated (if not always created) by adult gatekeepers (United Nations World Population Prospects 2017). In any given moment, we are awash in bewildering international events reported and shared across multiple media platforms in real time. We witness clashes among those calling for global human rights and those espousing nationalism and xenophobia, and we wonder at the prospects for today’s young people, their voices, their health, and their votes.1 We invent and interact with marvelous macro- and micro-technologies that make our lives easier, yet we rely on cheap labor (including child labor) to produce and sustain these N. op de Beeck (*) Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_1

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technologies; in the production and fabrication of our conveniences, we jeopardize biodiversity and the climate that up-and-coming generations need to survive. Daily, we filter an outpouring of art, literature, news, and criticism in response to our strained circumstances, and our children learn to see this all-at-once culture as normal. In our literature and creative work, we project a spectrum of planetary outlooks from utopian to cataclysmic, optimistic to untenable. Even as we develop our cyborg posthuman consciousness and an uneasy awareness of our deep kinship with nonhuman species, we reckon with all-too-human matters of gender, racial, national, age, and religious difference; we recognize how intersectionality determines individual identities, collective status, and oppression amid uneven social hierarchies.2 Young people grow up steeped in these volatile environments, engaging in international conversations across social media and comprehending the magnitude of the gap between the haves and have-nots, between the critically literate and the uninformed, between those with considerable control over information and power and those on the economic and technological fringes. The literary cultures of childhood, metaphors of childhood, and children themselves are tremendously rich in potential and at the same time under grave threat. In this time of radical change and diverse perspectives, we imagine an array of possible futures for those young people recently born into this dazzling and interconnected world. Our book and media formats reflect a technical paradigm shift: As Eliza Dresang and Kathryn McClelland explained at the turn of the century, “Radical change, as a theoretical construct, identifies and explains books with characteristics reflecting the types of interactivity, connectivity, and access that permeate our emerging digital society” (“Radical Change: Digital Age Literature and Learning,” 160). Trends in narrative content and snapshots of multifarious childhoods indicate a rush to rethink the experience of youth as well. Representing twenty-first-century childhoods in print and in digital formats, determining young people’s roles in recent social and political history, and isolating trends in present-day literary culture and childhood is a daunting and near-impossible prospect, complicated by the proliferation of niche audiences and emergent identity categories that deserve utmost respect and consideration.3 The project of identifying literary cultures of childhood navigates controversial opinions about what constitutes contemporary youth and reckons with the slipperiness of the child-as-referent. Depending on the context and the audience, the child and childhood may

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be connotative terms, strategically deployed for their sentimental or ideological potency. We could be referring to a socially constructed, imagined, metaphorical child and a prescribed, universal, or collective condition known as childhood.4 The child and childhood at other times may denote actual individuals whose well-being depends upon the care of others— everyday, real-life, not-so-ideal children with singular, personal, and unpredictable childhoods. Speaking of actual children, idealized children, and the literary cultures of childhood reawakens Jacqueline Rose’s much-­ debated assertion about “the impossibility of children’s fiction.” Rose famously argues that children’s fiction attempts and fails to bridge a generational-­experiential gap between adults who write and young audiences who read. Yet the twenty-first century, and the dizzying blur among generational categories, complicates the understanding of literature for, about, with, and even by children (Rose, The Case of Peter Pan). This collection of chapters thus asks how the written word and related media presently comprehend, describe, and shape the contemporary child and childhood. As a snapshot of our current moment, this collection identifies emergent trends, points to how longstanding conventions around childhood and literature are faring, and observes destabilizing factors in literature and media for and about children. This collection explores how literary and artistic representations of childhood and youth mirror or twist twenty-first-century perspectives. Readers might think of these chapters as a core sample of literary practice and a speculation on the century to come, with a convenient numerical marker (the year 2000 to date) and without the luxury of hindsight. As we question what our current century will mean for us and for children, we might reflect on the year 1900, when Swedish social theorist Ellen Key confidently proclaimed that the twentieth century would be “the century of the child.” After the publication of her book of that title— published in an English-language edition in 1909—Key’s future-directed prediction became “a slogan all over Europe” (Rönnberg, 3) an anticipation of special privileges for the youngest populations, and a rallying cry for worldwide education reformers invested in childhood security and autonomy. Did Key’s memorable statement come true in any affirmative sense, so that we of the twenty-first century might build upon a reliable foundation? What were the implications and the limits of Key’s assertion? If the twentieth century was the century of the child, what sort of children and childhoods did the century’s events produce, and what remains unfinished today?

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Literary and artistic constructions of childhood, and nonfiction accounts of lived childhood, both reinforce and contradict Key’s promise. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we still find ourselves grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects on children and all people. We realize anew how the ripples of imperialism, and of revolution, continue to reshape our world and our generations. We see how we have been informed by stories and also how we have been failed by textbook histories that are only ever partial (and always edited to reflect a presumed status quo). Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, we are caught up in a storm called progress, gazing at the debris of the past. Reflecting on twentieth-century events and cultural productions, we recognize unresolved opinions about the idealized children Key implied, and how our present zeitgeist makes it possible to ask whose child the past century validated. Commentators now link Key’s outwardly optimistic phrase to eugenicist notions about evolution, discredited recapitulation theories favoring Anglo-European dominance, and the medical, psychological, and educational establishments’ concerns with “the adequate reproduction of the human race” in a specifically racialized and nationalized sense (Dekker, 136).5 Throughout the twentieth century, children worldwide faced dire threats to their health, education, moral growth, and adult communities, despite a growing attention to socioeconomically fortunate young people as market influences and sources of cultural cachet (see Kinchin and O’Connor; Johnson; Solomon). Some 120 years on, these issues are still relevant, as we span the period from 1918’s Spanish influenza to 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic, from 1920’s women’s suffrage to 2020’s massive, global Black Lives Matter movement. If the twentieth century became the century of the child, at least for some, it became so in the sense that public attention turned toward the categories of the child and childhood, and not because children themselves universally fared better than they had in all recorded history. Childhood was more rigorously described, monitored, and documented than ever before in this era of scientific and ideological curiosity, influenced by nineteenth-century endeavors including Friedrich Froebel’s theories of play and Louis Agassi’s concept of nature study; paradigm-shattering turn-of-the-century work in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud; G.  Stanley Hall’s child study movement and his monumental psychological report on Adolescence (1904); Maria Montessori’s educational theory and school movement; and John Dewey’s democratic educational philosophy. While medical advances, personal insurance, and healthcare, declining child and maternal mortality,

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improved labor laws for working-class families (even though some outspokenly protested the loss of their children’s income), and increased access to public and affordable education improved the lots of many young people, the twentieth century also saw attention and resources lavished on certain fortunate children and families, to the neglect or outright abuse of less affluent children and historically oppressed groups.6 This was the period, in Viviana Zelizer’s words, of “pricing the priceless child,” and in the twentyfirst century, debates still rage as to whether and how (and whose) childhood is priceless or sacred (Zelizer; Thorne). International conflict, hard-won by  ostensibly democratic nations, brought tenuous periods of peace to the twentieth century. As the decades advanced, Anglophone nations and former colonies dealt with the complex results of slavery, imperial conquest, diaspora, and inherited societal inequities. For instance, until 1954—and unofficially for years thereafter, to the present day—African American children attended segregated schools and suffered under Jim Crow laws. Until the 1980s, Native American children, Canadian indigenous children, and Australian Aboriginal children endured so-called boarding or residential schools that suppressed indigenous knowledges and undermined sovereignty.7 South African children suffered under an official system of apartheid, and non-­official forms of apartheid and segregation persist. Mirroring these social, economic, and political histories, literature written in English during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century disproportionately represents and is addressed to young people with Anglo-European and Anglo-American heritage, as well as middle- to upper-middle-class upbringings. The book trade of the twentieth century normalized a narrow vision of what childhood and youth could or should be, eliding other lived realities. If sheltered and materially comfortable childhoods have been treated as conventional in mass media entertainment of the past century, diverse childhood experiences—in the long shadows of slavery, servitude, colonialism, and genocide—consistently have been devalued or erased in a way that scholarly and popular audiences have only now begun to fathom. A range of childhood experience largely went—and still goes, to some extent—unaccounted-for, rendering children doubly marginalized and requiring that twenty-first-century scholars locate and re-evaluate past literature in regard to youth and social justice.8 Twenty-first-century scholarship on childhood is characterized by fresh attempts to plumb the archives and amend the enormous gaps in literature for and about children of color and of marginalized demographics, as well as by efforts to account for

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authentic childhood experiences across time and in the present day (see, e.g., Robin Bernstein, Kate Capshaw, Kenneth Kidd, Julia Mickenberg, Philip Nel, Mavis Reimer, and Kathryn Bond Stockton—to name just a few scholars participating in this vital recovery effort). During the twentieth century, as marketers aimed to connect with young people’s economic power, childhood came to be seen in terms of just these sorts of demographics. Demographic categories expanded, with consequences for literature, education, bookselling, librarianship, and literary depictions of youth. In the United States, Hall’s category of adolescents and historically recognized and distinct categories like infants, babies, toddlers, and tots were augmented in the 1910s by teen-agers (which soon lost its quaint hyphen), at mid-century by categories including preteens and tweens (terms applied from the 1920s to the 1940s and popularized from the 1960s to present). Later, marketing categories (some say genres) emerged to further divide audiences into young adult (YA) and—since approximately 2009—20 something new adult categories, new adults being those who have outgrown young adulthood but not all of its trappings or literary interests. This ever-expanding lexicon calls to mind media critic Henry Jenkins’ remark: “We do not so much discard old conceptions of the child as accrue additional meanings around what remains one of our most culturally potent signifiers” (Jenkins, 15). Jenkins’ point echoes Adam Phillips’ comparison of what it is like to be a child and the concepts older people devise to explain it: “If the child, and stories about childhood like psychoanalysis, have acquired a quasi-religious significance, have become our most convincing essentialism, it is perhaps because children are, as their parents always say, impossible” (Phillips 155). Such cultural criticism and theorization should give us pause, even as we persist in assigning reductive categories based on age and our own grown-up assumptions. Whether demographically categorizable or not, young people of different races, classes, genders, and ages experienced the twentieth century, and experience the present day, in diverse and phenomenally unequal ways. Socioeconomically and legally, those categorized as children have incomplete status as citizens or as full human beings (Woodhouse 2004, 2010). Cooperative global and intergovernmental organizations, and worldwide non-governmental organizations and charitable foundations, and more localized and national administrations made only halting progress toward the equitable treatment and representation of young people. With each new global, national, or sectarian conflict came updates to

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existing, but inadequate, protections and laws (Fass, “Historical Context”).9 Across the twentieth century, young people’s rights to their basic needs and to protection were stated in multiple treaties, legal accords, and official documents, yet these statements have been and largely remain advisory, due to loopholes that reward ratifying countries with the ability to make special exceptions to the rules (e.g., concerning child labor or gender equity across nations) and due to certain nations’ rejection of or inaction on rights accords.10 Nevertheless, this action may be viewed as evidence toward a century of the child, because “[m]oving from viewing children as objects of love and charity to seeing them also as subjects of rights is a significant shift,” write Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham. “Rights are not gifts that governments grant to individuals upon reaching the age of maturity” (Human Rights in Children’s Literature, 197).11 Over the past hundred years, humanists, politicians, and activists have sought to shift values from an openhearted but ultimately toothless sympathy toward equity-based civil and legal rights that truly protect vulnerable populations; ethicist John Wall persuasively calls for “a more child-inclusive humanistic methodology” (“Childism” 68; see also Wall’s “Ain’t I a Person?”). Meanwhile, we may question how and whether our literary practices and tropes have marked the ordinary moments, the rites of passage, and the existential dangers associated with the condition known as childhood. Hindsight thus cautions against proclaiming “the millennium of the child,” for our access to information too readily reveals a world alternately optimistic and fractious. The figure of the child remains associated with playfulness, wonder, curiosity, joy, and other affirmative qualities. Surveys of children’s and teenagers’ hopefulness register a sense of optimism for the new millennium, adjusted for the likelihood of hope among diverse groups in terms of refugee and immigrant status, gender, nation, health, and class; measures of youth well-being include the Children’s Hope Scale, developed for measuring hope among children ages 8–16 and adapted for different age and identity categories (Snyder; Edwards and McClintock). Yet childhood is a precarious life stage. In 2005, historian Steven Mintz identified five “myths of childhood,” among them the notions that “childhood is the same for all children,” that “home [is] a haven and bastion of stability in an ever-changing world,” and that “the United States is a peculiarly child-friendly society” when actual situations and policies indicate that people are “deeply ambivalent” about children (Huck’s Raft,.2).

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There is no sign that Mintz’s sobering myths of childhood shall be abolished anytime soon. His perceptions of American childhoods might in fact be extended throughout the globe, where children’s futures are equally if not more tenuous. We inhabit a planet in which all beings— among them human children—remain vulnerable to state-sanctioned trauma and grow up in terrible conditions of economic, environmental, and cultural uncertainty. In the United States, easy access to guns and lax gun policy threatens children and other humans of every age, to the point that US public schools have added lockdown drills to their regular fire drills and weather-related exercises—a throwback to the bombing drills of World War II and post-atomic “duck and cover” Cold War activities. Racial animosity and gender inequality ensure that children of the dominant culture enjoy a prolonged innocence or ignorance while others, typically children of color, are not treated or represented equitably. Global outcry against (along with contrarian justifications of) the abuse and neglect of children, among them refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants, reveals an ongoing, unresolved, and racist violence deployed against people at vulnerable ages, especially in marginalized populations. Anxieties and concerns about our world and that of future generations are reflected in our literature for and about youth and young people, and today we read the literary figure of the child with a conflicted sense of its historicity. When, for instance, adults rushed to write, illustrate, and publish explanatory children’s books about the September 11, 2001, hijackings and terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda in the United States, they may have assuaged grown readers’ personal grief, spoken to established political standpoints, or tapped into a rich vein of melodrama. Yet they failed to contextualize a complex and violent geopolitical situation for an elementary-­school audience in a country that soon became steeped in Islamophobia and dangerous for all people of Middle Eastern or South Asian heritage. Scholars now question a post-9/11 literature of trauma as presented to children, which is characterized by a lack of representation of Muslim and Muslim-American families and by a depiction of normative European- or Anglo-Americans as innocent victims (Kidd, “T Is for Trauma”). Children lack the life experience and deep historical consciousness to respond in depth to such realities in their eras, and they seldom craft or judge literature for and about childhood. Their responses are predicated on the necessarily partial and situated information they glean from adult gatekeepers. (A US exception—and an example of adults listening to

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children’s voices—is the annual Children’s and Teen Choice Book Awards, established in 2008 by two literacy organizations, the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader.) Children themselves do have their own stories to tell, of course, and the twenty-first century is a period in which children’s subjective agency has risen to the fore in scholarship and in participatory all-ages networks.12 Children are innovators and have taken leadership roles in climate justice and other issues, albeit under the guidance and support of adult activists. Young people demonstrate agency and wisdom in dire circumstances, and twenty-first-century events for good or ill have given them ample reason to do so. In 2014, 16- and 17-year-olds were granted the right to vote in a referendum on whether Scotland would remain in the United Kingdom, and 75 percent of them did so. A year later, Scotland enfranchised all citizens age 16 and older, on the same day that the British Parliament chose to restrict people under 18 from voting in the European Union referendum that ultimately led to Brexit. Young people have shown leadership in other twenty-first-century crises too. In 2011, the environmental legal organization Our Children’s Trust began working with child plaintiffs to take legal action against US states, arguing that state policies were in violation of public trust; their lawsuits and filings charged that states were undermining environmental health for future generations and doing harm to those not yet old enough to vote. In another highly publicized example, teenage survivors of a mass shooting on February 14, 2018, which left 17 people dead in Parkland, FL’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, became ardent gun-­ control activists. Only six weeks after this horrific crime, with little time to process their trauma, the students responded to media attention by leading a “March for Our Lives.” Their raw and deliberate action, a demonstration of teenagers’ savvy handling of online social networks, culminated in a Washington, D.C., rally and related US and global events on March 24, 2018. In yet another case, young people hoisted “I Am a Child” picket signs at the New  York offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing for the protection—not the detention—of migrant children. The “I Am a Child” signs, designed by Paola Mendoza to echo Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Civil Rights slogan “I Am a Man,” called attention to children’s identity and vulnerability. This direct action with, by, and for children helped galvanize public sentiment against the separation of migrant parents from children, and led to national and international “Families Belong Together” events on June 30, 2018. Young people’s assertions of subjectivity, imagination, and visions for social justice find a

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platform on social media and in the material public square, albeit at risk to real children’s lives and vaunted ideals of innocence. Despite passionate action on the part of children, none of these issues have yet been resolved. Literature for and about young people of the twenty-first century mingles frustration, despair, and unsteady optimism about whether all can or will ever be well. M. T. Anderson’s Feed (Candlewick, 2002) prophesies a future in which privileged teenagers upgrade the hardware and software literally implanted in their brains, gaining access to a perpetual “feed” of advertisements and misinformation, while losing the ability to sustain critical thought. Individuals who resist the feed out of economic necessity or a desire for intellectual freedom are marginalized and under erasure. Andrew Smith’s allusive and disturbing monster-movie parody Grasshopper Jungle (Penguin, 2014) imagines a dystopian future in which mutant praying mantises take over the world and a few human survivors find shelter in an abandoned nuclear bunker. Amy Sarig King’s poignant Me and Marvin Gardens (Scholastic, 2017) involves a boy whose family farm is subdivided and developed into cookie-cutter houses; near the polluted creek that runs through the last woodland on the property, the boy befriends a doglike, slimy, and affectionate creature that eats garbage and defecates toxic waste. Other twenty-first-century fiction directed at young audiences and their adult minders features ghost children or detached children who recall traumatic circumstances from chillingly informed perspectives. Tim Tingle’s How I Became a Ghost—A Choctaw Trail of Tears Story (Scholastic, 2015) recalls the American federal government’s 1830s forced relocation of Choctaw people from Mississippi to Oklahoma and reflects on seldom-­ taught Native American history, through the voice of a murdered child. Similarly, Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Ghost Boys (Little, Brown, 2018) is inspired by the murders of Black children and teens by police and other authority figures. Set in Chicago, Ghost Boys is narrated by a 12-year-old African American child who has been shot by a police officer, and the voice of the departed rebukes the systemic  racism and violence perpetrated against Black communities across history and notably in the present day. In another dystopian future, Canadian Métis author Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (Cormorant, 2017), a Métis teenager called Frenchie flees to the northern wilderness to escape “marrow thieves” who extract indigenous people’s bone marrow to restore white Canadians’ lost ability to dream. In the barren woods, which are devoid of most animal life, Frenchie meets other indigenous people and discovers a means by which

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to resist a violent fate. Dimaline’s indigenous futurism, at first a grim account of a devastating future, interrupts a dystopian teleology of doom with a re-valuing of imagination. In a similar mode, Palyku novelist and law professor Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (Walker Books Australia, 2012) mobilizes Australian Aboriginal dreaming to counteract dystopian despair. Roni Natov writes, “It seems that much contemporary writing for children is more explicit about the traumas of children than ever before. The accompanying feelings of grief, terror, loneliness, anger, and anxiety are explored more fully and, I believe, demonstrate the release that such expression often offers to the characters in the stories and to the empathic reader.” Natov observes that although the ambiguities and the dangers of children’s lives are spelled out in complex emotional detail, “the vision at the heart of each story is not exclusive of hope, even in the portrayal of the darkest, often unimaginable pain that is, horrifyingly enough, the truth of some children’s lives” (Natov, 219–220). Natov finds literary examples across a range of authors and genres, citing Korean American novelist An Na, the African American poet Sapphire, and British fantasists David Almond and Philip Pullman. To this list we might add Neil Gaiman, whose horror fantasies Coraline (HarperCollins/Bloomsbury, 2002) and The Wolves in the Walls (HarperCollins/Bloomsbury, 2003) feature the unsettling illustrations of Dave McKean. Gaiman and McKean’s nightmarish scenarios—Coraline about a girl who gains entry to a parallel world where her demonic Other Mother has button eyes and sinister motives, and Wolves concerning a girl with the conviction that murderous wolves haunt her family—depict resilient children, yet both emerge from a fearful twenty-first-century zeitgeist. * * * With only two decades of the twenty-first century to draw upon for this volume, and daily changes shaking our social and environmental foundations, we cannot predict the events of the coming month, much less the next 80 years. Coming generations will have to reckon with this volatile uncertainty, turning at times to literature and related media for wise counsel, for diversion, and for alternative visions. By reflecting on emergent qualities of contemporary literary and artistic practice, we may be able to mount effective critiques and envision generative new forms. Thus the multi-disciplinary contributors to this volume examine engagements with

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ethical action, political activism, collective public participation, and issues of social justice for youth. They look at how literature represents subjective agency among young people, and they consider environmental concerns shaping the everyday lived experiences of all sentient beings, so that we might imagine a sustainable future beyond the iconic “seventh generation.” Because literary representations of children both model real childhoods and contribute to the degree of respect afforded to actual young people, this collection opens with essays on “Children’s Rights and Role Models.” Ensuring the full human rights of children, individually and collectively, influences the well-being of families and of people in general. Attention to young people’s protection from harm and to their participation in the public sphere is fundamental to a functional (and dare we say democratic) global society. The essays in this opening section therefore ask how literary and multimedia texts address the human rights of young people, and how young people are represented in literature shared across plural audiences. The essays engage with how children and adults speak, share opinions, and take public action in literary works, reinforcing or revising dominant paradigms. Societal and political values, whether presented as the greater common good, as children’s best interest, or as topics to be questioned by children themselves, are present in familiar texts. We may ask whether children’s books and books about youth, traditionally understood as having a didactic function, still uphold a status quo or take normative positionalities for granted. Could readers of the twenty-first century have a deeper comprehension of human rights and justice, an outcome of twenty-­ first-­century developments, even if those developments run at times counter to the achievement of full human rights? Legal expert Jonathan Todres, of Georgia State University, opens this section with his chapter on “Children’s Right to Participate: Insights from the Story of Malala.” Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai has grown to adulthood, yet she is still understood as the strong adolescent girl who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, and she is known on a first-name basis to her admirers. Todres looks at how Yousafzai has been configured as a child hero in literary and pictorial narratives, including her own book-length autobiography—which happens to be available in an adult version and in an abridged version for young readers. Whereas Yousafzai has attained celebrity status, everyday people and their community roles are the focus of Yasmine Motawy’s “The Wisdom of Getting Involved: Civic Engagement in Contemporary Egyptian

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Children’s Literature.” Motawy, of the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo, reads tales of children’s active mobilization for community change and addresses the ideological limits on such tales. Motawy finds a strong tradition of activist narratives in recent Egyptian children’s literature, while considering what forms of protest or resistance are allowable in publications intended to reach and foster a youthful audience. Because texts for and about young people recommend appropriate means of addressing authority, and hold up particular individuals to be emulated or scorned, trends in children’s biography shed light on timely and context-specific values. Clémentine Beauvais, in “Bright Pasts, Brighter Futures: Biographies for Children in the Early Twenty-First Century,” investigates the biography’s genre conventions and explores why scholars have not, until recent years, dealt seriously with this popular form. Beauvais, of the University of Cambridge’s Homerton College, examines what we have come to expect from—and how we can understand norms through—the inspirational rhetoric, accounts of success, and dependable closure characteristic of biographies. Building upon the notion of rights and role models for success, the essayists in “Social Justice and Diversity in Literature for Young Readers” highlight specific issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class within the field of publishing and across literary disciplines. The first decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by technological and organizational innovations that enable once-marginalized groups to center and amplify their public voices. These decades have seen the children and grandchildren of past social justice movements maturing into leadership positions and teaching new generations. In the United States, a historically Anglocentric and heteronormative children’s and YA book industry gradually has initiated more inclusive practices of hiring and publishing. In her comprehensive account of these ongoing changes, “We Need Diverse Books: Publishing, Equity, and Children’s Literature,” Sarah Park Dahlen surveys recent developments and issues a timely call to action. Dahlen, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University and a founding editor of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, documents the ascent and challenges of the movement toward meaningful diversity in publishing and librarianship, noting the industry-­ wide recognition of underrepresented populations and demonstrating how people have mobilized around campaigns like We Need Diverse Books and Own Voices. Dahlen shares annual data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC),

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which compiles statistics on authorship and content having to do with racial and ethnic diversity, and provides insight into the conversations among scholars, creative writers, editors, and bloggers—and critics who do all of the above. Where Dahlen chronicles racial and ethnic diversity across children’s and youth publishing, Derritt Mason of the University of Calgary Department of English considers how the representation of LGBTQ identities has shifted. Mason looks in particular at Lesléa Newman’s watershed picture book, 1989’s Heather Has Two Mommies, and its edited and re-illustrated 2015 edition in “What Having Two Mommies Looks Like Now: Queer Picture Books in the Twenty-First Century.” In the late 1980s, the original Heather’s focus on a daughter’s mothers provoked public outcry about lesbian partnerships and parenting alike, and led to book challenges in a climate of anti-gay hostility. In the twenty-first-century version, Mason discovers, the theme of lesbian parenthood is marginalized to the point of erasure despite the book’s “two mommies” reference, and Heather herself—coded as a queer and indeterminate figure—becomes the narrative hub. Twenty-first-century readers, writers, and illustrators may reconfigure once-divisive matters of gender, race, and class in the visual and verbal information picture books provide, yet the old divisions still haunt our texts, demanding without achieving resolution. While the work we read, write, illustrate, and critique has the potential to reveal damaging stereotypes, undermine prejudices, and challenge the advantages of privilege, literature may as soon reinforce essentialisms as dismantle them. Some twenty-first-century texts have radical aims, while others acknowledge unresolved social issues around human rights, social justice, and diverse identities. “Representing Youth, Claiming Identity, and Exercising Agency” demonstrates how these conflicts play out in multimedia texts. Nina Christensen, head of the Centre for Children’s Literature at Denmark’s Aarhus University, investigates graphic narratives about girlhood in her “Laughing Out Loud or Lost in the Woods? Tween Girl Identity in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels for Children.” Christensen considers how picture books and graphic narratives, which draw upon literary sources including the fairy tale and the cautionary tale, envision and verbally describe girls’ growth from prepubescent childhood to adolescence. Girls’ development in these texts is marked as hazardous, comical, embarrassing, or a combination of all three. In the illustrated texts Christensen analyzes, tween girls navigate a loaded visual culture of women’s product advertisements, gratuitous displays of female bodies,

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fairy-tale allusions, and aggressive Barbie dolls; this pervasive and normative visual culture signals gender norms and delivers coded threats to bodily autonomy, and girls must figure out how to engage as a consumer or a critic. If such visual-verbal representations of girlhood and the feminine recall and interrogate the gender binaries of earlier generations—as yet still with us—representations of boyhood likewise may be invested in traditional roles. In “‘Ganesha Is My Best Friend’: Homological Boyhood in Hindi Mythological Animated Films,” Anuja Madan studies Indian animated films that structure boys’ identity around religious figures and traditional masculinity. Madan, of Kansas State University, looks at recent animated films and television shows in which Krishna and Ganesha take the form of boy-gods and secretly help prayerful, devout mortal boys solve problems. The films and TV shows introduce young viewers to ancient figures in a decidedly contemporary manner, while underscoring the specialness of boyhood and the privileges of masculine identity. If Christensen and Madan attend to gender and its manifestations in disparate texts and genres, Edgar Roberto Kirchof attends to class and socioeconomic differences in his essay, “Brazilian Childhood and Literature in the Age of Digital Technologies.” Kirchof, a faculty member in the Doctor of Education and Cultural Studies program at the Lutheran University of Brazil (ULBRA), describes his research on how children in socioeconomically disadvantaged households and communities of southern Brazil gain access to and demonstrate fluency with English-language, predominantly American apps and games. Kirchof studies how children respond to web-­ based texts, compares their fervent gaming habits with their lack of fluency in traditional literacies, and connects his classroom research to theories of convergence culture. His findings underscore children’s ability to engage with international digital media despite language barriers and socioeconomic diversity, and raise questions about how children within and outside materially comfortable, affluent households learn about and reproduce globalized consumer culture. In these chapters, multimedia texts present possible identity formations, make judgments on traditional customs and on nonconformity, and represent subjective agency on the part of fictive protagonists and real-life media users alike. In the closing section of this volume, “Coming of Age in the Anthropocene,” three writers give attention to posthumanism, to relationships between young people and other sentient beings, and to the complex environmental crisis of the twenty-first century. Their essays assess aspects of the natural world and ecocriticism in youth culture, the

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human impact on our companion species and our planet, and climate change as the subject of fact and of literary fiction. Psychologist and Purdue University Professor Emeritus Gail F.  Melson details child psychology and the changing nature of human/nonhuman bonds in “Animals in Children’s Development: A Roadmap for the Twenty-First Century.” Melson looks at work published from the late twentieth century to the present day, assessing and proposing ways to study human children’s relation to nonhuman species that serve us as pets, food, zoo exhibits, and wild co-inhabitants of common outdoor spaces. Melson cites her own and others’ scholarship on children’s biophilia, and wonders whether a beneficial and ethical attachment to nonhuman species may be sustained in a literary and media culture rife with virtual pets and lifelike representations. Amy Ratelle approaches related ethical questions in “Examining Animal Bodies in War-Related Media for Children.” Ratelle looks at dramas that depict domesticated animals deployed in actual wartime battle practices, as well as slapstick or otherwise comedic texts that pit animals against would­be hunters or exterminators in ecotone territories. She wonders how writers and filmmakers perpetuate a “military-animal industrial complex” and images of animal trauma in the name of melodrama or ostensible humor, and she asks how posthumanist theory might remedy the cliché of a battle to the death among humans and other species. Alice Curry, founder and director of the United Kingdom’s Lantana Publishing, concludes this grouping of essays with “The Power and Potential: An Ecocritical Reading of Twenty-First-Century Childhood.” Curry explores how critical accounts of the myriad possibilities in child indeterminacy—including Maria Nikolajeva’s influential discussions of aetonormativity, or adult norms as disciplinary guideposts in children’s literature—have troubling implications in regard to ecocriticism. Curry, echoing scholars’ theories of aetonormativity, inquires whether child power shall be interpreted as an anthropocentric dominion over nonhuman species and shall duplicate the mistakes and deliberate violence of prior generations. Curry also cautions that Clémentine Beauvais’ affirmative vision of the openness of the future and a “mighty child” poised to make a better world must be weighed against the environmental destruction committed by past generations; adults who craft children’s texts or make decisions for young people have, to a strong degree, set the ecological tasks future generations have ahead of them. Climate crisis now determines what mighty children must do in order to survive, or to perish, and a phenomenal change in human norms will be essential. Not without optimism for child agency, Curry reminds us that radical, large-scale change is always conditional on past practices.

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Environmental transformation, she suggests, may come about through young people’s recognition of—and agential praxis to remedy—adult fallibility. Curry’s concluding chapter resonates with the combined urgency and vision expressed throughout this volume, calling upon a twenty-first-­ century academic readership to recognize and speak to the tasks ahead of us. Each contributor brings reliable historical and cultural knowledge as well as a distinct future vision to this volume on Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, and each has a distinctive critical perspective to share. Because this volume addresses twenty-first-century literary and media representations with a scant 20 years’ evidence, we see our task as an opportunity to point to contemporary developments in literature and childhood studies, as well as a chance to look ahead to monumental changes in the world in which texts are produced and real young people grow up. Topics in childhood studies and multimedia representation have become the stuff of hourly news reports and minute-by-minute social-media chronicles. We see our contributions as joining ongoing and ever-shifting conversations about those who are and those who will be the youth of this moment, and we look for ways to construct, critique, envision, and empower a sustainable new century and literary culture for coming generations.



Notes 1. Deszcz-Tryhubczak (2016) continues the work of fusing the literarycritical area of children’s literature studies with the more sociohistorical area of childhood studies in an effort to address human rights and political realities. 2. Theories of intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw 1989) have been taken up by social, cultural, and literary critics such as Hispanic activist Gloria Anzaldúa, in her theories of Nepantla, and legal scholar Patricia Hill Collins (e.g., 1998, 1990). Intersectionality and critical race studies are increasingly influential in accounts of diverse childhoods and families, and age too can be considered an intersectional category. See also Jiménez (2017) and Ranft (2013). 3. Abate (2016) considers the multiplicity of specialized, independently marketed, and often propagandistic texts for young ­ readers, which address narrow fields of interest and purvey political views outside a mainstream. While Abate’s examples point out extremist sensibilities, her survey acknowledges the increasing rarity of a commonly held mass-popular culture and the diminution of shared childhood collective.

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4. In his controversial No Future, Edelman takes aim at the way the figure of the child drives ideological calls for social safety and purity, undermining queer potentialities. The heteronormative imperative to be a reproducing body and the ostensibly corruptible innocent reproduced combine to destroy the queer subject. For fetal politics that circumvent autonomy, see Berlant and Edelman (2013), and essays on “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship” and “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus” (Berlant 1997). 5. Dekker (2000) believes “the 20th century should not be coined as The Century of the Child, but rather as the Child-Oriented Century” (134), adding that “the fact that Key is speaking about the future does not make her ideas automatically modern” or progressive (135). 6. Koop (2005) claims Key based her prediction on then-fashionable beliefs in “eugenics, the ‘natural’ course of development, and the salvation to be gained through science” (125), foreseeing a perfectible child and an improved condition of childhood. Koop outlines changes in theories of child development and argues that today, “We tend to foist a ‘culture’ of their own on children and adolescents and we even allow commerce to exploit this culture. It is difficult to get rid of this, in my opinion exaggerated, child-centeredness” (131). He calls for more nuanced understandings of childhood and children’s capacities: “Let us definitely close the door on Ellen Key’s ‘Century of the Child.’ Postmodern developmental psychology, which is nevertheless based on the rationality of the Enlightenment, is ready for its important humanitarian task in the 21st century!” (132). 7. For accounts of Native childhoods in North American history and twenty-first-century scholarship on Native representation, see Woolford; Lara-Cooper and Cooper; Heller; and Debbie Reese’s blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature (americanindiansinchildrensliterature. blogspot.com). 8. See “#WeNeedDiverseScholars: A Forum” in The Lion and the Unicorn 41.1 (January 2017), the ongoing survey of diverse literature from the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (ccbc. education.wisc.edu), and the open-access online journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literatures ­(sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/) for a reckoning with the lack of diversity in children’s literature and children’s literature scholarship. 9. Fass (2011) explores how young people’s rights to have their basic needs met were stated in multiple treaties, legal rulings, and other official but hard-to-enforce documents. High moral standards rang hollow against the evidence of war on an unprecedented international scale and due to enhanced media coverage of violence against young people. Children’s rights to free participation in society were declared widely, yet evidence emerged of the unlawful limits on young people’s expressions of identity and injustices done to the young.

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10. In 1989, the United Nations put forward the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which as of 2015 had been ratified by all member nations except the United States—which backed out of the U.N. Human Rights Council altogether in June 2018. In that same month in 2018, the United States engaged in practices—for example, of separating migrant families including Central American asylum seekers on the border between Texas and Mexico—prohibited by the CRC and condemned among human rights activists. 11. On the heels of World War I, the League of Nations’ 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child called for children’s provisional rights to basic survival needs like food, healthcare, shelter, to prioritized aid and refuge from danger, and to education and understanding within a community. More than a decade after World War II, the United Nations’ 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child (UN DRC) added to these “positive” provisions, which ensure children are granted their basic needs; the UN DRC established a set of “negative” or protective rights meant to guard children against violence, discrimination, neglect, and separation from parents. High moral standards frequently rang hollow due to war on an unprecedented international scale, and enhanced media coverage of violence against young people in the Civil Rights era and Vietnam War put the lie to sanitized depictions of innocent youth. Children’s rights to free participation in society were declared widely, but only as evidence emerged of the unlawful limits on young people’s expressions of identity and injustices done to the young. 12. For an excellent review and debate of the conversations around children’s agency and its expression in literature, see the forum on Divergent Perspectives on Children’s Agency in the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Culture (vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 254–310). Here, scholars Richard Flynn, Marah Gubar, Perry Nodelman, and Sara L. Schwebel argue and expand upon critical approaches to the meaning of agency in regard to children and young people’s ability to take action on their own and others’ behalf.

References Abate, Michelle Ann. The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2016. Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press, 2011.

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Bradford, Clare. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2007. Bruhm, Stephen, and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Capshaw, Katharine. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Collins, Patricia Hill. “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 3, 1998, pp. 62–82. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 139, 1989, pp. 139–67. Dekker, Jeroen J. H. “The Century of the Child Revisited,” International Journal of Children’s Rights, vol. 8, 2000, pp. 133-150. Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna. “Using Literary Criticism for Children’s Rights: Toward a Participatory Research Model of Children’s Literature Studies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 215-231. Dresang, Eliza T., and Kathryn McClelland. “Radical Change: Digital Age Literature and Learning.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 38, no. 3, 1999, pp. 160-167. Dresang, Eliza T. Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1999. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Edwards, Lisa M., and Jessica B. McClintock. “A Cultural Context Lens of Hope.” The Oxford Handbook of Hope. Matthew W.  Gallagher, et  al., eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 95-104. Fass, Paula. “Historical Context for United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,” AAPSS Annals, vol. 633, 2011, pp. 17-29. Flynn, Richard, Marah Gubar, Perry Nodelman, and Sara L. Schwebel. Forum on Divergent Perspectives on Children’s Agency in the journal, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Culture, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 254-310. Heller, Craig, et  al. “Selecting Children’s Picture Books with Positive Native American Fathers and Father Figures.” Multicultural Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2003, pp. 43-48. Jenkins, Henry, ed. The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Jiménez, Laura M. “My Gay Agenda: Embodying Intersectionality in Children’s Literature Scholarship.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 104-112. Johnson, Ken. “The Hundred Year Childhood.” New York Times, 26 July 2012.

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Kidd, Kenneth. “T Is for Trauma: The Children’s Literature of Atrocity.” Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature, by Kenneth Kidd, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 181-205. Kidd, Kenneth, and Michelle Ann Abate, eds. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Kinchin, Juliet, and Aidan O’Connor, eds. Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000 New York: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 2012. Koop, Willem. “Are We at the End of the ‘Century of the Child’? Historical Changes in Theorizing on Child Development.” Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time. Toronto/Bern: Hogrefe, 2005, pp. 124-133. Lara-Cooper, Kishan, and Sammy Cooper. “‘My Culture Is Not a Costume’: The Influence of Stereotypes on Children in Middle Childhood.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 31, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 56-68. Mickenberg, Julia, and Philip Nel. Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature. NY: NYU Press, 2010. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2005. Natov, Roni. The Poetics of Childhood. NY: Routledge, 2012. Nel, Philip. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. NY: Pantheon, 1998. Ranft, Erin. “Connecting Intersectionality and Nepantla to Resist Oppressions: A Feminist Fiction Approach.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, pp. 207–223. Reimer, Mavis, William Dumas, and Leonard Paul. Pı̄sim Finds Her Miskanow. Winnipeg, MB: Portage and Main, 2013. Rönnberg, Margareta. “The Century of the Child, Part II: Back to the Future or Forward to the Past?” Childhood Education: International Perspectives, ed. Eeva Hujala, Finland Association for Childhood Education International: University of Oulu Early Education Center, 1996, pp. 2-16. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. NY: Macmillan, 1984. Snyder, C. R., et al. “The Development and Validation of the Children’s Hope Scale” (Journal of Pediatric Psychology, vol. 22, no. 3, 1997, pp. 399-421. Solomon, Susan G. “The Century of the Child,” Design Issues, vol. 30, no. 2, 2014, pp. 112-115. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

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Thorne, Barrie. “Pricing the Priceless Child as a Teaching Treasure.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 5, no. 3, 2012, pp. 474-480. Todres, Jonathan, and Sarah Higinbotham. Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. United Nations World Population Prospects 2017. esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/ Wall, John. “Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities.” The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, ed. Anna Mae Duane, Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 2011, pp. 68-84. Wall, John. “‘Ain’t I a Person?’: Reimagining Human Rights in Response to Children.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, vol. 30, no. 2, 2010, pp. 39-57. Woodhouse, Barbara Bennett. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Woodhouse, Barbara Bennett. “Re-Visioning Rights for Children.” Rethinking Childhood. Peter B.  Pufall and Richard P.  Unsworth, eds. New Brunswick/ London: Rutgers UP, 2004, pp. 229-243. Woolford, Andrew. This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States. Lincoln, NE: U Nebraska P, 2015. Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. NY: Basic Books, 1984.

PART I

Children’s Rights and Role Models

Children’s Right to Participate: Insights from the Story of Malala Jonathan Todres

Introduction The right to participate is arguably the most progressive right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the foremost treaty on children’s rights. The Convention, or CRC, requires that states “assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child” (CRC, Article 12). And it mandates that the child’s views must be “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child” (ibid.). Recognition of the right to participate requires a shift in how we both understand and treat children. It means moving from viewing children solely as subsumed within the family, where they are “seen and not heard,” to appreciating children as actors with agency, capable of contributing to decisions about children’s lives.1 This chapter outlines children’s participation rights, discusses the story of Malala Yousafzai—both her lived experience and literary depictions of her life—and considers the broader implications of her story in children’s literature and children’s rights.

J. Todres (*) Georgia State University College of Law, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_2

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Adopted in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child turned 11 years old at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Today, despite the Convention long having reached “adulthood,” many of the rights in the Convention remain works-in-progress (Wall). The reasons are varied; in some countries, governments actively repress children’s rights, while in others, they are largely indifferent. And in still other nations, well-­ intentioned actors—from policymakers to parents—struggle to figure out how to operationalize certain rights including the right to participate (United Nations Committee, General Comment 5). Yet despite this patchwork implementation of the CRC, its inclusion of participation rights represents a powerful, and empowered, vision of children. In fact, the CRC includes several provisions for subjective agency and expression that had been absent from earlier, more protection-oriented children’s rights documents including the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child. These participation rights—referred to in Articles 12, 13, 14, 15, and 17 of the CRC—indicate a changing understanding of the child that has continued since the late 1980s. As the twentieth century bore witness to the birth of the modern international human rights movement, the latter part of the century saw the expansion of the human rights idea to include individuals and populations previously thought of as subordinate—for example, women, minorities, persons with disabilities, children, and others. The twenty-first century then confronts the challenge of making rights meaningful in the lives of all individuals, including those who are under 18 years of age and frequently denied the rights that attach to “adult” individuals. The right to participate2 is not only foundational for developing engaged citizens who can support a democracy, but it is also critical to realizing other rights. Providing opportunities for children to participate and be heard has been shown to produce positive outcomes in education, health care, juvenile justice proceedings, and other areas (see Todres and Higinbotham 2016). Perhaps more fundamentally, participation has an expressive function; it is an assertion of an individual’s personhood. And children, today as much as ever, are voicing a desire to be heard and to be acknowledged as individuals in their own right. Human rights law, and in particular children’s rights law, establishes that children have a right to be heard and to have their opinions given fair consideration. Yet human rights law, and even law more generally, is often removed from the daily lives of individuals. Only a tiny percentage of the population studies human rights law. Children’s literature, however, exists

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in children’s lives and offers them creative worlds in which to explore and confront human rights themes. As Ian Ward explains in his book Law and Literature, in which he explores the potential of literature to educate about the law: “[o]nly a tiny minority of the community will ever study law after the ages of around 18 or 19, but the vast majority who encounter a reasonably wide spectrum of children’s literature will already have engaged in the jurisprudential debate” (Ward, 118). Thus, children’s literature can make law, including human rights, more accessible (Ward, ibid.). It can provide children and adolescents a space to explore and engage with complex issues of rights and responsibilities and the meaning of participation, and that early engagement may develop into a deeper comprehension of human rights for the twenty-first century.

Participation as Foundational to Personhood In everyday life, children of all ages express their views to their parents, teachers, and others in their community. They ask to be heard and to have their views considered thoughtfully. Any parent or teacher can tell you how often children attempt to exercise their right to be heard. These moments are part of growing up and practice for developing a more robust sense of a child’s right to participate in his or her community and nation. In the human rights context, the concept of participation encompasses a range of rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to vote, among others. Traditional notions of childhood viewed children as subsumed within the family, with limited if any participation rights. It was presumed that parents would represent the child’s interests in the community and in the nation, and indeed even present-day documents place great power in the family as an institution. The CRC itself emphasizes the importance of the family, referring to it as “the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children” (CRC, Preamble). And, for children to realize the full range of their rights, including their right to participate, having parents or caregivers that nurture and support those rights is critical. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and children’s rights more generally challenge the idea that children are solely appendages of the family. While acknowledging the critical role of parents and the family in the development of the child, the Convention also insists on recognition of children as individuals in their own right (CRC, Preamble). In short, from

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a children’s rights perspective, agency and the need for protection are not mutually exclusive (see James 2011). The Convention reflects both ideas, emphasizing the essential role that parents and families play in the lives of children and establishing that children have a distinct right to be heard.3 As noted in the Introduction, the core of children’s participation rights is found in Article 12 of the Convention, which provides that: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child. (CRC, Article 12)

There are four critical aspects of this right. First, the child’s right to be heard applies to “all matters affecting the child.” Therefore, even though subsection 2 of Article 12 provides that a child “shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child,” the first requirement of Article 12 is not limited to judicial proceedings. In other words, Article 12 is not merely about giving children a say in custody proceedings in family court, for example, but rather it means ensuring that children have meaningful opportunities to participate in all decisions that affect their lives. Indeed, in answering the threshold question of which matters affect a child, children’s own views should inform that determination. As Laura Lundy writes, “The obvious starting point would be to ask children themselves whether the matter affects them” (Lundy, 931). Second, this right belongs to every child “capable of forming his or her own views.” As the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has stated, there is no minimum age for the right to express one’s views and the burden should not be put on the child to prove he or she is capable of expressing a view (United Nations Committee, General Comment 12). The default position must be that children are capable of expressing their views. Further, as Lundy explains, “Children’s right to express their views is not dependent upon their capacity to express a mature view; it is dependent only on their ability to form a view, mature or not” (Lundy, 935).4 This lack of a minimum age presents challenges for adults, who must ensure not only that children have a forum for expressing their views but also must learn how to listen to all children who are capable of expressing a view, even very young children (Lundy, 736). But critically, as is the case with rights held by adults, the existence of this right

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of the child is not dependent on maturity. What changes with the child’s development and evolving maturity is the weight given to the child’s view. Third, the right to participate acknowledges the developing nature of childhood. Children, especially young children, lack the capacity and autonomy of adults. Recognizing these limitations, the Convention provides that the weight given to the child’s views should be consistent with the “age and maturity” of the child (CRC, Article 12). In other words, Article 12 grants children the right to have their voices heard and be given due consideration; it does not demand that children be allowed to decide an issue. As any parent knows, in many instances, pursuing the child’s best interests means making informed decisions on the child’s behalf.5 Lothar Krappmann, former member of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, explains that Article 12’s due weight requirement “means that the [child’s] views are seriously considered. … The final responsibility, however, remains with the adult” (Krappmann, 507–508). Indeed, children often express that they want the opportunity to provide input and want to feel heard, but do not want the burden of having to make the final decision.6 The right to participate also includes a right not to express one’s view (United Nations Committee, General Comment 12, paragraph 16), just as freedom of expression includes a right not to speak. However, if a child chooses to participate, then his or her views must be given appropriate consideration. Fourth, participation must be meaningful. As the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child—the body established to review countries’ progress in implementing the CRC—explains, [A]ppearing to “listen” to children is relatively unchallenging; giving due weight to their views requires real change. Listening to children should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather as a means by which States make their interactions with children and their actions on behalf of children ever more sensitive to the implementation of children’s rights. (United Nations Committee, General Comment 5, page 4)

Just as the building of a school or a hospital does not fulfill a state’s obligation to ensure education or health, merely inviting children to a meeting or permitting them to speak at the meeting is not sufficient (Willow, 52–53). Meaningful participation means ensuring young people are heard and, in appropriate instances, incorporating their ideas into decisions.

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Other rights of the child, also enshrined in the Convention, bolster the right to participate. The right to freedom of “thought, conscience, and religion” safeguards children’s right to think freely and hold their own beliefs (CRC, Article 14). And children’s literature offers the space to explore ideas and develop one’s own beliefs. Parents and other caregivers are natural partners and guides for children in this process, and the Convention requires that governments “respect the rights and duties of the parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right [to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion] in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child” (CRC, Article 14). In other words, children’s rights law establishes that the government cannot mandate what a child must think or believe. With the freedom to hold his or her own views, the child is then protected by children’s rights law if he or she wants to express those views. Article 13 of the Convention establishes that “[t]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.” One might argue that this language expressly protects children’s access to children’s literature. Access to information that can inform the child’s views is also reinforced by Article 17 of the Convention, which provides that states “shall ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health.” Participation rights also include the right to freedom of association (CRC, Article 15). Working in conjunction with the right to education, these rights and freedoms allow children to grow and develop in their thinking and to be positioned to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their lives, both as children and later as adults. Participation is a cornerstone of democracy and human rights. Equally important, it is foundational to personhood. Recognizing an individual’s right to participate in his or her community is tantamount to acknowledging that he or she counts (see Todres 2012). Recognition of children as rights holders is not possible without realization of their right to participate, a right that matures as children do. Given the critical nature of the right to participate and to have one’s voice heard, it is important to

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understand the messages that are conveyed to children about the value of their participation.

The Emergence of the Empowered Child Nowhere is the idea of active participation more vividly represented than in the story of 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who as a girl stood up to Taliban efforts to prohibit girls’ education in Pakistan. Malala7 personifies the strength of youth, and she implodes the myth that empowering children will lead to frivolous demands. She represents the voice of the new century, and it is essential that both adults and children alike hear and see what she and other children stand for. On October 9, 2012, Malala was the victim of a terrible crime in rural Pakistan. A masked gunman boarded a school bus and shot the then-15-­ year-old girl in the head in front of her friends. The attack, which injured two other girls as well, was motivated by a death threat issued by the Taliban, which objected to Malala’s voice on behalf of girls’ education. Remarkably, she survived. As Malala herself explains, “The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born” (Yousafzai 2013). In reality, Malala had engaged in countless acts of courage in the years before the assassination attempt, from risking her safety to write a blog for the BBC about the situation in her hometown, Mingora, to the very act of continuing to attend school, even as girls’ education was being shut down. She and her father had been featured in a short New York Times documentary, Class Dismissed in Swat Valley, in 2009, and her story drew international attention (Ellick). Ultimately, Malala’s strength, power, and courage would lead her to become a global advocate for the education of every child, particularly girls. On her 16th birthday, she delivered an address to the United Nations. Then, in 2014, at the age of 17, she became the first child to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which she received along with Indian children’s rights advocate Kailash Satyarthi, whose work aims to end child labor exploitation. That a child or adolescent is engaged politically and seeking to assert her rights and the rights of other children is not new. Young people have played meaningful roles in many struggles for human rights. The twentieth century bore witness to youth activism in the iconic struggles for

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human rights, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.8 Although youth participation and activism is not new, what is new is that adults are starting to grant greater respect to the power of children’s voices. A young John Lewis was an important civil rights figure, but no one questioned that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader of the movement. With Malala, a young girl was, and now as a young woman continues to be, the central figure of the movement to ensure girls’ education globally. She is supported by global leaders such as former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others, but she remains the central figure. That signals an important shift in terms of recognizing the agency of children and the value of their voices and allowing them to come to the forefront.9

The Literary World Malala is also serving as a beacon in the literary world. Her autobiography, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, co-authored by British journalist Christina Lamb, became an international bestseller and has been translated into more than 40 languages since its 2013 publication (see Sutton). The book’s tone and language suggest that despite its young subject and her account of childhood, the target audience is in fact adults. Having a ghostwriter both elevated Malala’s voice and altered it. As Fatima Bhutto writes in her review for The Guardian newspaper, it is sometimes difficult to decipher whose voice we are hearing, whether Malala’s or Lamb’s: “Malala’s voice has the purity, but also the rigidity, of the principled,” but it is overtaken at times by “the stiff, know-it-all voice of a foreign correspondent” (Bhutto). Still, Malala’s story is important for audiences of all ages, exhorting readers to understand what children’s rights mean and how they operate or are impaired in practice. (A young readers’ version of the book has also been published, co-authored by Patricia McCormick.10) Having both adults and young readers understand the value of children’s rights, as illustrated in this internationally known story, is essential to securing support for the realization of children’s rights more broadly. And the Convention recognizes this critical point by requiring that children’s rights be made “widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike” (CRC, Article 42). It is the only human rights treaty to include such a mandate.

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Although adults can facilitate children’s rights, ultimately children must understand and realize them. Thus Malala’s story has been retold in a number of children’s books, including ones aimed at younger children such as Malala Yousafzai: Warrior with Words, written by Karen Leggett Abouraya and illustrated by L.  C. Wheatley. Beautifully illustrated, the book opens: Malala is a miracle in pink. Malala is a warrior with words. Malala Yousafzai did not celebrate her sixteenth birthday with a sleepover, but with a stand­up. It was a miracle that she could stand at all. She stood up in front of the whole world to prove that words have power. (Abouraya)

And so the book opens with Malala addressing the United Nations, and then goes back in time to tell her story. The young reader knows from this opening that the story ends victoriously for Malala, providing some comfort through the darker pages describing the Taliban crackdown on girls’ education and assassination attempt of Malala. Malala Yousafzai: Warrior with Words offers young readers an opportunity to learn about Malala, her bravery, and the importance of educating every child. It is about rights but also about our duty to ensure every child’s rights are fulfilled. Malala’s story, recounted in books for adults and children alike, highlights several important themes: Children’s Insightfulness  First, Malala recounts that at an early age, she recognized injustices and unequal treatment. She writes, “While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five-year-old boy! This was the tradition. I had decided very early I would not be like that” (Yousafzai and Lamb, 26). While no one doubts that Malala is extraordinary, her early insights are an important reminder that children see, understand, and are affected by injustice. In this regard, she is not unique. Children might not describe what they see in the context of human rights law or norms, but they are more perceptive than most adults acknowledge and from a young age understand core concepts of fairness and justice (see Riedl et al.; Wallberg and Kahn). Their insights reinforce the importance of ensuring the voice of every child is heard.

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The Importance of Adults  One of the striking aspects of I Am Malala is that much of the book, especially the early chapters, is about Malala’s father. It is a reminder, like that which we see in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, that parents and caregivers are essential guides and partners of children. Malala’s father’s passion for education and bravery in the face of injustice inspired and emboldened his daughter. In the early years of life, mothers and fathers and teachers are partners in children’s reading experience. They read to and with children. They act, at times, as rights “translators,” helping their children, especially younger ones, understand lessons from stories and relate them to their own lives. I Am Malala is in a sense Malala’s gift to her father, honoring what he taught her and showing that she has become the courageous, educated daughter he wanted to raise. That there is so much on her father serves as a contrast to many literary works for children—from James and the Giant Peach to the Harry Potter series—in which the child protagonist only comes to the forefront when the child’s parents have died (see Todres and Higinbotham). But in Malala’s story, she is strong in the presence of and in part because of her parents—her father’s insistence on her education and her mother’s caring support of her. In short, Malala had adult caregivers who nurtured and supported her empowerment. They wanted and allowed her to be heard. And that is precisely what is needed, as Gerison Lansdown explains, [A]dults need to learn to hear and see what children are saying and doing without subjecting it to the filtering process that often diminishes their contribution simply because they are young. Unfortunately, too often, adults fail to recognise these capacities because they assess children from an adult perspective. And too often, children’s capacities are underestimated because of an adult failure to create an environment in which children can articulate their views appropriately. (Lansdown 2005, 5)

Education as Empowerment Human rights law, including children’s rights law, establishes that every child has a right to education (CRC, Article 28). Human rights requires that children have access to education and information from a diversity of sources, and literature provides that. In her autobiography, Malala describes her early appreciation of the value of education:

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As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of paper with a pencil to account for the oranges she sold, as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was going to fight. (Yousafzai and Lamb, 217)

Similarly, the message is clear to the child reader of Warrior with Words. After reading that Malala and her family returned home to find their house in chaos—though, “miraculously, the books in her room had not been touched”—the child reader sees the illustration of Malala and her family huddled together amidst a destroyed home. And then, the child reader turns the page and sees an image of an upright Malala with the words “Education is our basic right” written in oversized text next to her (Abouraya). Malala’s story, and indeed the very act of reading, reinforces the value of education. Opportunities in the Literary World  Opportunities abound in the literary world to confront difficult issues and to be inspired by characters who overcome challenges to and restrictions on their rights. Malala’s story is a real-world example that has been transferred to the pages children read or have read to them. Carol Bellamy, former Executive Director of UNICEF, writes: For myself, it was Alice in Wonderland. Was I aware in my early years that Alice was seen, by some, as a feminist icon—a Malala of her time? Of course not. But it is certain that, in my childish enjoyment of her adventures and her bizarre encounters, I was absorbing valuable lessons for life. … The lesson was clear: if Alice can do whatever she like, so can I. (Bellamy 2016)

Children’s literature provides a powerful, safe space in which to engage difficult, complex issues. And to be inspired to make one’s voice heard. Children’s Literature as a Vehicle for Participation Rights  Children’s literature, at times marginalized as children’s rights are, offers a vehicle for exploring and understanding children’s participation rights. The act of reading children’s literature and immersing oneself in the imaginative world of different stories can be empowering, freeing children from their day-to-day lives which are otherwise constrained. Children’s literature also

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provides a model for participation, showing child readers not only the value of their voices, but how to participate meaningfully. Malala herself writes how after recovering from being shot, she was finally able to read again and read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, remarking: I loved reading about Dorothy and how even though she was trying to get back home she stopped and helped those in need like the Cowardly Lion and the rusty Tin Man. She had to overcome a lot of obstacles to get where she was going, and I thought if you want to achieve a goal, there will be hurdles in your way, but you must continue. (Yousafzai and Lamb, 295)

While Malala’s story comes with the intensity of real-world experiences in a country where human rights are constrained, many other books for children offer more playful narratives about the right to be heard and children’s participation rights.11

Conclusion Children have the right to be heard and to participate in decisions that affect their lives. Yet they can realize this right only if they are aware that they have the right to be heard and to have their views be given due consideration. Thus adults have an obligation to educate children about their rights. This foundational step of educating about rights is embedded in the Convention, which requires that states make the “the principles and provisions of the Convention widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike” (CRC, Article 42). Children’s literature provides an invaluable space for children to explore the idea of participation. Indeed, Malala teaches us also of the power of literature. She writes about being a preteen: “I read my books like Anna Karenina and the novels of Jane Austen and trusted my father’s words: ‘Malala is free as a bird’” (Yousafzai and Lamb, 67). Fortunately, Malala is not alone. In the twenty-first century, we have seen more widespread recognition of the importance of human rights education (Howe and Covell) and the fundamental role children’s literature can play in exposing children to core principles of human rights. There is growing recognition of rights discourses in children’s literature, from scholarly books to special journal issues12 to new literary honors. In 2015, Amnesty International UK and the Chartered Institute of Library

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and Information Professionals (CILIP) established a new award for human rights in children’s literature. Although much more is needed to ensure full recognition and realization of children’s participation rights, in literary spaces and daily life, this is an exciting time for those interested in children’s literature, children’s rights, or both. The early years of the twenty-first century have laid the foundation for exploring and even embracing children’s participation rights in children’s literature and beyond.

Notes 1. On evolving constructions of childhood, see, for example, Sánchez Eppler (2011) and Johnny (2006). 2. In this chapter, I use the “right to participate” to include broadly the right to play an active role in issues that affect one’s life and, more generally, in one’s community or society. Thus, the right to participate includes a right to be heard, which itself encompasses meaningful opportunities to express one’s views and have them considered thoughtfully. 3. Nineteen provisions of the CRC acknowledge the importance of parents and families in the lives of children. See United Nations CRC, arts. 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 37, and 40. 4. Endorsing an equitable approach, Archard and Skivenes insist that “a child should not be judged against a standard of competence by which even most adults would fail. It is unfair to ask children to be more competent in their decision-making than those adults to whom we grant a general freedom to decide” (Archard and Skivenes, 10). 5. The “best interests of the child” standard itself has been the subject of critique. Mnookin writes, “The choice is inherently value-laden; all too often there is no consensus about what values should inform this choice” (Mnookin, 17–18). Lansdown (2000) comments, “In the name of the best interests of children, we have justified decisions, actions, and treatments of children which in retrospect we now consider unacceptable.” Important questions arise depending on who determines the child’s best interest, what criteria they use, and how they weight different factors. 6. Grahn-Farley writes, “The right to participate does not give the child a right to make decisions. … [It] means that the child should be heard in all matters that concern the child. … [It] also includes the right of the child to participate in a meaningful way” (Grahn-Farley, 372). According to Morag, Rivkin, and Sorek, “Studies indicate that children whose parents are going through a divorce are usually interested in expressing their positions and their feelings regarding decisions that affect their lives,

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although in most cases they do not wish to be the ones making the decision” (Morag et al., 4). 7. I refer to Malala Yousafzai by her first name, as she has become known globally as “Malala.” In Western media, she is consistently referred to as Malala. Although I cannot say for sure whether this first name usage is due to her being understood as a child (or female) or rooted in another reason, I note that it would be highly unusual for an adult of her international stature, or even lesser stature, to be called only by first name in Western media. 8. See, for example, Brown (2012), Woodhouse (2009), and Liddell et al. (1993). 9. The 2018 March for Our Lives, led by young leaders from Parkland, Florida, demanding action to end gun violence in America, offers another example in which children and adolescents are at the forefront of a movement and not playing only supporting roles. 10. The young readers’ edition by Yousafzai and McCormick was published a year after the initial “adult” edition. For perspectives on the differences between the two versions, see Butcher, who claims the young readers’ edition presents a more genuine first-­person voice, and Reynolds, who notes key details left out of the young readers’ version. 11. See, for example, Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who! (1954) and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958); Doreen Cronin and illustrator Betsy Lewin, Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type (2000); and Drew Daywalt and illustrator Oliver Jeffers’ The Day the Crayons Quit (2013). 12. See The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 40, no. 2, April 2016, a special issue on children’s rights in children’s literature guest-edited by Laura Saguisag and Matthew B. Prickett.

References Abouraya, Karen Leggett, and L.C. Wheatley (illus.). 2014 (StarWalk Kids Media e-book). Malala Yousafzai: Warrior with Words. New York: Lee & Low, 2019. Archard, David, and Marit Skivenes. “Balancing a Child’s Best Interests and a Child’s Views.” International Journal of Children’s Rights, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1-21. Bellamy, Carol. Foreword. Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law, by Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Bhutto, Fatima. “I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai—review.” The Guardian, 30 Oct 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/30/malala-yousafzaifatima-bhutto-review. Accessed 28 March 2019.

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Brown, Josie Foehrenbach. “Inside Voices: Protecting the Student-Critic in Public Schools.” American University Law Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2012, pp. 253-331. Butcher, Kasey. “I Am Malala: Comparing the Young Reader Edition to the ‘Original.’” Ph.D.s and Pigtails: Girls, Grad School, and Popular Culture, 12 March 2015, phdsandpigtails.com/2015/03/12/i-am-malala-comparingthe-young-reader-edition-to-the-original/. Accessed 28 March 2019. Ellick, Adam B. “Class Dismissed in Swat Valley.” Video. New York Times, 22 February 2009, www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/1194838044017/ class-dismissed-in-swat-valley.html. Accessed 28 March 2019. Grahn-Farley, Maria. “Human Rights and U.S.  Standing under the Obama Administration: The U.N.  Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Forgotten History of the White House Children’s Conferences, 1909-1971.” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 20, 2011, pp. 307-376. Howe, R.  Brian and Katherine Covell. Empowering Children: Children’s Rights Education as a Pathway to Citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. James, Allison. “To Be (Come) or Not to Be (Come): Understanding Children’s Citizenship.” Annals AAPSS, vol. 633, no. 1, 2011, pp. 167-179. Johnny, Leanne. “Reconceptualising Childhood: Children’s Rights and Youth Participation in Schools.” International Education Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2006, pp. 17-25. Krappmann, Lothar. “The Weight of the Child’s View (Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child).” International Journal of Children’s Rights, vol. 18, no. 4, 2010, pp. 501-513. Lansdown, Gerison. “Can you hear me? The right of young children to participate in decisions affecting them.” Working Paper 36. Bernard van Leer Foundation, The Hague, 2005. Lansdown, Gerison. “Implementing Children’s Rights and Health.” Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol. 83, 2000, pp. 286-288. Liddell, Christine, Jennifer Kemp, and Molly Moema. “The Young Lions: South African Children and Youth in Political Struggle.” The Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children, eds. Lewis A.  Leavitt and Nathan A.  Fox. New York: Psychology Press, 1993, pp. 199-214. Lundy, Laura. “‘Voice’ Is Not Enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.” British Educational Research Journal, vol. 33, no. 6, 2007, pp. 927-42. Mnookin, Robert. In The Interest of Children: Advocacy, Law Reform and Public Policy, New York: W.H. Freeman & Co. 1985. Morag, Tamar, Dori Rivkin, and Yoa Sorek. “Child Participation in the Family Courts—Lessons from the Israeli Pilot Project.” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, vol. 26, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-30.

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Reynolds, Alyson. “I Am Malala: Omissions From the Young Readers’ Edition.” Alyson Reynolds’ Portfolio Challenge, 24 May 2016, alysonreynoldsfolio.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/i-am-malala-omissions-from-the-youngreaders-edition/. Accessed 28 March 2019. Riedl, Katrin, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. “Restorative Justice in Children.” Current Biology, vol. 25, no. 13, 2015, pp.  1731-1735. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.014 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Childhood.” Keywords for Children’s Literature. Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, eds. New York: NYU Press, 2011, pp. 35-41. Sutton, Karolina. “I Am Malala.” Review. Curtis Brown, n.d., curtisbrown.co. uk/client/malala-yousafzai/work/i-am-malala#! . Accessed 28 March 2019. Todres, Jonathan, and Sarah Higinbotham. Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Todres, Jonathan. “Maturity.” Houston Law Review, vol. 48, 2012, pp. 1107-1165. United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 5: General measures of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (arts. 4, 42 and 44, para. 6), U.N. Doc. RC/GC/2003 (2003). United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment 12: The Right of the Child to Be Heard, U.N.  Doc. CRC/C/GC/12, ar. 20 and 21 (2009). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989. www.ohchr. org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. Accessed 28 March 2019. Wall, John. Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2016. Wallberg, Pamela and Maria Kahn, “The Rights Project; How Rights Education Transformed a Classroom.” Canadian Children, vol 36, 2011. 31–35. Ward, Ian. Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Willow, Carolyne. Children’s Right to be Heard and Effective Child Protection: A Guide for Government and Children’s Rights Advocates on Involving Children and Young People in Ending All Forms of Violence. Bangkok: Save the Children, 2010. Woodhouse, Barbara Bennett. “The Courage of Innocence: Children as Heroes in the Struggle for Justice.” University of Illinois Law Review, 2009, pp. 1567-1589. Yousafzai, Malala, and Christina Lamb. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2013. Yousafzai, Malala, and Patricia McCormick. I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition). New  York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2014. Yousafzai, Malala. “The text of Malala Yousafzai’s speech at the United Nations.” A World at School. 12 July 2013, web.archive.org/web/20131014103537/ https://secure.aworldatschool.org/page/content/the-text-of-malalayousafzais-speech-at-the-united-nations. Accessed 28 March 2019.

The Wisdom of Getting Involved: Civic Engagement in Contemporary Egyptian Children’s Literature Yasmine Motawy

From the sudden politicization of a largely apolitical nation to the continued interrogation of social, religious, and political positions in the years following the 2011 revolution, Egyptian literary, film, media, and visual arts have flourished. Egyptian children’s literature, on the other hand, has been slow to recover from and engage with the nation’s seismic ideological upheaval. On the one hand, children’s book production has been severely affected by the economic downturn that has forced publishers to rethink and seriously curtail their children’s offerings as consumer confidence declines and books that are not part of the national school curriculum are considered luxuries. On the other hand, the ideologically conservative Egyptian children’s media industry is at a crossroads. Children’s author Fatima Sharafeddine succinctly explains, “In the Arab world, we do not realize that political events mean anything to the children; we do not notice that they are affected by it; they are generally excluded from the political scene and shielded from its terrible

Y. Motawy (*) American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_3

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consequences” (qtd. in Qualey, online, n.p.). However, that may not be entirely true. Twenty-first-century-creators and publishers of children’s literature in Egypt wrestle with profound questions: What content is appropriate for these times of change? What is political correctness today? What expectations do  the purchasing public for children’s books  have? How much of the socially, politically, and economically revolutionary content that prevails in adult literature should be mirrored in children’s books? This reckoning is best understood in light of how political and civic engagement played out in children’s books in the years leading up to 2011, and hence covers works written in the decade from 2005 to 2015. This chapter therefore attempts to first situate politically engaged texts for Egyptian children within the historical trend of book production, while expanding the definition of activism—which is rarely directly tackled—to permit this analysis to examine books that: 1. encourage children to view their transactions as involving rights and responsibilities; 2. encourage readers’ critiques of existing social orders and pave the way for utopian thinking; 3. identify personal characteristics conducive to community engagement; 4. allow children to see themselves as potential agents for social transformation; and 5. arise as a narrative product of civic action and engagement themselves. In addition, this analysis asks what power relations, ideologies, and values are encoded into the discourse of children’s books, and whether these texts can be transformative in permitting children to critique, imagine, and formulate action in the world around them. Beginning in the 1960s, poorly produced books on religious, folkloric, nationalistic, and moralistic themes dominated the book market in Egypt (Rizk and Rodenbeck 102–103). This period of decline in children’s book publishing was marked by the jarring emergence of the deeply political Dar al-Fata al-Arabi Publishing House in 1974. This experimental publisher was established in Cairo by Palestinian residents with PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) funding. The house managed to bring Egypt’s best artists on board as illustrators, and counted Helmy El Touni, Moheidin Ellabbad, Adly Rizkallah, Hijazi, and Bahgat among its

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contributors. The regionally available books were largely concerned with questions of social justice, the promotion of Arab nationalism, and encouraging children’s answers to the Question of Palestine (Ellabbad and Traboulsi, online, n.p.). The Cairo branch of Dar al-Fata al-Arabi had published 170 children’s books and related works before it moved to the Gaza Strip in 1995. This publisher’s 1995 departure from Cairo coincided with the rise of neoliberalism in Egypt and with the expanded role of NGOs in development. In the late twentieth century, Egypt opened up to international initiatives to revive children’s book production, resulting in books that mimic Western themes and forms. Local and international organizations such as UNICEF, Amnesty, and Ana Masry partnered with players in the publishing industry to translate and make available children’s versions of books that raise children’s awareness of their basic human rights and define civic engagement as citizens’ participation in a democratic country’s processes. Children’s books of this period visualize and retell key United Nations and UNICEF documents including the landmark 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC); such publications arise in accordance with Article 42 of the CRC, which obliges states’ parties to ensure that children are aware of the CRC’s human rights principles. These works thus invite children to engage with their worlds and define this engagement as a matter of exercising human rights. Often, these are works in translation rather than original Egyptian publications or original work in Arabic. For example, Alain Serré’s J’ai le droit d’être un enfant (2009; I Have the Right to Be a Child) was translated from the French and published in Egypt by Boustany’s Publishing House in 2013; tellingly, this publication received support from the Taha Hussein Fund by the French Institute, a grant started in 1990 that has supported the translation and publication of more than 12,000 French titles in 75 countries. Similarly, in 2006, Egypt’s National Council for Childhood and Motherhood translated and published a simplified and illustrated version of the UN’s 1959 Declaration of Human Rights. This book explains the historical context for the declaration and the birth of the United Nations, founded in 1945 to replace the World War I-era League of Nations. The text explains that a group of people who were different in every way came together to agree that they did not want another world war that victimized non-participants and wrote a document to that effect, then goes on to condense and narrate parts of the list using neutral-colored stick figures.

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The early years of the twenty-first century, characterized by a global outlook and an urgent sense of rights under threat, saw fresh political changes in Egyptian children’s literature. A 2005 USAID National Book Program for Schools that funded the creation and dissemination of original Egyptian children’s books with the aim of providing all Egyptian schools with a library of the best books produced to ensure a generation of Egyptian readers. The project was evaluated to be a success; developing and effectively distributing a great number of new titles, and significantly enhancing the abilities of publishers, librarians, teachers, and the private children’s books sector (Juarez and Associates 8). It did much to revive the children’s book industry in Egypt. Shortly thereafter, the 2008 launch of the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature and other children’s literature prizes  improved children’s publications in the Arab world in general, by encouraging publishers to take risks and seek out competitive new writers and illustrators. Issue-based books were often favored by publishers and prizes, marking civic engagement as an increasingly popular topic and intentionally sustaining a “rights-based” discourse among small children. Original works, as opposed to works in translation, came to reflect Arab publishers’ growing interest in speaking the language of rights and equality to children. One example is the modern classic I Am a Human, written by Amal Farah and illustrated by one of Egypt’s top political cartoonists, Mustafa Hussein. Farah’s written text reassures the child reader that “my name, language, color, features, feelings, home, and environment make me special. And that matters!” (27) Hussein’s illustrations tell a parallel story: A pictured girl and boy bask in the security of their citizenship, to the backdrop of a minaret, a church spire, an Egyptian flag, a skyscraper, and a tree studded with ripe oranges (23). Another page shows Egyptian boys from various governorates holding up a map, indicating that patriotism is an underlying condition for the question of rights and echoing Egyptian school curricula, which promote nationalism (27) (Figs. 1 and 2). Another path in the encouragement of civic engagement is in the depiction of activities that citizens in any type of state voluntarily engage in to improve a community. These activities include maintaining cleanliness—a real problem in Egyptian urban centers—and their depiction allows for a broader understanding of community engagement in countries where such opportunities are limited. These works are more narrative than informative, but they still operate within the same heavy-handed, didactic model that “tells” a child the acceptable forms and themes within which

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Fig. 1  Amal Farah and illustrator Mustafa Hussein’s I Am a Human, p. 23

Fig. 2  Amal Farah and illustrator Mustafa Hussein’s I Am a Human, p. 27

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to exercise their civic rights. What is omitted is the depiction of children engaging in any attempt to reform the way they are being governed through symbolic artistic gestures or even legitimate avenues of expressing dissatisfaction such as petition writing. Oftentimes, however, the depiction of one right will be in direct contradiction with another, as in the case with prolific author Fatma el Maadoul’s Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (2006; I wish I were the Governor of Cairo). Maadoul is a pioneer in children’s literature in Egypt and a one-time holder of many official positions in the nation. Her books cover topics never before discussed in Arabic children’s literature, introducing children with special needs, modern family structures, racial and religious tolerance, as well as ecological issues. At the same time, her work has been criticized for being commissioned by the deposed government in its socialization campaigns. In Atamanna Law, children imagine themselves government officials, yet violate the rights of others to participate in the cultural life of the city (Figs. 3 and 4). The picturebook opens with Sarah, the protagonist, looking out at the Cairo skyline and daydreaming about all the things she would do for Cairo if she were governor, allowing the reader into her utopic vision for the capital and encouraging parallel imaginings in the reader. Sarah’s first order would be to forbid cars downtown and make all the roads leading to Tahrir into pedestrian zones; her fantasy reveals an anxiety in the popular imagination around public spaces and the potential they have for congregation. (Historically, protest movements in Egypt started at university gates and passed through other squares in Cairo, rarely becoming localized sit-ins, and Tahrir was first appropriated in this way in 2011.) Sarah

Fig. 3  Fatma el Maadoul’s Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (I wish I were the Governor of Cairo), p. 11

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Fig. 4  Fatma el Maadoul’s Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (I wish I were the Governor of Cairo), p. 12

also fathoms a Disneyfied utopian public space located in the manmade Fustat gardens park, with art exhibitions and entertainment such as magicians, acrobats, religious chanters where “everyone would don clean appropriate styles” and “clean” carts would sell traditional “shaabi” food in “a sophisticated civilized manner” and there would be an area set up to sell traditional Egyptian crafts  (11, 12). Maadoul’s proposed facelift of Cairo is terrifying in that she transforms the city by evicting its inhabitants and taking away their ‘uncivilized’ forms of self-expression. The gentrification of public spaces for touristic consumption as a spectacle is not new in Egypt, and neither is the celebratory discourse on cleanliness, particularly for children. Nevertheless, this vision for a city is chilling in its failure to address any real problems beyond the cosmetic. The following year, in a work of fiction titled Shagaret el gemmez (2007; The sycamore tree), Maadoul described activism that went beyond purely utopian imaginings and revolved around the threat to a favorite tree in a public park. Shagaret el gemmez describes the protests staged by neighborhood children who learned of builders’ plans to sacrifice a sycamore at the altar of commercialism and build a kiosk in its place, using its timber. The earnestness of the children’s appeal shamed the assembled workers into gathering their machinery and leaving the sycamore in place. The naïveté of this process belies the complexity of activism and ignores its mechanics, and potentially does the child reader a disservice. The children are neither structured nor organized in a critical mass, nor do they fully recognize the mindset of the industry they are up against, yet all goes swimmingly and they are able to save the tree. In a society where social injustices are rampant, it is worth noting that Maadoul’s children pour their energies into

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yet another urban landscape cause. The adult writer is only comfortable engaging children in causes where the resistance is to a public that is negligent of its civic duties or a corporation that has just failed to grasp the importance of a tree and the seriousness with which the children wish to protect it. Structural injustices that implicate governmental deprioritization or failure to understand an issue are never tackled, and in any case, the mechanisms by which justice is achieved are never elaborated on at any length. The heartwarmingly neat and tidy resolution leaves children none the wiser about the avenues through which they can really  pursue social change. Where Maadoul’s books and mainstream publishing offer idealized simplicity and cosmetic solutions, a significantly different narrative emerges from the realm of activism itself. In 2004, the Arab Penal Reform Organization (APRO), supported by USAID, directly explained and lobbied for child activism in their series of 36 illustrated children’s books, “Activist Ali’s Team.” These very unsubtle short illustrated narratives are created by a team of writers that collaboratively write e-books, intended to educate children on their civil and legal rights, follow a 10-year-old named Ali and his male and female companions. Early in the series, Ali learns from his father that an activist is someone who tries to change society for the better. Afterward, Ali and his friends form an activists’ club. In each book, they encounter a serious social or political problem in Egypt and take concrete steps to correct it. For example, the third book in the series, Ahlaam bahbouha w zanana (Dreams of Bahbouha and Zanana), brings up sensitive issues surrounding gender inequality and child welfare. Two 10-year-old girls, Bahbouha and Zanana, are forced to work as household servants instead of remaining in school. After witnessing the girls’ plight, two female members of Activist Ali’s Team call the club together to figure out a plan of action. Their meeting educates readers on child welfare organizations in Egypt and international organizations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). They also make a material effort to help Bahbouha and Zanana. The young activists find neighbors to donate desks and school books, and they locate teachers who can volunteer time to educate the two girls. Typically, each book in the series ends with a brief explanation of the law or international human rights convention that applies to the story; in Dreams of Bahbouha and Zanana, the authors explain the CRC and how Egypt adopted the convention.

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The series, which is now complete, won a distinguished award from the United Nations Development Project in 2007, and the organization has distributed 450,000 copies of “Activist Ali’s Team” books to youth clubs, schools, shelters, orphanages, hospitals, and cultural centers. Despite the fact that the books have been praised by the Egyptian Ministry of Education, the project ran into a roadblock in 2008 when local security forces in the governorates of Upper Egypt removed the books from school libraries and banned them, saying they were a threat to State security. The government confiscated and returned more than 60,000 books to APRO. APRO could then only distribute the books to private schools, detention centers, and hospitals. The trajectory of “Activist Ali’s Team” illustrates the dilemma faced by publishers of literature promoting children’s social awareness. Representations of grassroots efforts, meant to solve structural problems, can be perceived as belligerent to the State. This perception has not necessarily changed post-2011, as evidenced in the sensitivity that children’s publishers show in their approach to the revolution. For instance, Fatma el Maadoul was quick to respond to the zeitgeist; her Thawret el ‘asafeer (2013; Revolution of the birds) follows birds who reside in the trees around Tahrir Square on the morning of the revolution (Figs.  5 and 6). The

Fig. 5  Fatma el Maadoul, Thawret el ‘asafeer (Revolution of the birds), p. 18

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Fig. 6  Fatma el Maadoul, Thawret el ‘asafeer (Revolution of the birds), p. 25

protests are explained to them by a grandmother bird, who says that the people are angry because of the injustices of their ruler and the scarcity of their resources. As the 18 days progress, papa bird becomes agitated by the occupants of the square and argues with his family because he wants to leave. They refuse and he leaves alone. Meanwhile, birds fly around Cairo looking for food and report that they see children revolting against their parents through the windows: some children want to stay home from school, and some refuse to get dressed or brush their hair. In the streets, chaos ensues as the police withdraw from their posts, and papa bird is quick to point out how his fears have been vindicated. So far, papa bird’s views mirror those of two groups nicknamed “the remnants of the old regime” and “the couch party” by the supporters of the revolution in the square. The former are angry at the revolutionaries and foresee a snowball effect that spreads dissent everywhere; the latter are on the fence, following the revolutions on television and social media from the comfort of their sofas. Papa bird’s wise mother leads him back to the square. She hopes he will be moved by the patriotic fervor that has gripped the square and the singing of the national anthem, but he is met with a revolution in the trees; the birds are objecting to the indignity of his storming away without consulting them. They demand their rights, including democratic rule of the flock. A magistrate bird then comes in to explain to the birds—and the young readers—what this involves: the birds will need a constitution, fair elections, a cabinet, and a parliament. This direct explanation of the ‘correct’ take on revolutions—established figures of authority, who have not been ousted, mete out wisdom on the best course of action and the road to an undisputedly desirable democracy—is classic Maadoul. The undoing

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of the impact of political engagement of this form mirrors the state media discourse that acknowledges the nobility of the original intentions of the revolution but chides the revolutionaries for allowing their enthusiasm to be hijacked and exaggerated by others who have less noble personal interests in political upheaval. It then firmly emphasizes the legitimate route to effecting change, ignoring that part of the rationale of the revolution was the impossibility of doing so. This depiction of civic action preserves a middle ground between addressing community engagement as a political issue and avoiding an unfavorable stance vis-a-vis the State. The revolution is directly discussed again in 2013, when award-­winning Lebanese author Fatima Sharafeddine paired up with award-winning Egyptian artist Walid Taher to produce Habbat Rayahon Qawayaton (A strong wind blew), a subtle depiction of the “awakening” that was the Arab Spring. The book is dedicated to “Egypt … Egypt’s children … and the children of all the Arab revolutions” (3). The strong wind is described as blowing through the hair of everyone on the street, making everyone laugh, then through the washing hanging out to dry. The wind blows over the people on the rooftops, making everyone sway to music, and blows all the televisions away until everyone watches a film screened on the skies. Finally, the wind blows and the world is filled with dancing and revolutionary chants. The narrator says, “My heart took flight with joy and so did the hearts of everyone around me” (23). The mixed media pages feature Taher’s signature line sketches of children activists flying through the air accompanied by flags, violins, bicycles, old box style television sets, superimposed over collaged photographs of a bed of roses, a 1950s Volkswagen Beetle popular after the 1952 revolution, and Sayed Darwish, the father of Egyptian popular music, composer of the new Egyptian national anthem and the musician who roused public sentiment against the British culminating in the 1919 revolution. The nostalgic backdrop against the fluttering figures conveys a sense of life breathed into the masses as it has not since previous uprisings. The movement of the masses and the infectiousness of change is romanticized in a way that might no longer be possible today after the post-revolutionary euphoria has dissipated and the arts are now contending with the realities and demands of a new era. The latest book of that decade to address child civic engagement is Yacoub El Sharouni’s (2015) Laylatul Nar (The night of the fire). This is a dark and unpatronizing departure from Sharouni’s usual retellings of classic tales. Like a Greek tragedy, the events all take place on one fateful night when the informal market in the Citadel area in Cairo is burnt down. The reader

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immediately learns of the complex dynamics between the residents, the police, the municipal authorities, and each other and finds out why the people of the neighborhood allow the market to burn down without intervention. The protagonist is a young boy whose family’s livelihood and his own depend on the market. This street-smart boy recognizes that if dawn breaks and the market has not been rebuilt, the municipality will finally have an opportunity to have it cleared and reclaimed. He must contend with the latent heat of the embers, the difficulty of clearing the area, the lack of building material and manpower, and the impossible deadline. The book does not deal in naïve dichotomies of bad people and good people, or spend too much time dwelling on whose fault it is these people are poor. In this story, injustice happens, and people struggle with its grim consequences. A man who buys a taxi can become blind shortly thereafter; a government can demand its land back because squatters have no official rights to it. The protagonist’s ability to mobilize the community is aided by an unblunted survival instinct, his dire circumstances, his personal investment in the market both as a source of livelihood and as a legacy of his forefathers, and finally, the absence of formal structures that can be relied upon to intervene on behalf of the market traders. Sharouni’s story exemplifies many of the qualities that foster the aspirations of community engagement among young people. First, readers receive the assurance that their voices can be heard. The protagonist, as a working child from a family known to the community, knows that the adults around him respect him enough to listen to his ideas. Second, readers gain the ability to identify how aspirations will be realized, because the boy immediately visits influential traders in the area who have sentimental or pragmatic reasons for wanting the market to stay open. Third, readers find space within the school/work/home trinity of commitments to engage. Fourth, the society in the narrative recognizes the value in the engagement. The protagonist takes initiatives, and the hesitant community—encouraged by his success—throws its lot in with him as they are not just bound by trade in this communal space. Sharouni explains the social relationships and the intricacies of the lending circles that further bind the entire community. Fifth, readers observe the characters’ shared belief that authentic, individual engagement will make a difference, and that  true problem-solving rather than volunteerism alleviates the ongoing tribulations of others. As publishers remain wary about where to go with children’s literature in volatile times, the most noteworthy books show a strong trend toward

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character development through social awareness. If few books directly address civic engagement in the public space, or encounter resistance to themes of action for social justice, some books seek to foster the personal qualities conducive to civic engagement. Authors and publishers recognize that the contemporary child reader in the Arab world often experiences diversity largely through books; homogeneous family groups limit the young reader’s encounters with many genres of difference. Yet several children’s texts contend that empathy and caring about inequities (whether natural, such as disability, or manmade, such as poverty, racism, and/or war) drives social and political change. These texts value resourcefulness and learned optimism, encouraging unity and confidence over isolation and learned helplessness. One example of such a small-scale account is Rania Amin’s Sadiq mukhtalif jiddan (2010; A very different friend), an installment in Amin’s “Farhana” series. Here, the popular female protagonist finds herself in the uncomfortable situation of having to be a good hostess to Shady, a child visitor who has a clear but unnamed condition that makes him hyperactive, messy, and unattuned to social cues. When Farhana expresses anger at finding Shady making a mess of her tidy room, she faces Shady’s own uncontrollable tantrum. When she attempts to engage him with blocks, he topples everything she builds. It is only when Farhana stops expecting Shady to be a regular guest and learns flexibility that she sees the beauty in his self-absorbed, solitary make-believe play. Walid Taher’s Etisalat Award-winning Al-noqta Al-sawdaa (2009; The black dot) is a more of a conceptual narrative; abstract yet similarly attuned to home spaces. The picturebook opens with a large number of children in a festive scene, playing collective games. They wake up the following day to find a large black dot on their playground, and they have no idea why it arrived or how to get rid of it. Ultimately they decide that since they cannot remove it, they will use it—first as a tower to see far away, next as a shelter in the (highly unlikely) event of rain, and finally as home base in their game of hide-and-seek. Only a boy named Marwan does not accept this compromise, and he spends nine days and nights thinking about a real solution. Frustrated, he kicks the dot and a little bit of it crumbles at his feet. Marwan has found a way to eliminate the intrusion, yet the other children balk at his solution: “We are fine and comfortable, even though our playing field is considerably smaller and the sun no longer shines into the houses,” they protest (40). Marwan perseveres and his friends eventually assist him until another challenge arises: what to do with the pieces?

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This problem-solving, open-ended story resonates with the ongoing concerns that civic-mindedness and stewardship impose. In Hadil Ghoneim’s award-winning Sana fi Qena (2014; A year in Qena), family obligations hurl a 13-year-old upwardly mobile urban protagonist back into rural Qena for a year. Sana fi Qena is the diary of this unnamed writer, who tracks his thoughts and actions in a world ruled by the seasons and by the mindset of a frugal agricultural society. The boy’s astute observations, precociousness, and brief period of sulking endear him to the reading audience, which follows him as he resolves to ‘make things better.’ His overenthusiastic proactiveness marks his first collision with his extended family, as he rents a tractor from a schoolmate to work the land more cheaply and efficiently than the cow. It turns out that the family rents the cow from a distant relative whom they are indirectly supporting, and the boy learns what his hardworking family already knows: the cow’s steps, unlike the tractor’s tires, do not compress the soil, and the cow’s fuel is more readily available and cheaper than the gasoline and spare parts needed to power the tractor. After a few such incidents, “he is humbled by the understanding that this rural community has dealt with every contingency, and that the modern solutions they sometimes shun come not from stubborn ignorance but from a deep understanding of their problems (Motawy 100). His sharpened attention changes his community engagement from awkward collision to happy collusion, and he grows through his connection to the agricultural, social, culinary, and cultural life of this Upper Egyptian village” (Motawy 100). The protagonist’s journey from sheltered childhood into respectfully engaged youth through an integration experiment is one venue for voicing dissatisfaction with the status quo and expressing political criticism against a system that does not provide enough bridges for social activism. Rather, in the wake of the raids on Egyptian NGOs following the revolution, grassroot initiatives have been systematically frustrated as fears that they could destabilize the regime ran high. These books that subtly foster personal qualities conducive to the civic engagement affirm the general realization that social activism begins with the young, and the need for subtlety in approaching the matter in the current environment. The extended definition of activism I propose becomes useful in providing a nuanced conclusion regarding how authors view the wisdom of involvement. While the books produced in this period seem to mostly discourage direct belligerent engagement with authorities (Thawret el ‘asafeer), they do  support the rallying of community efforts to solve

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problems at a grassroots level (Laylatul Nar, Sadiq mukhtalif jiddan) as long as the community does not rise up against the status quo by weaponizing a rights-based discourse (the reception of the “Activist Ali’s Team”). The books also tepidly encourage abstract utopian thinking (Al-noqta Al-sawdaa, Habbat Rayahon Qawayaton, Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-‘Qahira), and very benign acts of protest that do not destabilize society but secure nominal victories that regularly expend the buildup of revolutionary energies that can truly threaten the social structure (Shagaret el gemmez).

References Ahlaam bahbouha w zanaana (Dreams of Bahbouha and Zanana). Arab Penal Reform Organization (APRO), 2015, wwtw.activistali.org/eng. Amin, Rania. Sadiq mukhtalif jiddan (A very different friend). Cairo: Elias Publishing, 2010. Ellabbad, Mohieddin, and Nawal Traboulsi. “Revolution For Kids: Dar El Fata El Arabi, Recollected.” Trans. Hassan Khan. Bidoun.org., 19, Winter 2009/2010. El Sharouni, Yacoub, and Samar Salahedin (illus.). Laylatul Nar (The night of the fire). Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2015. Farah, Amal, and Mustafa Hussein (illus.). I Am a Human. Trans. from Arabic by Yasmine Motawy. Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2008. Ghoneim, Hadil, and Yasser Gaessa (illus.). Sana fi Qena (A year in Qena). Cairo: Dar al-Balsam, 2014. Juarez and Associates. Final Report of the Evaluation of the USAID/Egypt National Book Program for Schools. Prepared for USAID, 2008. Maadoul, Fatma, and Rabab Hakem (illus.). Atamanna Law Kuntu Muhaafiz Al-Qahira (I wish I were the Governor of Cairo). Cairo: Nahdet Misr. 2006. Maadoul, Fatma, Hanadi Sleit (illus.). Shagaret el gemmez (The sycamore tree). Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2007. Maadoul, Fatma, and Reem Heiba (illus.). Thawret el ‘asafeer (Revolution of the birds). Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2013. Motawy, Yasmine. “Postcard: Sana fi Qina (One Year in Qena) by Hadil Ghoneim.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. 53.3 (2015): 100. Qualey, Marcia Lynx. “Where are the Children’s Books of the ‘Arab Spring’?” Arablit.org 12, March 2012. Web. Sharafeddine, Fatima, and Walid Taher (illust.). Habbat Rayahon Qawayaton (A strong wind blew). Cairo: Dar Al Shorouk, 2013. Taher, Walid. Al-noqta Al-sawdaa (The black dot). Cairo: Dar El-Shorouk, 2009.

Bright Pasts, Brighter Futures: Biographies for Children in the Early Twenty-First Century Clémentine Beauvais

This chapter explores contemporary evolutions of a genre too often dismissed as old-fashioned or unexciting: the biography for children. That genre, in the early twenty-first century, is of great theoretical interest to the children’s literature researcher, because it condenses with particular intensity some prominent questions and paradoxes that remain vexing for children’s literature criticism today—namely, tensions between child reader and adult intentionality, between truths and untruths, or between a glorified past and a hypothetical future, in the children’s text. My chief contention is that the biography for children today exacerbates—because it simply has to tackle—contemporary questions about the temporal positioning of the young reader in the act of reading, and what that positioning implies of the child’s agency in the future. What is the nature of a literary injunction addressed to a child—a being who is almost all futurity, latency, potentiality—by an adult intentionality, whose

C. Beauvais (*) University of York, York, England, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_4

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existence is to a much larger degree fixed? What kind of power might the child reader be given by a work of children’s literature, namely, a text by essence didactic?1 That issue is germane to the biography for children, that genre which presents, more directly than any other in children’s literature, an adult life—often a finished life, whose commitments are often overemphasised—and asks the child reader to do something with it. But what? How? And when? I want to explore those questions by taking seriously the claims made by biographies for children, and for that purpose the corpus must be explored with a generous eye. Much existing scholarly work on the biography for children, as I detail below, disproportionately foregrounds an unselected mainstream, often to denounce its mediocrity. Here, I will be studying audacious, intriguing contemporary declensions of the genre. I am especially interested in how those biographies do theoretical work of their own. In its most interesting contemporary iterations, the genre now offers readers more than life narratives: biographers (by which I mean both writers and illustrators of this type of text) call attention to what it means to represent an adult life to a child today and what it means to inspire a child today. As they update and rethink the genre, biographers for children update and rethink what it may entail for a contemporary child to appropriate past lives and their commitments.

An Ugly Duckling of a Genre Claiming that the biography for children is relevant to twenty-first century children’s literature criticism somehow sounds odd; of all genres of children’s books, the biography is one of the quaintest. The biography for children is a living fossil in the publishing landscape. Whether seen as connected, in spirit and in style, to medieval hagiography, seventeenth-­century moral tales, or eighteenth-century fictionalised biographies, the genre hearkens back to times when children’s books’ moral didacticism and instructional purposes were (or so it seems now) distastefully obvious (see Pickering). Yet the dinosaur is still in excellent health, thank you very much. Inspirational biographies for children are not just surviving, they are thriving. The WorldCat library database catalogued 2414 biographies in their juvenile literature section for 2017 (a peak year between 2010 and 2019), and shows numbers in steady increase since the 1980s ­(www.worldcat. org). Amazon references a staggering 30,000 ‘biographies’ in their

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children’s section—double the number of Classics, and far more than Mysteries or Comics. Biographical series abound, perhaps the best-known of which is Penguin’s highly commercial ‘Who Was …?’. Some writers, such as Doreen Rappaport, author of profiles of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other American icons, specialise in that type of text. Biographies are addressed to all, from the youngest children—Scholastic’s ‘My first biography’ picturebooks on Benjamin Franklin, Helen Keller, and other notables—to readers on the cusp of adulthood. Death is no precondition; in 2016, publishers provided at least ten traditional biographies for children of US Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.2 The genre today is an award magnet, from the Caldecott and the Newbery to the Jane Addams Peace Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award.3 It also benefits from the support of the educational system: biographies are often para-educational books, used in class, for which purpose publishers often provide extensive epitextual informative material. If we consider biography for children to be a genre in the pragmatic sense that many children’s books are categorised by publishers as ‘biographies’, then we can establish, through distant reading, a number of paratextual conventions common to that corpus that may be deemed ‘generic’. Out of 159 new books catalogued in 2015 by the WorldCat database under Juvenile Biography in English, fewer than 20 titles do not feature the name of the individual whose life is being narrated.4 Subtitles are perhaps what most distinctively set apart those texts from other genres in children’s literature: two-thirds of titles have a subtitle. That subtitle generally contains the name of the historical figure, accompanied with a more or less clear indication of the fact that the book will tell his or her story, using such sentences as ‘The story of’, or ‘The life of’ (e.g., Steptoe). The main title is generally catchy, and quite often mentions the first name of the figure, which therefore finds itself mentioned twice if it is then repeated in the subtitle (e.g., Rappaport and Collier). More infrequently, the figure’s name is the title, and the subtitle contains the catchy phrase (e.g., Markel and Pham). Most titles without subtitles feature only the name of the historical figure.5 Most titles that are only composed of one first name are biographies of women.6 However, despite some generic unity, the biography for children today cannot be thought of monolithically: the corpus is varied (especially if we consider non-Anglophone works) and spans many historical figures.7 Very diverse biographies for children coexist; some in series, some stand-alone;

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some complete, some partial; some highly fictionalised, others entirely documentary. The commercial sprightliness of the biography for children is not always matched by scholarly enthusiasm. Academic work on the genre (of which there is not very much, relative to the magnitude of the corpus) has historically been mostly critical. In the 1970s, early researchers cast severe to damning judgement on their chosen corpuses, with one discussing the risk for children of being ‘biographically brainwashed’ by the books’ idealistic presentations of success (Jurich), and another bemoaning their simplicity, ending with a murderous flourish: ‘Either the authors have underestimated the abilities of their prospective readers, or they do not have the abilities to probe the complexities of the people they consider and to present these complexities to a young audience’ (Stott 1974, 248). Slightly later articles recognised some virtues to the genre, but highlighted, too, the lack of depth and the hagiographical tendencies of most attempts (Herman, Marcus). Biography for children has gained a reputation for being aesthetically and stylistically inferior to other kinds of children’s literature, a problem compounded, as repeatedly noted, by seriality (Stott, Herman, Girard). Leo Zanderer, in 1981, prophesied a ‘long’ ‘route to the writing of good biographical literature for children’ (Zanderer, 50); Linda Girard, in 1989, highlighted the ‘low level of author commitment to research, choppy or immature writing, and the tendency to substitute easy fictionalizing for hard won narrative style’ (Girard, 187). In the early twenty-first century, the idealising tendencies of the biography for children are still being denounced, and critical work has become mostly ideological, with scholars noting the racism or colour-blindness, sexism, ableism, and individualism of the genre.8 Some more positive voices, however, are now heard, specifically those of scholars interested in the pedagogical uses of biography (e.g., Morgan; Floyd and Hébert). In Sara VanderHaagen’s sophisticated analysis, the genre is presented as an imperfect but potent literary form of ‘public memory’, useful for civic education (VanderHaagen, 34). Scholars have also shown the extent to which the genre has evolved and, we might say, ideologically improved, especially since the new rise of high-quality, ideologically progressive biographies for children.9 Despite its small size and generally critical outlook on the genre, the scholarly literature devoted to biography for children is theoretically sophisticated, with profound questions spanning such philosophical riddles as the value of adult role models for the child reader, the role of

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historical literacy in the construction of the future, what it means to represent the life and deeds of existing human beings, the aesthetics of inspirational literature, the blurry frontier between censorship and selectiveness, etc. Early on, critics deployed complex methodological tools to tackle the genre; Zanderer, in particular, leaned on Jean-Paul Sartre’s theorisation of biography-writing. The wider field of scholarly reflection on non-fiction for children is also currently in sharp expansion, with complex debates about epistemology and narrative positioning involving educational professionals, creators, and academics since the early 2010s.10 However, the scholarly reflection around biography for children is still extremely small compared with the discussions taking place in the ‘adult’ field of biography studies,11 and there is little scholarly interest for the aesthetics of the genre. It is worth, therefore, observing closely some of the swans that have grown out of that ugly duckling.

Contemporary Swans: A Note on Corpus Selection For this study, necessarily limited in scope, I have chosen nine picturebook biographies for children, published between 2005 and 2016. My corpus spans literature originally published in English, French, and Spanish, in six countries; whenever possible, an English translation has been used. It includes works that are part of a series, and stand-alone texts; biographies describable as fictionalised, others close to non-fiction; some of very famous people, some of lesser-known historical figures. Four are about women, five about men. Intended readership ages are difficult to establish, but the works vary considerably in reading level and length; while the style of Frida Kahlo recalls picturebooks for very young children, The Ghost of Karl Marx implies a readership with a junior-high-school level understanding of society. A number of informal interviews were also conducted with authors and editors of biographies for children. Those will be called upon ad hoc within the analysis (Table 1). Those works are arguably all ‘radical’ in Kimberley Reynolds’ aesthetic definition, and some are also radical in Nel and Mickenberg’s more ideological understanding (2008, 2011).12 But they are sold as biography for children, and recognisably follow paratextual generic conventions described earlier. As such, they participate in twenty-first-century evolutions of the genre; and, as I hope to show, they illuminate, by their

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Table 1  Corpus of texts Title/Authors

Historical figure

Original place and language of publication

Name of the series (if applicable)

De Calan, Ronan, and Donatien Mary (illus). The Ghost of Karl Marx, translated by Anna Street. Zurich/Berlin: diaphanes, 2015 Croteau, Marie-Danielle, and Rachel Monnier (illus.). La poupée cassée: Un conte sur Frida Kahlo. Montréal, Quebec: Les 400 Coups, 2009 Giovanni, Nikki and Bryan Collier (illus). Rosa. New York: Square Fish, 2005 Grill, William. Shackleton’s Journey. London: Flying Eye, 2014 Meirieu, Philippe, and Pef (illus). Korczak, pour que vivent les enfants. Paris: Rue du Monde (Coll. Grands Portraits), 2012 Novesky, Amy, and Isabelle Arsenault (illus.). Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. New York: Abrams, 2016 Sánchez Vegara, Maria Isabel, and Gee Fan Eng (illus.). Frida Kahlo. Translated by Emma Martinez. London: Frances Lincoln, 2016

Karl Marx

France/French

Les petits platons (France); Plato & Co (diaphanes/University of Chicago Press)

Frida Kahlo

Canada/French

Au pays des grands (In the land of the great/ tall/adults)

Rosa Parks

USA/English

N/A

Ernest Shackleton

UK-USA/ English

N/A

Janusz Korczak

France/French

Grands portraits (Large/great portraits)

Louise Bourgeois

USA/English

N/A

Frida Kahlo

Spain/Spanish

Sís, Peter. The Pilot and the Little Prince. London: Pushkin, 2014 Thobois, Ingrid, and Géraldine Alibeu (illus.). Des fourmis dans les jambes: Petite biographie de Nicolas Bouvier. Geneva: La Joie de Lire, 2015

Antoine de Saint-­ Exupéry Nicolas Bouvier

USA/English

Pequeñas y Grandes (Small and Big) (Spain) Little People, Big Dreams (Quarto/ Frances Lincoln) The third in a biography trilogy by Peter Sís. N/A

Switzerland/ French

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reflection, current and future developments of children’s texts beyond the biography for children. My analysis of those biographies focuses on three aspects connected to the child’s readerly positioning. First, I look at the biographies’ implicit understandings of what constitutes truth when representing real lives; understandings which, I argue, leave behind any dualistic approaches to fact and fiction. I then analyse in detail two literary and graphic devices which those biographies often resort to, the effect of reality and the biographeme, which construct points of contact between reader and historical figure. Those means of access, I discuss last, may be considered temporal tunnels or wormholes, through which the future-bound child and the past adult are allowed to interact. The texts reject closure, but encourage action; they are socio-politically committed in that they envisage, but never give a clear shape to, the child’s future projects informed by the past.

Truth or Dare: Beyond Fact and Fiction Preoccupation with fact-fiction dualism has plagued biography for children throughout its critical history. Over forty years ago, Marilyn Jurich denounced—using a phrase now common in critical commentary—the ‘hero worship’ inherent to the genre. Others have pinpointed the excessive shoehorning of human existences into narrative patterns and characterisation typical of fiction-writing (see, e.g., Stott 1979). The child reader, Jurich warned, may feel overwhelmed when s/he ‘finds he cannot become even close to the ideal’ (Jurich, 144). This would make the biography for children overly serious in the Sartrian sense of the word: it misrepresents the human condition by having it follow external patterns, by turning situated existences into ideals (Sartre 1958). On the other hand, biographies for children have also been perceived as utterly un-serious regarding factuality; complaints about lack of historical veracity, excessive selectiveness, distortions, or embellishments of ‘the truth’ were a staple of early criticism.13 The biography for children, in short, has been seen as too committed to fictional ‘recipes’ for characterisation and plot structure, and too lackadaisical regarding the sociohistorical situatedness and the psychological complexity of its figures (Stott 1979). This tension, critics have argued, makes such texts not only distasteful, but self-defeating; the books undermine their own educational purposes by proposing portraits that are at once too idealistic for role-modelling, and too inaccurate to serve as historical instruction.

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Contemporary critics of non-fiction for children, however, have proposed alternative approaches to the fact-fiction dualism. Joe Sutliff Sanders, inscribing himself within a debate on the nature of non-fiction for children as allowing inquiry rather than ‘factual’ knowledge, focuses on the degree to which non-fiction books for children cultivate critical literacy: ‘Instead of scanning for the inevitable failures of accuracy, we can search for where a book does and does not invite questions’ (Sanders 2015, 386). Indeed, the contemporary biographies discussed here often bypass claims to factual truth, and opt instead for narrative and aesthetic choices that interrogate the very dualism of fact and fiction in any representation of human existence. To some degree, this happens defensively, with paratextual material safeguarding the narrative against potential criticism as to its factuality: Croteau’s book on Frida Kahlo, for instance, is preceded by an editor’s note stating, ‘from biographical and artistic elements, the writer imagines, in all freedom, the childhood of the greatest in the history of art’ (n.p.). Novesky and Arsenault’s Cloth Lullaby is ambivalently subtitled ‘A Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois’. Thobois and Alibeu’s title plays down, with similar ambiguity, its own truth claims, by calling itself a ‘small’ or ‘little’ (petite) biography. But it is mostly within the iconotexts that the fact-fiction dualism is intriguingly deactivated. Not all the picturebooks chosen may be called postmodern.14 However, most show little interest for distinguishing between historical fact and fictionalisation in their portraits. Instead of claims to truth, they develop what I would call an aesthetic of believability, playing with both idealisation and historical factuality in their representations of human lives. The narratives achieve this through aesthetic and literary devices which replace questions of fact with an interest in effect, and necessarily involve considerations of audience. Namely, they sidestep claims to an inherent truth (or lack thereof) of the iconotext, by focusing instead on giving the reader a believable account of the person’s life. For some, this is accomplished through what Roland Barthes (1968) calls the reality effect (l’effet de réel). In Barthes’ analysis, texts achieve effects of reality through ‘useless’ elements, narrative ‘luxuries’, namely notations in excess of the structural needs of a text. Those elements, Barthes says, cannot in modern literature be considered solely aesthetically pleasing; they have the other, crucial function of signifying and denoting reality. Reality effects are common in biographies. In Rosa, a brief mention of a minor character is accompanied, for no obvious reason, by the

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statement that ‘She always served macaroni and cheese when she baked red snapper for dinner’. Another narrative ‘luxury’ is given to the reader when Rosa ‘[fiddles] in the pocket for the dime so that she would not have to ask for change’. Those details cannot be located on a fact-fiction spectrum, but nor are they pure embellishment. They serve to evoke reality, to lend the iconotext—and the life therein—texture and presence. That surfeit of non-narrative elements often occurs in illustrations. In Korzcak, a bazaar of toys, everyday objects, and misbehaving children ‘ultimately do not say anything else than this: we are reality; it is the category of “reality” (and not its contingent contents) that is then signified’ (Barthes 1968, 88). Particularly useful here is the implied distinction between the contingent reality a biographer could describe—‘what really happened’—and the more necessary truth of literary reality. That statement grants literature its own order of the real, which functions to a great degree allusively. Within that framework, being ‘true to life’ is an unhelpful conceptualisation, and the biographers studied are unafraid of their imperfect adherence to such simplistic understandings of truth. Perhaps the most self-aware of the picturebook biographies in the corpus, Cloth Lullaby, describing a process of wool-dyeing, enigmatically states, ‘And that wool smelled; that’s how you knew it was real’. But despite the enticingly inviting ‘you’, the reader, who has not smelled the wool, has to take the picturebook’s word for it; and accept, more fundamentally, the uncertainty of what makes wool really wool, and a human existence real. The commitment to an effect of reality rather than pure fiction or pure factuality is a leitmotiv among all interviewees, who say they have thought deeply about the philosophical nature of truth in the writing of biography for children. Jessie Magana, a French author and editorial director of biographies for children, foregrounded the concept of ‘lying-true’ (le mentir-­ vrai) coined by French poet Louis Aragon: ‘It’s about lying in order to reach the truth’, she says; the biographical pact does not imply commitment to historical exactitude. Jean Paul Mongin, editor and author of the Petits platons series of philosophers’ biographies, says that the series ‘is about truth, but the historical truth interests me less than the truth of a philosophy’. Through details about philosophers’ existences, young readers experience philosophy, because ‘ever since Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has always been about encountering a person’. But that biographical mission is not essentially concerned with, as Barthes would say, realities in its contingencies. Its truth lies elsewhere.

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Yet it would be wrong to imply that ‘good’ contemporary biographies for children are inattentive to historical fact. All picturebooks discussed include paratextual or intratextual non-fictional elements. Three picturebooks are to a large degree non-fictional, and three contain documentary dossiers. Lexicons, end notes, bibliographies, inserted quotations from the historical character are frequent. Shackleton’s Journey, Korczak, and The Pilot and the Little Prince are especially unapologetic of their documentary dimension, giving readers sometimes unmanageable amounts of facts, dates, and details. As such, they may be considered to adhere to a conception of human existence as, at least in part, mappable and describable. However, those informative elements emerge within narratively and aesthetically restless contexts; they are not allowed, so to speak, to establish themselves as master keys to the historical figure. This is obvious with postmodern work such as Sís’, which constantly shifts its weight, one-­ minute blowing bubbles full of dates, the next bursting onto the reader a surrealistic doublespread whose deciphering is by necessity poetical. Shackleton’s Journey is undeniably documentary in its chronicle of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 polar expedition; but it fervently references ancient travel tales and The Odyssey in text and images, making it impossible to settle on one or the other reading. William Grill’s blue-on-white, fine-line illustrations alternate between large, Homeric seascapes, and tiny vignettes picturing, in a highly stylised way, the everyday necessities of the crew, neat arrangements of penguins, and ninety-nine dogs tidily lined up. What could have been either a clunky heroic tale or a tiresome non-fictional machinery becomes an appraisal of the journey in both its gigantic and minuscule aspects. We have there a total, and therefore surreal or super-­ real, portrait: the picturebook is only truthful to Shackleton’s journey through an impossible cobbling-together of its minutest practical concerns with its oversized ambitions. Just as fact is not abandoned, so fictional aggrandisement is present, too. Biographies of ‘saviours’ are particularly likely to grant their character secular sainthood. Self-aware borrowings from religious iconography are most obvious in Bryan Collier’s artwork for Rosa, a biography of African-­ American activist Rosa Parks. Parks’ head is crowned with yellow stained-­ glass collage, in an obvious representation of an aura or halo; the last spread shows her reverently touched by children, head bowed in quiet prayer. Another picturebook ends with obvious narrative and iconographic references to the life of saints: in Meirieu and Pef’s Korczak, the doctor is pictured framed by the door of a death train, holding a toddler,

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surrounded by Jewish children whose yellow stars form around Korczak a pattern reminiscent of Madonna iconography. The image also recalls Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, often represented with a white beard and with children. The text states that Korczak, who died in Treblinka with the children, ‘is still with them. With those from the Orphans’ House. And with all the others.’ A secular apotheosis is also implied in The Pilot and the Little Prince, where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, having vanished at sea, is hypothesised to have ‘found his own glittering planet next to the stars’. Through such references, the biographies accept—even assert— their lineage to the hagiography and the hero myth. Yet such references are juxtaposed with sometimes profound statements on the messiness, unpredictability, and complexity not just of life, but of its representation. In Cloth Lullaby, Louise Bourgeois is ‘deeply disappointed to learn that math, like life, is uncertain’. Thobois tackles the question of Nicolas Bouvier’s sincerity in his own life-writing: Do his books faithfully narrate what he lived? What is true? What is fake? Hard to answer. Maybe everything’s true and nothing’s true. … Like all writers, Nicolas Bouvier has a tendency to transform reality a little.

That sentence, of course, cleverly refers back to the act of writing biography. Similar questions of representation and self-representation permeate both Kahlo biographies, which make extensive use of Kahlo’s appetite for self-portraits. In both cases, Frida and her portraits within illustrations interpenetrate and mingle, making it impossible to decide whether we are looking at her (but it is, of course, her representation) or at a self-portrait (but it is, of course, an illustrator’s pastiche). The complex layering of representations in the picturebooks alludes to the artist’s multifarious life, believable without being accurate. Self-reflectiveness reaches its pinnacle in The Ghost of Karl Marx, perhaps the most unconventional biography in the corpus, told from the first-­ person perspective of Marx’s ghost. The illustrated book begins by Marx laying bare the constructedness of the story he is about to tell, abandoning all conventional claims to truth, and powerfully involving the reader: What am I doing under this sheet? Well, it’s a long story, one about the class struggle. A sad story, but one to which we are going and try to give a happy ending, a joyful outcome, for what would be the point of inventing endings if we can’t make them happy!

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That is a sentence to keep in mind—we pick up those threads again later.

‘Some Future Body’: The Biographeme as Narrative Stitch While these biographies may sidestep clear distinctions between fact and fiction, it does not necessarily follow that they succeed in engaging the reader. After all, however philosophically satisfying, boundary-­transgression does not a good reading experience make. Pure uncertainty, the gleeful postmodern destruction of truth, could make a biography meaningless. Some narrative stitch is needed to make that special order of truth connect with, speak to, the reader. That stitching occurs, I would argue, through the biographeme, another coinage of Barthes: were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections, let us say: to ‘biographemes’ whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion. (Barthes 1976, 9)

The biographeme (which Barthes does not develop further), an alluringly vague concept, has been used in diverse ways. By biographeme I understand here, close to Barthes’ definition, small details which, the biographer assumes, decant some of the essence of a past life. As discussed earlier, the messiness of human life is often reclaimed in the biographies studied; yet they also offer moments where a person’s existence appears intensified, compressed into a small space, packed with symbolic meaning and narrative force. What might be called a biographemic approach is integral to three iconotexts, and frequent in another three (Shackleton’s Journey, Rosa, and Korczak, which, as we have seen, frequently use effects of reality, use few biographemes). The most evident function of the biographeme is as an entry-point into a life. Cloth Lullaby focuses, perhaps predictably, on Louise Bourgeois’ weaving mother, a motif famously constitutive of the artist’s work. But that biographeme isn’t left alone; it is everywhere multiplied. The mother unfolds—unravels, perhaps—into other symbols—the river, the spider, the sewing set, the star. The act of weaving also spreads: among the many objects strung together in the picturebook are

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constellations, musical notes, mathematical equations, and Louise’s life. The biographeme emerges here as a powerful, multifarious generator of connections within the human existence, encouraging a join-the-dots approach whose patterns can only ever be as factually accurate as constellations. A neighbouring, but different biographemic approach occurs in the highly surrealistic La poupée cassée: Un conte sur Frida Kahlo, where Frida’s illness (also at the centre of the other Kahlo biography, Frida Kahlo) is displaced alternatively onto a capuchin monkey played by the child Kahlo, then onto a doll; through those objects, brokenness comes to connote, but never exhausts the meaning of, Frida’s childhood. Different still is The Pilot and the Little Prince, which can be read as a territorial battle between biographeme and linear storytelling. In his remarkable geocritical analysis of what he calls a ‘biotopia’ (biotopie) of Saint-Exupéry, Christophe Meunier (2014, 2015) maps the spatial organisation and narrative functions of the round-shaped biographemes, those ‘medallions, bubbles, which, once put together, reconstruct the life of a character’. That reconstruction is mostly the reader’s doing. ‘Antoine tamed animals for company’, we read on one page; reminiscences of that detail may re-emerge, much later, when told by other biographemes, ‘December 31, 1940: Antoine arrived in New York on the Siboney/His dog, Hannibal, was his constant companion’. All three biographemes, beyond their factual interest, are evidently relevant to The Little Prince, which contains a famous episode of taming; but that relevance is not mentioned. Those points of contact are not storylines, lacking the narrative strength of either causation or sequence; they are frustratingly pointillist, barely even correlated. But they hint at plural networks, in and out of the iconotext—Meunier analyses those biographemes as moments of ‘nostalgic synthesis’ between Saint-Exupéry and Sís himself. They may be explored as points of contact between Saint-Exupéry and the reader as well. Barthes wishes that his biographemes might ‘touch’ another being, ‘destined to the same dispersion’, and the biographeme indeed affords the reader occasions for intense understanding, and potentially appropriation, of historical figures’ existences and situations. But what for? In the concluding part, we try to answer that question—and rejoice at our failure to do so fully.

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The Young Reader’s Temporal Positioning in the Biography for Children That question is that of the puzzle of the young reader’s location, and thus their space for agency, in the biography for children. What is the young reader to do with a portrait, albeit of exceptional quality, of a dead person or of someone who is past the time of a noteworthy achievement? During its long history, the biography for children has often been perceived solely in terms of exemplarity: ‘Good biographies are good reading for children, assuring them that they, too, can reach for the stars’ (Jordan, 63).15 But as Jurich noted, many biographies for children set up impossible examples, making it unthinkable for the child reader to locate their own existence in continuity with that of the historical figure. Still today, critics show similar wariness; Sanders et al., for instance, talk about the fact that award-winning biographies for children tend to complicate the hero/ villain distinction, but also contend that this ‘stereotype-inconsistent approach’ is ‘a trait of award-winning books’ (Sanders et al. 2017, 69, 65), and admit, in relation to the de-vilified ‘villains’: ‘As we explored this pattern, we again found ourselves torn... [Do the books] unfairly amplify or even exaggerate the role of remarkable but very special exceptions?’ And even when the example is not so ‘exceptional’, and not impossible to follow, what should the reader do with it? The biography for children may be coercive, directing its young reader to think about what happens next. As Leonard S. Marcus argues, Biographies for children … have a secret subject in addition to the one they are obviously “about”. That secret subject is the reader. The author, retelling someone else’s life, is also to some extent thinking of the reader’s own future, of how the reader will be influenced by what the author says. (Marcus, 28)

On a similar line, VanderHaagen gives the intriguing suggestion that the genre offers its audience a ‘usable form of the past’ (VanderHaagen, 21). It is evident for both authors, as it is to me, that the most pressing question here is one of temporal positioning. The biography for children is indeed characterised by a problematic tension between past and future, even only if we consider the gap between protagonist and audience. The biography for children is one of the only genres of children’s literature that tends to focus on adult lives, and often

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lives completed.16 Yet, especially in the case of politically committed picturebook biographies, the temporalities envisaged for present and future action to have an effect can be remarkably large. As Sharon Smulders’ analysis of Wangari Maathai picturebook biographies shows, the temporalities of environmental change are slow, difficult to represent. By pinning change to one woman, they certainly run the risk of individualising a struggle that should be collective; yet, ‘the point such work seeks to make is that global environmental issues possess a local and very real significance’ (Smulders, 32). Following Zanderer’s Sartrian analysis, we can say here that those books struggle with a complex existential pull between attempts at making the child free to act, and insistence on the situated entanglements of the protagonists. They present ‘life as a product of history that slowly becomes conscious of its potential for freedom’ (Zanderer, 36). Yet, to keep it in Sartrian terms, the life represented in the biography for children has already slid into facticity; it is no longer subject to change. How is any ‘potential for freedom’, therefore, made available to the child? Interestingly, interviewees respond hesitantly to that question, often shifting the topic. They categorically reject the notion that a biography should set an example—Mongin replies, ‘Heaven forbid!’ The idea, he says, ‘is not to convert the child to Marxism, but to give him the experience of a unity … to bring the child back to their own dynamic of personal unification’. Jessie Magana anchored the ‘what next?’ question within very pressing current concerns in France. Biographies help us get out of determinism. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. What’s a hero? What does it mean to be a hero? … When you read terrorists’ portraits, most had very little access to culture and reading, and they found in ISIS videos a kind of heroism. My idea is to explain that there’s many different ways of being a hero. … Children’s literature has a responsibility. It must allow for evasion, for dreams. That’s what commitment means today.

The picturebooks mirror that mixture of hesitant lack of future planning, and assertions concerning the necessity of future-bound commitments in general. Most biographies are entirely inexplicit about how they intend the life story to serve. The non-fictional material at the end of Frida Kahlo finishes with a noncommittal, ‘She is an inspiration to many women today’. They do not directly encourage readers to walk in the

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footsteps of the historical figure. Yet they implicitly position the child as an active participant in the story, and encourage processes of identification. This happens visually (and relatively traditionally) in Rosa, for instance, where one of the doublespreads makes the reader adopt the protagonist’s perspective in subjective camera. More interestingly, books like Korczak use childhood as a motif and children as characters to hint at the continuation of the historical figure’s deeds. While Korczak dies within the text, the last words of the picturebook itself, within the documentary dossier, are the doctor’s real words, in the form of an evocative quotation from his writings: I have read interesting books. Now, I read children. I cannot say: I already know. I read once, then a second time, a third time, a tenth time the same child, and I cannot know very much, for the child is an immense world that has existed for a long time and will continue to exist. I know a little about what once was and about what is. But what comes next?

No answer, of course; it is the end of the book. But the fact that more text happens after the death of the character—that his words still live on— hint that the story should not stop there, and the explicit reference to children implies and interpellates a young reader. Calan and Mary similarly suspend closure, ending their book by putting Marx’s ghost on a boat to Wall Street. Mongin, the editor, notes, ‘there could be a Book Two’, in which the happy ending promised at the very beginning might be realised. But there will not, of course, be a sequel. Marx’s boat, on which the reader, too, is visually positioned as heading towards a future that the child is encouraged to construct without the help of another opus. Korczak’s speech beyond death, and more strikingly Marx’s ghost, condemned to wander the world, spell out more strongly than other biographies the notion that a character’s thoughts may ‘live on’ after their death. Several other biographies end with the character’s death, and while that ultimate closure may be circumvented (it is strikingly often euphemistic, with resort to stock phrases such as ‘last journey’ or ‘resting’), the fact of death, after the emotional and aesthetic engagement with their existence and project, may leave the reader stunned, at once with many threads to pick up and no obvious path to follow. The final endpapers of The Pilot and the Little Prince offer the (potentially grieving) child a large terrestrial map—an incitement to explore the world, maybe, if it were not for the fact that the map is a mirror image of the opening endpapers. Saint-Exupéry’s

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plane, shown flying ‘in reverse’—towards the left—implies circular return rather than change. The final endpapers in Cloth Lullaby are the very hue of blue that was described earlier in the picturebook as the colour of despair for Louise Bourgeois: ‘Blue pierces my heart’. Little is done to comfort the bereft reader; little is shown of what her life could inspire the child reader to do, or be, in the future. Those different approaches to closure are all (happily) unsatisfactory in their own ways. To ‘live on’, Marx must exist as a ghost, Korczak in documentary pages; most of the others are plainly dead, and even those who aren’t—for instance in cases, not explored in this chapter, of currently living people—have already done and already been the exception for which they have been deemed worthy of a biography. There is no space for the reader to be that person. So they must work on some other way of acting beyond the text. There are hopes and hints for the future in those iconotexts, but no clear plan. Children’s literature, even at its most didactic, often tends to betray a degree of adult desire for an unpredictable future, and seldom articulates clear programmes for the child reader’s future actions (Beauvais 2015). The iconotexts studied here, in their presentations of past lives made to ‘speak’ to future ones, yearn for that unpredictability. They transgress, both within the narratives and within their address to the child reader, dichotomies between fact and fiction, certainty and latency, fixed pasts and possible futures. In their narratives and aesthetics, they create points of contact between text and child, allowing the reader a grasp of what a human existence is like—in both its messy everydayness and in its moments of glorious meaningfulness. But as those temporal wormholes close, or refuse the child’s presence— there’s already somebody here!—or hint at things beyond the eminent historical figure described, there is no other choice for the reader than to do something else, something of their own, with that narrated life. Those examples show that the biography for children today innovates, thinks about itself, ponders about truth and time in representing existences, and subtly addresses readers and their futures. The genre’s distinctive interplay of fact and fiction, of past and future commitments, of adult and child existences, gives the twenty-first-century critic of childhood in literature and culture a sense of how generations and eras may be put into contact today; of how time past may be made meaningful so as to undergird, but not corset, future action.

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Notes 1. Those questions are in many ways declensions, focused on the particular parameter of time and temporality, of the ‘power’-oriented children’s literature theory of the past twenty years, in Nodelman, Nikolajeva, Gubar, and Rudd. In my own work I discuss the didactic nature of children’s literature; see Beauvais, The Mighty Child. 2. See Russo. Donald Trump is featured in a few self-­published biographies, quite possibly not all of them entirely serious, and in Mattern’s A True Book. 3. On children’s biography and the award system, see Sanders et  al.’s sophisticated analysis of award-winning children’s non-­fiction, which, they argue, can be both historically reductive in places, and nuanced in others; their study includes some biographies (2017). In another essay, Sanders argues that ‘Since the rise of awards for nonfiction by the American Library Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, “literary” attributes such as theme and style have become increasingly important aspects of highly regarded nonfiction for children’ (Sanders, “Almost Astronauts”). 4. Texts that do not feature individuals’ names tend to be autobiographies, biographies of people whose names are not immediately recognisable, biographies of multiple individuals or groups, or titles with immediately understandable periphrases—for example, Gibbs Davis and Comport’s First Kids, on US presidents’ children. 5. Generally within a biography series; such is the format adopted, for instance, by the Small and Big Series, published by Quarto and Frances Lincoln, and discussed later. 6. For example, Brière-Haquet and Liance’s Nina (on Nina Simone) and Winter and Colón’s Hillary (on Hillary Clinton). Frida Kahlo’s first name is the title of two picturebooks, one by Winter and Juan, and the other by Perez and Lacombe. 7. In the 2015 WorldCat catalogue, very few celebrities have two or more biographies: Rosa Parks, Maurice Sendak, Pope Francis, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Hillary Clinton, Jane Goodall, with Abraham Lincoln (four) and Malala Yousafzai (five, including her autobiography) topping the list. The rest of the biographies therefore span well over a hundred different historical and contemporary figures. 8. See Nel on ‘Obamafiction’; Winograd on African-­ American football players; Owens on Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, Kunze on Helen Keller; and Echterling as well as Smulders on Wangari Maathai. 9. Owens’ work on gender roles in Curie and Einstein biographies for children, for instance, highlights the gradual emergence of strong awareness

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of structural inequality in the Curie story; Gale Eaton’s monograph on women in biographies for children maps the gradual rise, over a century and a half, of a socially aware, less self-­censored, and more complete outlook on the lives of famous women. See also Sanders et al. (2017). 10. I do not have space here to talk at length about the debate on ‘new’ and ‘old’ non-fiction for children, launched by Mark Aronson and taken up influentially by educationalists and authors. See Aronson (2011), Zarnowski and Turkel (2012); and Sanders (2015). 11. See, for example, Lejeune (1989), Epstein (1991), Holden (2014), and Benton (2015). 12. Speaking on iconotextual aesthetics, Reynolds (2007) says that ‘The word-image dynamic is particularly adept at giving expression to meanings and concepts that reside at the edges of language’ (16–17). 13. See, for example, Lechner (1997). Kazemek (1990) dutifully lists—in selected biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr.—what he has found of ‘Distortions and Pious Generalities’ (66), ‘Lack of Acknowledgement of King’s shortcomings’ (67); ‘thoughtless notion that King launched the civil rights movement’, ‘Lack of balance [in the representation of King’s life]’, and ‘False Impressions about the Accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement’ (ibid.). Dagher and Ford (2005) pinpoint systematic misrepresentations of scientific processes in science biographies. 14. Unless we wish to stretch the definition to any picturebook demonstrating any playfulness with language or images! On the subject, see Sipe and Pantaleo (2010). 15. ‘If not a summons to a life sublime, then what is biography for children?’ asks Herman (86), in a similar vein. 16. Not always, of course. There is a growing body of texts featuring child agents, for example Hoose’s Claudette Colvin (2014), not to mention the numerous biographies of Anne Frank, and the autobiography and biographies of Malala Yousafzai (see chapter “Children’s Right to Participate: Insights from the Story of Malala” by Jonathan Todres, in this volume).

References Aronson, Mark. “New knowledge.” The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 87, no. 2, 2011, pp. 57-62. Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “L’effet de réel.” Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, 1968, pp. 84-89.

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Beauvais, Clémentine. The Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Benton, Michael. Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Brière-Haquet, Alice, and Bruno Liance (illus.). Nina. Paris: Gallimard, 2015 Croteau, Marie-Danielle, and Rachel Monnier (illus.). La poupée cassée: Un conte sur Frida Kahlo. Montréal, Quebec: Les 400 Coups, 2009. Dagher, Zoubeida R., and Danielle J. Ford. “How are scientists portrayed in children’s science biographies?” Science & Education, vol. 14, no. 3-5, 2005, pp. 377-393. Davis, Kathryn Gibbs, and Sally Wern Comport (illus.). First Kids. New  York: Random House, 2009. De Calan, Ronan, and Donatien Mary (illus). The Ghost of Karl Marx, translated by Anna Street. Zurich/Berlin: diaphanes, 2015. Eaton, Gale. Well-Dressed Role Models: The Portrayal of Women in Biographies for Children. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Echterling, Clare. “Individualism, Environmentalisms, and the Pastoral in the Picture Book Biographies of Wangari Maathai.” Children's Literature, vol. 44, no. 1, 2016, pp. 78-95. Epstein, William H. Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. Vol. 1. Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991. Floyd, Erinn Fears, and Thomas P. Hébert. “Using Picture Book Biographies to Nurture the Talents of Young Gifted African American Students.” Gifted Child Today, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, pp. 38-46. Giovanni, Nikki and Bryan Collier (illus). Rosa. New York: Square Fish, 2005. Girard, Linda Walvoord. “Series Thinking and the Art of Biography for Children.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4, 1989, pp. 187-192. Grill, William. Shackleton’s Journey. London: Flying Eye, 2014. Gubar, Marah. “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 450-457. Herman, Gertrude B. “‘Footprints on the sands of time’: Biography for children.” Children's Literature in Education, vol. 9, no. 2, 1978, pp. 85-94. Holden, Philip. “Literary Biography as a Critical Form.” Biography, vol. 37, no. 4, 2014, pp. 917-934. Hoose, Phillip M. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014. Jordan, P. C. “Biography about Children for Children.” Biography, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995, pp. 55-64. Jurich, Marilyn. “What’s Left Out of Biography for Children.” Children’s Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, pp. 143-151.

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Kazemek, Francis E. “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability: Biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the classroom.” The Social Studies, vol. 81, no. 2, 1990, pp. 65-69. Kunze, Peter C. “What We Talk about When We Talk about Helen Keller: Disabilities in Children’s Biographies.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 304-318. Lechner, Judith V. “Accuracy in Biographies for Children.” New Advocate, vol. 10, no. 3, 1997, pp. 229-42. Lejeune, Philippe. “The autobiographical pact.” On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 3-30. Marcus, Leonard S. “Life Drawings: Some Notes on Children’s Picture Book Biographies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 4, no. 1, 1980, pp. 15-31. Markel, Michelle, and LeUyen Pham (illus). Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016. Mattern, Joanna. A True Book: President Donald Trump. Rookie Biography series. New York: Scholastic, 2018. Meirieu, Philippe, and Pef (illus). Korczak, pour que vivent les enfants. Paris: Rue du Monde (Coll. Grands Portraits), 2012. Meunier, Christophe. Les Géo-graphismes de Peter Sís. Découvrir, explorer, rêver des espaces. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. Meunier, Christophe. “Terre d’exploration, terre d’exil, terre des hommes: Le Pilote et le Petit Prince de Peter Sís.” 2014. lta.hypotheses.org/521 Mickenberg, Julia L., and Philip Nel. “Radical Children’s Literature Now!” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 2011, pp. 445-473. Mickenberg, Julia L., and Philip Nel. Tales For Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Morgan, Hani. “Picture book biographies for young children: A way to teach multiple perspectives.” Early Childhood Education Journal, vol. 37, no. 3, 2009, pp. 219-227. Nel, Philip. “Obamafiction for children: Imagining the forty-fourth US president.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 2010, pp. 334-356. Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, voice and subjectivity in literature for young readers. London: Routledge, 2009. Nodelman, Perry. The hidden adult: Defining children’s literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Novesky, Amy, and Isabelle Arsenault (illus.). Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. New York: Abrams, 2016. Owens, Trevor. “Going to school with Madame Curie and Mr. Einstein: Gender roles in children’s science biographies.” Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol. 4, no. 4, 2009, pp. 929-943. Perez, Sebastien, and Benjamin Lacombe (illus.). Frida. Paris: Albin Michel, 2016.

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Pickering, Samuel F. “The Evolution of a Genre: Fictional Biographies for Children in the Eighteenth Century.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 7, no. 1, 1977, pp. 1-23. Rappaport, Doreen, and Bryan Collier (illus.). Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Rudd, David. Reading the Child in Children’s Literature: An Heretical Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Russo, Maria. “Review: Biographies of Hillary Clinton for Kids of All Ages.” The New York Times, 29 January 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/books/ review/review-biographies-of-hillary-clinton-for-kids-of-all-ages.html?_r=0 Sánchez Vegara, Maria Isabel, and Gee Fan Eng (illus.). Frida Kahlo. Translated by Emma Martinez. London: Frances Lincoln, 2016. Sanders, Joe Sutliff, Katlyn M.  Avritt, Kynsey M.  Creel, and Charlie C.  Lynn. “How Award-Winning Children’s Non-Fiction Complicates Stereotypes.” Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards, eds. Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph Terry Thomas, Jr., Abingdon, Oxon.: Taylor & Francis, 2017, pp. 58-72. Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Almost Astronauts and the Pursuit of Reliability in Children’s Nonfiction.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 4, 2015, pp. 378-393. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1958. Sipe, Lawrence R., and Sylvia Pantaleo. Postmodern picturebooks: Play, parody, and self-referentiality. London: Routledge, 2010. Sís, Peter. The Pilot and the Little Prince. London: Pushkin, 2014. Smulders, Sharon. “‘Information and Inspiration’: Wangari Maathai, the Green Belt Movement, and Eco-Children’s Literature.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 20-34. Steptoe, Javaka. Radiant Child: The story of young artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2016. Stott, J. C. “Biographies of sports heroes and the American dream.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 10, no. 4, 1979, pp. 174-185. Stott, J.  C. “Biography for Children (Review).” Children’s Literature, vol. 3, 1974, pp. 245-248. Thobois, Ingrid, and Géraldine Alibeu (illus.). Des fourmis dans les jambes: Petite biographie de Nicolas Bouvier. Geneva: La Joie de Lire, 2015. VanderHaagen, Sara. “Practical Truths: Black Feminist Agency and Public Memory in Biographies for Children.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 18-41.

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Winograd, Ken. “Sports biographies of African American football players: the racism of colorblindness in children’s literature.” Race Ethnicity and Education, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011, pp. 331-349. Winter, Jonah, and Raul Colón (illus.). Hillary. New York: Schwartz & Wade, 2016. Winter, Jonah, and Ana Juan (illus.). Frida. Paris: Gautier-Languereau, 2006. Zanderer, Leo. “Evaluating Contemporary Children’s Biography: Imaginative Reconstruction and Its Discontents.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 5, no. 1, 1981, pp. 33-51. Zarnowski, Myra, and Susan Turkel. “Creating New Knowledge: Books that Demystify the Process.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 28-34.

PART II

Social Justice and Diversity in Literature for Young Readers

“We Need Diverse Books”: Diversity, Activism, and Children’s Literature Sarah Park Dahlen

The children’s literature world has long been what Nancy Larrick called “all-white.” The year 1965 was a landmark year with her damning article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” but not enough has changed in the overall landscape in the decades  since. Readers’ awareness of the power of misinformation for stories began early, for example, with Pequot activist and author William Apess writing in early 1800 about how he had been mis-educated about Native people through stories (Reese 9 March 2016a). And as early as 1847, the Anti-Slavery Alphabet was published, and in 1927 Native parents criticized problematic representations of Native people in textbooks. The fight for diverse youth literature has been ongoing for decades—centuries, even—but specific events and circumstances in the 2010s catalyzed the movement forward in a way that is undoubtedly altering the production, use, and discourse surrounding children’s literature. There have been many calls for more diverse representations in the authorship and content of books for young readers. Despite these calls, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of

S. P. Dahlen (*) St. Catherine University, St. Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_5

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Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education reported that between 1985 and 2015 the percentage of children’s books written by and/or about non-white people fluctuated between 9 and 14 percent. In 2016, the “about” percentage reached 22 percent, but as CCBC Director K. T. Horning noted in October 2017, “What we’ve been seeing more are white people creating characters of color and more characters with ambiguous ethnicities, e.g. brown-skinned” (Horning 2017). Moreover, the 2016 “by” percentage was 13 (in 2015, “by” was 11 percent), significantly lower than the 22 percent “about.” Paula Chase Hyman  at The Brown Bookshelf blog wrote, “though there was a 48% increase in books showcasing African Americans, only 33% were written by us. More books about us, but even less by us” (Hyman 2018). High rates of outsider authorship by  writers who present or identify as white, oftentimes with problematic books that garner positive reviews while raising reader objections, dominate the CCBC’s annual publishing data. The CCBC data have been depicted in a variety of formats and media. In 2016, illustrator David Huyck and I worked together with author Molly Beth Griffin and scholars Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Edith Campbell, and K.T. Horning to create a “2015 Diversity in Children’s Literature” infographic that has been displayed in many libraries, presented at numerous conferences, and printed in several publications. In 2013, multicultural publisher Lee & Low Books began creating infographics regarding the low rates of diversity in children’s book publishing, and also in other fields such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and American politics. Lee & Low’s infographics demonstrate that the “diversity gap” is not a problem specific to children’s literature, but to power and media industries generally. Their May 10, 2018, Diversity Gap infographic for children’s books used the 2017 CCBC data and communicated that only 7 percent, or 288 of 3700 books surveyed, were written by Black, Latinx, and Native writers (Corrie; see also Ehrlich 2017, on previous infographic). The children’s book industry reached a tipping point in 2014, when a group of authors launched the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Twitter campaign, demanding more diverse books with “a roar that can’t be ignored” (We Need Diverse Books  Tumblr 2014). The momentum of that campaign caused tremendous ripples in the publishing industry and beyond. The significance of this moment cannot be understated, though its long-term impact is still being realized. Scholars observe that earlier movements, such as the work of the Council on Interracial Books for Children

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(established in 1965), were powerful and important (Capshaw), but, as publisher Jason Low recently noted, for almost two decades the “the needle has not moved” (The Open Book, 17 June 2013). Therefore, this chapter considers the historical and contemporary context in which We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) continues the work of other activists, tracks the ongoing  work of activists alongside WNDB, and details how the larger  movement might continue to grow. Though discussions in this piece primarily focus on race, the fight for equitable and meaningful representation is crucial across multiple and intersecting identity categories, and historically has been fought and is being fought by many communities. Indeed, WNDB “recognize[s] all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQiA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities∗, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities” (“About WNDB” 2018). The diverse books movement is rooted in a history of alliances for the common good, and must remain so to create the change we want to see.

Hopes and Dreams I started this because in my fifth-grade class I was only able to read books about white boys and their dogs.—Marley Dias (qtd. in Flood 2016).

In 2016, then-11-year old reader Marley Dias caught the attention of the publishing industry when she started the #1000blackgirlbooks campaign. Tired of books that featured only “white boys and their dogs,” Dias set out to collect more than 1000 books that she found relatable; in other words, that featured people who looked like her. The idea of children’s literature functioning as mirrors goes back many decades; in 1973, A.  S. W.  Rosenbauch said “[children’s books] reflect the minds of the generation that produced them” (Kelly, 90). In the updated version of the “Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books” (based on the “10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children’s Books for Racism and Sexism,” which was originally published in 1974), Louise Derman-Sparks writes that children’s books “reflect the attitudes in our society” (DermanSparks 2016). However, the concept was most famously made concrete by Rudine Sims Bishop in 1990. Bishop’s “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” metaphor asserts that readers need to read about both their own experiences, as well as experiences unlike their own. Window books “[offer] views of worlds that may be real or imagined,” and “are also

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sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created by the author” (1990). In mirror books, “we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience,” which, Bishop argues, is a “means of self-­affirmation” (1990). Therefore, children’s literature can serve as a mirror for society, both reflecting our values and projecting how we want our children to be. Early primers and religious tracts provided models that children were supposed to mimic. Children were supposed to behave like the characters they read, such as Little Lord Fauntleroy, who was obedient and kind to everyone around him, or Pollyanna, who could find the good in any situation. So too the inverse, children should be able to see their experiences—affirmations of their diverse and multidimensional lives—in the books they read. Ideally, all readers should be able to see mirrors of themselves in books, but historically this has not been true, and contemporarily, has yet to be realized. Libraries, too, should be places where children can see a variety of experiences. Collections must reflect not only the communities they serve (mirrors), but also communities that are entirely unlike the ones they serve (windows). K. T. Horning writes, “as a group, children’s librarians have been on the forefront for diversity from the beginning, striving to serve all children” (2015, 1). However, she also observes, “our predecessors in the library field had a much better track record for it than we ourselves have had over the last forty years” (1). Early librarians Pura Belpré, Charlemae Hill Rollins, Augusta Baker, and others looked for books that contained characters who looked like the people in their communities, but publishers were not providing them (Eddy 2006). To this end, W.  E. B.  DuBois, Augustus Granville Dill, and Jessei Redmon Fauset published The Brownies Book magazine in 1920; Belpré wrote her own books, such as Perez and Martina (1932) and Juan Bobo and the Queen’s Necklace: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale (1962); and in 1934 Baker began compiling bibliographies of African American children’s books called “Books About the Negro for Children”  (Augusta Baker Collection). Baker’s first list contained 100 titles, and for a while  she included even offensive books such as Little Black Sambo (1899) “because there is a lack of material for the pre-school and primary age groups” (Augusta Baker Collection).  This lack of material was an ongoing concern—including to librarians in branches serving underrepresented populations, and to early bookmobile efforts—throughout the twentieth century, and certainly was not

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limited to the United States. In Germany, Jella Lepman believed that global children’s literature could build empathy and understanding; she conceived of her International Youth Library (IYL, aka Internationale Jugendbibliothek), founded in Munich in 1949, as a space where children’s books from around the world could be gathered and made available for the purpose of cultural exchange. Another outgrowth of the IYL was the 1953 establishment of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), also with the goal to promote peace and understanding through global connections in and through children’s literature (www.ijb. de/en/about-us.html). The political environment of the 1960s affected the increased demand for diverse books. According to the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC) president Beryle Banfield, the CIBC was a direct “outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement” (Banfield 1998). The CIBC worked for two decades to “promote a literature for children that better reflects the realities of a multi-cultural society” (Council vii, quoted in Banfield). To this end, one of its most enduring legacies is the aforementioned guide “10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children’s Books for Racism and Sexism,” first published in 1974. Considered one of the basics in children’s literature evaluations, it has been updated and revised by Louise Derman-Sparks on the Social Justice Books website (socialjusticebooks. org). The CIBC also published The Bulletin of Interracial Books for Children, which included articles on problematic issues in children’s books, such as orientalism in Claire Hutchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese’s 1938 picture book, The Five Chinese Brothers (see Schwarz, “Time to Retire,” 1977). Another one of the CIBC’s legacies was the opportunities it provided to writers of color and Native writers. Through its new writers’ contests, the CIBC helped launch the careers of Walter Dean Myers (1968 award), Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, and Mildred Taylor. The CIBC was a significant force while it was operational; the Bulletin archives, revealing the important activist work of the CIBC, may be accessed at the University of Wisconsin Libraries, using  Nicole Cooke’s Bulletin bibliography as a guide (https://www.ibcbulletin.info/). Rudine Sims Bishop and others observe that more diverse books appeared in print in the 1960s because publishers finally saw a market for them. Due to a combination of an availability of federal funding through the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the demand from teachers and caregivers, publishers began to accept and publish diverse books to serve libraries and schools (see Bishop 1982; Martin 2004; Taxel

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2010, 480; Capshaw, 240). However, Joel Taxel notes that “government money for libraries was radically reduced” by the 1980s, and when a conservative backlash targeted the inclusive gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the output of books by and about racial and social diversity also became stagnant (Taxel 2010, 480). Marcus writes, “An early casualty of the new conservative climate was the commitment of publishers to expand the range and number of children’s books that addressed the needs and aspirations of the nation’s African American community” (Marcus 281). But scholars pushed forward, creating a template for those coming after. In 1982, Bishop published her canonical Shadow & Substance: Afro-­ American Experience in Contemporary Children’s Fiction, which provided a useful way to think about who books were meant for, what kinds of stories they told, and the direction in which particular bodies of literature were headed. Shadow & Substance serves as a model for other scholarship: Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart’s The Heart Has Its Reasons, Anna Nielsen’s chapter on Muslim representations in Diversity in Youth Literature, and my own work evaluating representations of transracial Korean adoption in youth literature (Park 2009; Dahlen 2013). If the 1980s political climate delayed the momentum of mainstream children’s publishing of diverse youth literature, as Leonard Marcus explains, independent presses and other venues took up the charge (Marcus 280–281). Taxel writes, “Multicultural literature exemplifies the phenomenon of niche publishing that is having an increasing impact in the United States and elsewhere. … These publishers were made possible, perhaps necessary, when the conservatism of the 1980s led to a slowdown in the publication of authors and illustrators from parallel cultures” (Taxel 2010, 485).1 Children’s Book Press, founded in 1975, had been “the country’s first publisher to focus exclusively on quality multicultural and bilingual literature for children” (www.leeandlow.com/imprints/4) and Bobby and Lee Byrd established Cinco Puntos Press in 1985 in El Paso, Texas. The press “publishes great books which make a difference in the way you see the world” (www.cincopuntos.com). In 1988, Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson founded Just Us Books, with the goal of publishing “positive, vibrant Black-interest books” (Marcus 299); today, Just Us calls itself the “only [publisher] exclusively dedicated to producing Black-interest children’s books” ­ (www.justusbooksonlinestore.com/ pages/ABOUT-JUST-US-BOOKS.html). In 1993, soon after Just Us launched in New Jersey, across the river in New  York Philip Lee and Thomas Low established Lee & Low Books with the goal “to publish

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contemporary diverse stories that all children could enjoy” (“About Us” 2010, www.leeandlow.com/about-us). Lee & Low acquired Children’s Book Press in 2012 and Shen’s Books in 2013, making them now the “largest multicultural children’s book publisher in the country” (ibid.). Their diversity initiatives include offering awards, scholarships, and internships to underrepresented authors and people aspiring to work in publishing, and creating and disseminating the Diversity Gap infographic series. In 2015, I worked with Publisher Jason Low and Director of Marketing and Publicity Hannah Ehrlich Friedman to administer the Diversity Baseline Survey; we found that American publishing is 79 percent white and 78 percent female (Lee & Low Books et al. 2016). While Lee & Low continues to grow, and as their books continue to garner critical acclaim, as of 2020, diversity imprints have sprung up at major publishing houses: for example, Salaam Reads (2016) at Simon & Schuster, Rick Riordan Presents (2016) at Disney-Hyperion, Versify (2018) at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Kokila (2018) at Penguin Young Readers, and Heartdrum (2019) at HarperCollins. The founding of REFORMA (1971), the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA, 1971), the American Indian Library Association (AILA, 1979), and the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA, 1980) helped move forward discussions of the need for more diverse children’s books, and certainly the literature awards—the Pura Belpré, Coretta Scott King, APAAL, and AILA awards bring increased visibility to stories that are otherwise underrepresented. Likewise, the Lambda Literary Awards, the Stonewall Awards, and the Schneider Family Book Award highlight texts that best depict stories of people who identify as LGBTQ and are differently able. That said, the different relationships between the ethnic caucuses and ALA/ALSC/YALSA have meant that the award-winning books and authors have had different levels of visibility and attendance at award banquets. Therefore, it was quite meaningful when ALA announced, “In an effort to bring awareness about and encourage the creation of more books that depict diverse cultures, or by authors of color, the ALA will highlight titles selected by the American Indian Library Association (AILA), Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), and the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), during the upcoming 2019 ALA Youth Media Awards” (“ALA to support…” 30 Jan 2018). The 1980s and 1990s backlash against more diverse children’s literature must be understood in the context of the political environment (Taxel 1997, 417). The push for autonomy over one’s own stories falls directly in

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line with the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, the conservative right has been pushing for a more “traditional” canon, absent of stories that include characters who identify as LGBTQ, characters who curse or engage in any kind of sexual activity, and so on (see Abate 2010). This is a trend that continues to this day.

Broken Dreams In his mid-1980s New York Times article, “Children’s Books: ‘I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry,’” author Walter Dean Myers lamented the waning numbers of books about Black people, and also called for Black people to “reinvest” in education and respond to the needs themselves (Myers 1986). Nearly 20 years later, in “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” he wrote, “In 1969 … Children of color were not represented, nor were children from the lower economic classes. Today, when about 40 percent of public school students nationwide are black and Latino, the disparity of representation is even more egregious. In the middle of the night I ask myself if anyone really cares” (Myers 2014). Published the same day, in the same Opinion page forum, his son Christopher Myers wrote a scathing article titled “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” in which he took the industry to task for failing to make good on their “intentions” to publish more diverse books (Myers 2014). “The business of children’s literature,” wrote Christopher Myers, “enjoys ever more success, sparking multiple movie franchises and crossover readership, even as representations of young people of color are harder and harder to find” (ibid.). The CCBC statistics (Fig. 1) confirm that the numbers of diverse books increased slowly over the past decade, with more drastic changes in more recent years. According to Lee & Low’s 2018 infographic (Corrie 2018), the numbers rose from 10 to 14 percent between 2013 and 2014, and then “jumped” to 20 percent in 2015, 28 percent in 2016, and 31 percent in 2017, but these increases can hardly be celebrated as major accomplishments, especially at a time when half the country’s children are non-white. Also, though the work of the CCBC is important, Horning is clear about the data’s limitations—the CCBC counts quantity, not quality. As well, many of the books are still written by outsiders, as evidenced by Jalissa Corrie’s blog post noting that Black, Latinx, and Native writers authored only 7 percent of books published in 2017. And there remain many problematic texts.

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Fig. 1  David Huyck et al.’s CCBC Infographic (Source: Huyck and Dahlen 2019)

Michelle Martin observes in Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books that the 2000s were the “Golden Age” of African American children’s picture books, even as overall the numbers continue to be stagnant, and many books are written by outsiders (Martin 2004). If we measure progress by awards, certainly, more African Americans have won the Newbery, Caldecott, and Legacy awards than ever before.2 Even though Zetta Elliott “believe[s] that black authors and illustrators are better off today than they were in the ‘all-white world of children’s books’ of the 1970s,” at the same time she also asks, “when we look at the small number of authors and illustrators who seem to win a CSK [Coretta Scott King] Award year after year after year, are we looking at a picture of real diversity? Is the award helping to increase the overall pool of black authors and illustrators, or is it merely upholding the status quo by feeding a few big fish in a very small pond?”3

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Other efforts came to a close in the 2000s. Multicultural Review, which was founded in 1991, and which many relied on for reliable reviews on underrepresented topics, ceased publication in 2012 (Miller-Lachmann 2012). In an interview with author Cynthia Leitich-Smith (2009), former editor in chief Lyn Miller-Lachmann spoke about the history of the journal and how it had filled a critical gap in reviewing a range of diverse literature and other media. And by the journal’s closure, other resources had emerged; readers (broadly defined to include lay readers, scholars, critics, etc.) took to social media to post their own reviews of books, particularly those that engaged with topics related to underrepresented communities. For example, Debbie Reese’s blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature, was established in 2006 (Jean Mendoza joined AICL as co-­ editor in 2016)  and is largely considered one of the most authoritative resources for reviews of depictions of Native people in children’s literature; Reese writes at length about the importance of Native sovereignty over their land, their bodies, and their stories. Edith Campbell’s blog, CrazyQuiltEdi, was also established in 2006 and is similarly respected for posting reviews on African American children’s and young adult literature. Other blogs include Latinxs in Kid Lit, Smithsonian APA, BookToss, The Brown Bookshelf, YA Pride (formerly GayYA), Disability in KidLit, and DiversityinYA. The establishment of the Children’s Book Council (CBC) Diversity Initiative in 2012 was another step, coming from the publishers themselves. One initiative is a “Goodreads Bookshelf [that] features front and backlist titles by CBC-member publishers” (“About CBC Diversity”). As of April 2020, the shelf includes 3968 titles, which must be considered against the fact that approximately 3400 children’s books are published each year. Inclusion of only CBC-member publishers means that the Goodreads Bookshelf does not include books published by smaller presses such as Lee & Low Books or Just Us Books. This is especially important, given that the CCBC observes “the importance of small, independently owned publishers as contributors to a significant body of authentic multicultural literature for children in the United States and Canada” (Schliesman 2017). In the years immediately preceding the time of this writing, the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) continued its advocacy to promote diversity and anti-racism. The organization published “The Importance of Diversity in Library Programs and Materials Collections for Children,” a white paper written by ALSC past-president

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Jamie Campbell Naidoo (2014). The 2015 ALSC competencies, revised from a previous iteration in 2009, include stronger wording regarding privilege, diversity, and outreach; similarly, the revised 2017 YALSA competencies include a greater emphasis on advocacy and equity. Furthermore, the updated ALSC award manuals contain three additional paragraphs reminding committee members to consider how their identities and social locations impact how they experience and evaluate children’s books: they should “strive to be aware of how their own perspectives and experiences shape their responses to materials” because everyone has “gaps in knowledge and understanding, and biases” (ALSC, John Newbery Award Committee Manual, 23). However, members of ALSC revealed something about themselves with a survey in early 2016. When asked, “What Kinds of Programs do ALSC Members Want at ALA Annual 2017?” members ranked “diversity in children’s lit” as their number one topic choice, with “diversity in the profession” coming in at number ten (Guest Contributor 2016). This could be interpreted as, “We want to discuss diversity in children’s books, but not with the people that those books represent.” Publishing, too, is reckoning with the whiteness of the profession, and the effects of this mostly white industry creating books depicting non-white people. In 1972, Velma Varner, then managing director and editor of Viking Junior Books, said, “America’s minority populations also needed significant representation within the ranks of the publishing houses themselves. … America’s publishers for children … during the 1970s lacked even a single person of color in a high-level role” (Marcus, 259). Taxel observes, “While women have long played a role in children’s book publishing, people of color, until very recently, have been excluded from positions of power and responsibility, especially editorial positions” (Taxel 2010, 385; see also Reynolds, Eddy). And more recently, the 2015 Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey demonstrated unequivocally that the publishing industry has hardly heeded this call. For example, the survey found that “just under 80 percent of publishing staff and review journal staff are white” (Lee &  Low  Books 2016; see also the 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey). Librarianship and publishing both need to reckon with how, as the Reading While White bloggers say, “[their] Whiteness impacts our perspectives and our behavior” (“Our Mission”). In terms of children’s literature studies, the essays included in “#WeNeedDiverseScholars: A Forum” similarly question the relative exclusion of women of color scholars from a majority white and female field4; the circumstances that resulted in those

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publications also led to the establishment of an open-access online journal, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL) (sophia.stkate.edu/ rdyl). RDYL founders envisioned that it would be a “new space for scholarship, one that would actively seek work that was frequently deemed ‘too political’ or ‘not scholarly enough’ by established journals” (Halko and Dahlen 2018).

“We Need Diverse Books”: A “Roar That Can’t Be Ignored” Before 2014, every push and every raised voice contributed to the larger movement promoting diversity in children’s literature. But, as demonstrated by the near-static CCBC data, the industry is resistant to change. And in 2014, the perfect storm catapulted the movement forward. We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) was launched after social media erupted when people learned that a panel at BookCon (a convention organized by Book Expo America) on youth literature was set to feature 30 white authors and a cat. In reaction, a diverse group of authors, publishers, and other stakeholders organized a #WeNeedDiverseBooks Twitter campaign from 1–3 May 2014, to push for a conversation with a “roar that can’t be ignored.” We Need Diverse Books was established as a 501(c)3 organization, with the WNDB team being comprised of “book lovers” from a variety of places in the book world, including publishing, libraries, and the nonprofit sector. WNDB refused to be ignored—almost immediately, nearly every youth literature-, library-, and education-related conference had a WNDB panel or event. Today, a person cannot be in the work of children’s books without knowing about the movement. A Google search of “We Need Diverse Books” results in the WNDB logo, book displays, event flyers, and selfies of people holding a sign that says, “#WeNeedDiverseBooks …” and explaining why diversity is essential. Looking very somber, author and WNDB member Mike Jung holds a sign reading, “#WeNeedDiverseBooks because my daughter was 3 when she first said she hates having brown hair & eyes.” Librarian Heawon Paick’s sign says, “#WeNeedDiverseBooks because the world is diverse.” In another image, a man holds a sign that says “#WeNeedDiverseBooks so LGBT teens aren’t killing themselves or feeling alone or ashamed. We need the hate to end.” Access to affirmative representations of diversity in children’s literature can be a matter of life and death for young people.

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In the months following the launch of WNDB, CBC and ALSC further propelled the discussion by organizing the Day of Diversity, a pre-­ conference to the 2015 ALA midwinter conference. One hundred children’s literature scholars, librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and illustrators were invited to talk about the state of diversity in children’s literature, and to strategize on actions to move forward in diversifying our related fields (Dahlen and Kanani‘opua Pelayo-Lozada 2015). Later in 2015, in one of the most powerful instances of naming whiteness and its effects on literature and librarianship, a group of white librarians (including the CCBC’s K.T. Horning) launched the aforementioned blog Reading While White (readingwhilewhite.blogspot.com). The mission of the blog is to “confront racism in the field of children’s and young adult literature” because the whiteness of the profession has had a harmful effect on children’s literature and librarianship (ibid., “Our Mission”). The blog has become a crucial space for readers to discuss whiteness, privilege, and racism in children’s and young adult literature. A discussion on the whiteness of children’s literature must also address whiteness in librarianship and education. According to an ALA demographic study published in 2017, 86.7 percent of people in librarianship are white (Rosa and Henke 2017). Similarly, the National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2019 that 80  percent of people in the teaching profession are white; in some states, such as Minnesota, the percentage is as high as 96 percent (“Vision” 2019). Lee & Low’s 2015  Diversity Baseline Survey revealed that publishing is 79 percent white. The survey results were published amid an intense discussion about the depiction of slavery in children’s literature, notably in two picture books: Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall’s A Fine Dessert (2015) and Ramin Ganeshram and Vanessa Brantley-Newton’s A Birthday Cake for George Washington (2016). Both picture books were concerned with American history and both depicted, without much comment within the text itself, enslaved people who appeared undisturbed by their circumstances. Both books had been published to positive reviews, with A Fine Dessert garnering Caldecott buzz and a 2015 Best Illustrated Book notice in The New York Times, yet readers’ outcry led to the trending of a #slaverywithasmile hashtag on Twitter. In the midst of intense public discussion about how we remember and misremember history, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Debbie Reese, and K. T. Horning observed, “The case of A Fine Dessert and the cultural politics surrounding the discussion of how to depict

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slavery in books for children have import for the way Black children are present in children’s literature and how the rest of the world sees them” (Thomas et al. 2016, 14). Initially, some of the blame was leveled at the whiteness of the publishing industry, because both Jenkins and Blackall are white, and their publisher—Schwartz & Wade—and reviewers are part of an overwhelmingly white industry. The conversation became more complicated with the subsequent publication of Birthday Cake, whose author, illustrator, and editor are all women of color. And while both the author of A Fine Dessert and editor of Birthday Cake have made public remarks regarding how they’ve listened and learned from the discussion—including an apology from Jenkins on the blog Reading While White—audiences have noted relative silence from the white illustrator of A Fine Dessert.5 Today, everyone involved in children’s literature and librarianship should know about We Need Diverse Books, but in 2015 some scholars and librarians were shocked to learn that Sims Bishop’s famous concept, “windows and mirrors,” was not as well known. Shortly after librarian and blogger Edith Campbell posted about Large Fears, a picture book depicting a Black protagonist who does not fit into a gendered binary, and called for more mirror books, young adult author Meg Rosoff commented that literature “does not have the ‘job’ of being a mirror.”6 As the others pushed back on her suggestion that “there are zillions of places kids can see mirrors,” Rosoff admitted that she had not heard of Rudine Sims Bishop’s windows and mirrors concept, which raised additional questions: do white people not talk about windows and mirrors, and the need for both? Why don’t more people, and especially authors of Rosoff’s stature, not know about windows and mirrors? Have mirrors and windows come to be associated only with diverse children, with the word “diverse” understood as non-white? What is the relationship between scholarship and creativity in making books for young people, or at least in thinking and talking about making books for young people? Such debates point to the necessity of discussing the need for diverse books, more anti-racist education, and bolder discussions regarding the whiteness of children’s literature with a broader audience comprised of multiple stakeholders in children’s literature publishing, education, librarianship, and beyond.7 Nancy Larrick’s criticisms regarding “The All-White World of Children’s Books” still hold true 50 years later, and WNDB is but one significant movement in a rich history of activism, one that did not begin in the 1960s. K. T. Horning has noted that “many people seemed to think that

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the discussion of diversity started in 1964 with Nancy Larrick’s seminal article” (Horning 2015). A similar criticism can be made of the conversations around WNDB; in a perhaps unsurprising instance of amnesia, a writer for Library Journal article noted, “the controversy around BookCon could end up being a helpful conversation starter about diversity in the publishing industry,” suggesting that no conversations had previously existed (Chant 2014). In order to showcase this history and acknowledge that WNDB is part of a larger and ongoing movement, the WNDB website features a section called “Looking Back,” “a series about the forerunners of diversity in children’s literature” (Marples 2016). “Looking Back” includes, for example, a blog post about Charlemae Hill-Rollins, a Black children’s librarian who also served as ALA’s first Black president in 1957. WNDB co-founder, CEO, and president Ellen Oh’s public and straightforward comments on Twitter and other social media indicate that she is not afraid to challenge whiteness and racism in any industry, be it children’s literature or Hollywood (see, e.g., Twitter hashtag #whitewashedOUT). She has spoken out not only on the lack of diverse books, but also on the lack of diverse authors. For example, Oh and Stacey Lee, both Asian American female young adult authors, published posts essentially calling out non-Asian authors after problematic publications of white people writing Asian and Asian Amerian stories (Oh 2016; Lee 2016). In July 2016, Edith Campbell and Jennifer Baker both took novelist e.E. Charlton-­ Trujillo to task for the “made-up” African American Vernacular English in the young adult novel When We Was Fierce (see also Campbell and K. T. Horning’s conversation regarding Fierce’s invented dialect, on the blogs CrazyQuiltEdi and Reading While White, both July 25, 2016). The hashtag #OwnVoices, created by writer and blogger Corinne Duyvis to describe works where “the protagonist and author share a marginalized identity,” extends the work of #WNDB (Duyvis 2015). WNDB members and friends are adamant that the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement is not a call for white authors to write people of color and First Nation/Native characters into their stories, either as secondary characters or as protagonists. Echoing these concerns, in her follow-up blog post, Campbell stated, “The call came out for more diverse books and white authors asked ‘how can I write diverse characters’ when they should have asked how can I support authors of color” (Campbell 2016a). The convergence of the murders of  African Americans  including Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, John Crawford, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd,  as well as the rise of #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, increasing

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Islamophobia and homophobia, gun violence, #OscarsSoWhite, and other movements are not unrelated to the ongoing conversations around children’s literature and race. Shannon Gibney, award-winning author of the young adult novel See No Color (2015), penned a short essay titled, “Fear of a Black Mother” in the critically acclaimed anthology, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (2016, edited by Sun Yung Shin), in which she describes her fear as the mother of a Black son, that someday soon society will view her son not as human, but as a monster to be eliminated; Black males tend to be perceived as older and bigger than they actually are, and described using words such as “menacing,” “demon,” etc. Indeed, in “Trayvon—Killed by an Idea,” author and activist Zetta Elliott states that the US media’s propensity to depict Black males as “violent, predatory criminals” is related to how Black males are actually treated in real life (Elliott 2012). Perhaps We Need Diverse Books and other movements can propel forward conversations that result in more life, and less death.

We Have Long Needed Diverse Books In 2016, the Public Religion Research Institute published the results of a study which revealed that white Americans tend to associate mostly with white Americans, and that three-quarters of white respondents report that they have not had a meaningful conversation with anyone non-white in the previous six months (see Cox et  al. 2016). The 2015  and 2019 Diversity Baseline Surveys demonstrated that most of publishing is white and female. In such an insular society and an insular industry, what are the implications of white people’s ability or willingness to empathize with people whose experiences look very different? How can readers and listeners hear and acknowledge diverse stories, and make them available for all readers? WNDB and related movements push back against this insularity and whiteness. WNDB members have spoken out against Rosoff’s comments, spoken up about diversity and youth literature, and participated in related initiatives such as the #WhitewashedOUT Twitter campaign. WNDB has also made possible multiple internships to diversify the publishing profession, hosted panels at academic and professional conferences, granted several awards, and created and expanded partnership with the Scholastic Reading Club (see Reese 2016b). WNDB pushes back against whiteness and white fragility without hesitation or apology, and pushes not only for diverse books but also for diverse voices (see, e.g., DiAngelo 2011). They demand—and have—a seat at the table.

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Additionally, other initiatives, such as the Diversity Baseline Surveys, the American Indians in Children’s Literature blog, the Teaching for Change campaigns, including the See What We See coalition (socialjusticebooks.org/about/see-what-we-see/), and the increasing acceptance of self-published and community published works, are also impacting the youth literature world. Together, all these movements are pushing for tough conversations and putting pressure on the industry to be more inclusive and responsive. A Bustle article began, “WNDB showed that it’s grown from a grassroots social media movement to a fully-fledged, independent organization” (Goldstein 2015), and went on to list eight signs of change, including statements that tokenism is no longer tolerated, and that authenticity and diversity are encouraged and better executed; the success of these can be debated, given that the industry continues to publish more white authors instead of more #OwnVoices. In an article joining Charlemae Hill-Rollins’ work and the WNDB movement, Cass Mabbott argues that Library and Information Science departments should channel the momentum of the WNDB movement to better prepare students “to serve their patrons in a culturally fluent way” (Mabbott 2017). Individual members, past and present, of the WNDB team have also been vocal on social media and on conference panels; for example, Jennifer Baker has penned powerful articles for Forbes and Mike Jung is a frequent, reasoned, and eloquent commentator on industry blogs. However, as long as industries remain overwhelmingly white, and until there is diversity at all levels and in all types of positions in publishing, education, and librarianship, change will be slow. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Change must be demanded. It must be systematic and intentional, and it must be achieved together. It is the responsibility of everyone in publishing, education, and librarianship to produce, teach, and promote diverse literature by people of color and Native people, and this must be done with volition, purpose, and hope. Philip Nel writes, “we must recognize that We Need Diverse Books and Black Lives Matter are not just slogans. They are directives” (Nel, 202). Historically, many people and organizations have fought for systemic change, and indeed, today the demands have coalesced into a “roar that can’t be ignored.” Ebony Elizabeth Thomas often says, “The industry has to adapt or die.” As more caregivers and educators demand diverse books, and as an increasingly diverse society leverages its buying power, the publishing industry must indeed adapt and respond,

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both to market demands as well as doing what is right—publish the diverse books that better reflect the diverse world in which we live. In 1969, in an open letter to editors, Augusta Baker noted that in the 1930s people had recognized the need for children’s books for African American children and provided guidelines on what editors “should and what they should not do when publishing books about African Americans” (cited in Horning 2015). Though progress has been made, we have yet to heed her guidelines or meet that demand. Forty years later, Zetta Elliott’s open letter to the publishing industry issued a similar demand: “again and again I hear white editors deploring the lack of publishable material— ‘Those stories just don’t cross my desk!’ Maybe, dear editor, you need to get up from your desk and go out into the world, into the communities where these writers reside” (Elliott 2009, “Something …”). Given that the publishing industry, like librarianship and education, is demographically homogeneous—white, female, heterosexual, and able-bodied—it is time to take more seriously Baker and Elliott’s call. In the age of #WNDB, #DivPitch, #OwnVoices, social media, and other movements, agents and editors can no longer claim that they don’t have access to good stories written by people with the lived experiences depicted in those stories. The highly visible and very active We Need Diverse Books movement has catalyzed discussions that may lead to meaningful change; it is one significant movement in a long history of activism, and it exists alongside cognate movements. Systemic exclusion in publishing cannot be dismantled by one organization; it will take working alongside individuals (Zetta Elliott, Beth Phelan, Debbie Reese) and organizations (The CCBC, Lee & Low Books, Teaching for Change, WNDB, etc.) It will also take the work of parents, librarians, and teachers; educators and scholars; and politicians and corporations. And certainly, it will take the work of authors and illustrators, and buyers and readers.

Echoes We can read echoes of Augusta Baker’s words in the words of Zetta Elliott, and echoes of the CIBC in the work of the We Need Diverse Books movement; that the WNDB young adult award is named after Walter Dean Myers is a meaningful link echoing the work of the CIBC. Marley Dias echoed Nancy Larrick when she observed that all the books she was reading depicted “white boys and their dogs.” Scholars writing today echo scholars from the previous century. But echoes fade unless they ricochet and are amplified, and our work today and moving forward is to amplify

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all our work and all our words, and to maintain the “roar that can’t be ignored” because, as K.T. Horning says, “we still have a long way to go” (Horning 2015, 1). There is work to be done.—Walter Dean Myers (2014) Get to work.—Jason Reynolds (2016)

Note  Special thanks to Edith Campbell, Dr. Debbie Reese, Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Kallie Schell for assistance with this chapter.

Notes 1. I use the term “multicultural” with caution, because as library science and race scholar Todd Honma explains, “What has most often surfaced in the discourse of LIS is a benign liberal multiculturalism that celebrates difference and promotes ‘cross-cultural understanding’ empty of critical analyses of race and racism that instead adopts a commodified diversity management more in line with capitalist market relations than emancipatory anti-racist struggles” (Honma 2005, 11). See also Capshaw for a discussion of how the word “multicultural” is deployed differently in different disciplines and industries. 2. On June 23, 2018, the ALA Association for Library Services to Children announced “the ALSC Board unanimously voted that the ALSC Board accept the ALSC Awards Program Review Task Force’s Recommendation about the [Laura Ingalls] Wilder Award, renaming the award as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award” (Voors, emph. in original). 3. In “Farewell, Coretta” (2013), Elliott writes about how the same Black authors and illustrators win the awards each year. In “and now for the analysis …” (2012), she comments that of the 50 Black-authored books published in 2012, 24 books were published by 3 publishers, while the other half were mostly “loners” at other publishing companies. 4. See contributions by Slater, Dahlen, Martin, Jiménez, and Jiménez García to a special #WeNeedDiverseScholars forum in The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017. 5. Birthday Cake editor Andrea Davis Pinkney commented on what she learned from the situation during a conversation with Lisa Von Drasek, Curator of the University of Minnesota Children’s Literature Research Collection, at The Loft Literary Center’s Children’s and Young Adult Literature Conference (7 May 2016). A Fine Dessert author Emily

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Jenkins admitted her error in a blog post on 31 October 2015, and apologized in the comments section on 1 November 2015 at 9:48 a.m. 6. Rosoff has deleted her comments from Edith Campbell’s Facebook post, but other comments can still be found at https://www.facebook.com/CrazyQuiltEdi/posts/1006468086083304? comment_id=1007343619329084¬if_t=like 7. This thread on Edith Campbell’s Large Fears Facebook post was one of the reasons why the editors of Research on Diversity in Youth Literature chose Rudine Sims Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” as the theme for its inaugural issue (June 2018). They hoped that this issue would share the idea of “mirrors and windows” with a broader group of stakeholders.

References Abate, Michelle Ann. Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism. New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press, 2010. “About Us.” Lee & Low Books, 2010, www.leeandlow.com/about-us. Accessed 18 April 2020. “About WNDB.” We Need Diverse Books, 2018, diversebooks.org/aboutwndb/. Accessed 18 April 2020. “About CBC Diversity.” Children’s Book Council, 2018, www.cbcdiversity.com/ about. Accessed 18 April 2020. “ALA to support multicultural literature for youth with enhanced 2019 Youth Media Awards.” ALAnews, 30 January 2018, www.ala.org/news/pressreleases/2018/01/ala-support-multicultural-literature-youth-enhanced2019-youth-media-awards. Accessed 18 April 2020. Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). John Newbery Award Committee Manual, 2015, www.ala.org/alsc/sites/ala.org.alsc/files/content/ newbery_manual_august2015_Current%20on%20Website.pdf. Accessed 18 April 2020. Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). Competencies for Librarians Serving Children in Public Libraries, 2015, www.ala.org/alsc/edcareeers/alsccorecomps. Accessed 18 April 2020. Banfield, Beryle. “Commitment to Change: The Council on Interracial Books for Children and the World of Children’s Books.” African American Review, vol. 32, 1998, pp. 17–22. Bishop, Claire Huchet, and Kurt Wiese (illus.). The Five Chinese Brothers. New York: Coward-McCann, 1938.

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Bishop, Rudine Sims. Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children’s Fiction. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1982. “Fast Facts: Teacher Trends.” National Center for Education Statistics, 2019, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28. Accessed 18 April 2020. Campbell, Edith. “Can You Hear Us Now?” CrazyQuiltEdi blog, 29 July 2016a, campbele.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/can-you-hear-us-now/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Campbell, Edith. “Review: When We Was Fierce.” CrazyQuiltEdi blog, 25 July 2016b, campbele.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/review-when-we-wasfierce/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Capshaw, Katharine. “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 237–257. Cart, Michael, and Christine A. Jenkins. The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Chant, Ian. “BookCon-Troversy: Uproar Over Lack of Diversity at BEA’s Consumer Day.” Library Journal, 3 May 2014, lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/05/ shows-events/bea/bookcon-troversy-uproar-over-lack-of-diversity-at-beasconsumer-day/#_. Accessed 18 April 2020. Children’s Book Press. Lee & Low Books, 2016, www.leeandlow.com/imprints/4. Accessed 18 April 2020. Corrie, Jalissa. “The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing, 2018.” The Open Book Blog, 10 May 2018, blog.leeandlow.com/2018/05/10/the-diversity-gap-in-childrens-book-publishing-2018. Accessed 18 April 2020. Cox, Daniel, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Robert P.  Jones. “Race, Religion, and Political Affiliation of Americans’ Core Social Networks.” Public Religion Research Institute, 2016, www.prri.org/research/poll-race-religion-politicsamericans-social-networks/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Dahlen, Sarah Park. “A Step from Heaven: On Being a Woman of Color in Children’s Literature Studies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 82–92. Dahlen, Sarah Park, and Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada. “Day of Diversity: Extending the Dialogue, Encouraging the Action.” Children and Libraries, vol. 13, no. 3, 2015, pp. 23–27. Dahlen, Sarah Park. “How to Evaluate Children’s and Young Adult Books about Transracial and Transnational Asian Adoption.” Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors through Reading, eds. Jamie Campbell Naidoo and Sarah Park Dahlen, Chicago, IL: American Library Association (ALA), 2013, pp. 149–161. Derman-Sparks, Louise. “Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books.” Social Justice Books: A Teaching for Change Project, 2016, www.teachingforchange. org/selecting-anti-bias-books. Accessed 18 April 2020.

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DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, vol. 3, 2011, pp.  54–70, libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116. Accessed 18 April 2020. Duyvis, Corinne. “#OwnVoices.” Corinne Duyvis: Sci-Fi and Fantasy in MG & YA, 2015, www.corinneduyvis.net/ownvoices/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Eddy, Jacalyn. Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–1939. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Ehrlich, Hannah. “The Diversity Gap in Children’s Book Publishing, 2017.” The Open Book Blog, 30 March 2017, blog.leeandlow.com/2017/03/30/thediversity-gap-in-childrens-book-publishing-2017. Accessed 18 April 2020. Elliott, Zetta. “Farewell, Coretta.” Fledgling: Zetta Elliott Blog, 30 January 2013, www.zettaelliott.com/farewell-coretta. Accessed 18 April 2020. Elliott, Zetta. “and now for the analysis…” Fledgling: Zetta Elliott Blog, 10 December 2012a, zettaelliott.wordpress.com. Elliott, Zetta. “Trayvon—Killed by an Idea.” Huffington Post Blog, 2 July 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/zetta-elliott/trayvon-martin_b_1453394.html. Accessed 18 April 2020. Elliott, Zetta. “Something Like an Open Letter to the Children’s Publishing Industry.” Fledgling: Zetta Elliot Blog, 5 September 2009, zettaelliott.wordp r e s s . c o m / 2 0 0 9 / 0 9 / 0 5 / s o m e t h i n g - l i k e - a n - o p e n - l e t t e r- t o - t h e -­ children%E2%80%99s-publishing-industry. Accessed 18 April 2020. Flood, Alison. “Girl’s Drive to Find ‘1,000 Black Girl Books’ Hits Target with Outpouring of Donations.” The Guardian, 9 February 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/09/marley-dias-1000-black-girl-books-hits-target-with-outpouring-of-donations. Accessed 18 April 2020. Gibney, Shannon. “Fear of a Black Mother.” In A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, edited by Sun Yung Shin, pp. 13–23, St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016. Goldstein, Caroline. “We Need Diverse Books at Bookcon 2015 Showed Us 8 Reasons Why Diverse Books are More Powerful than Ever.” Bustle, 31 May 2015, www. bustle.com/articles/86808-we-need-diverse-books-at-bookcon-2015-showedus-8-reasons-why-diverse-books-are-more. Accessed 18 April 2020. Guest Contributor. “What Kinds of Programs do ALSC Members Want at ALA Annual 2017?” ALSC Blog, 17 March 2016, http://www.alsc.ala.org/ blog/2016/03/what-kinds-of-programs-do-alsc-members-want-at-alaannual-2017/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Halko, Gabrielle Atwood, and Sarah Park Dahlen. “Editors’ Introduction.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, article 2, 2018, sophia. stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss1/2. Accessed 18 April 2020.

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Honma, Todd. “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies.” Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, article 2, 2005, pp. 1–26. Horning, K.T. (@kthorning). “K.T.  Horning Twitter Post.” 22 October 2017, 11:24 a.m., twitter.com/kthorning/status/922166841342119937. Accessed 18 April 2020. Horning, K.  T. “When Whiteness Dominates Reviews.” Reading While White blog, 25 July 2016, readingwhilewhite.blogspot.com/2016/07/when-whiteness-dominates-reviews.html. Accessed 18 April 2020. Horning, Kathleen T. “Milestones for Diversity in Children’s Literature and Library Services.” Children and Libraries, vol. 13, no. 3, 2015, pp. 7–11. Huyck, David, Sarah Park Dahlen, and Molly Beth Griffin. “Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic.” sarahpark.com blog, 14 September 2016, readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing. Accessed 18 April 2020. Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. “Diversity in Children’s Books 2018.” Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, sarahpark.com blog, 19 June 2019, http:// ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books2018-infographic/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Hyman, Paula Chase. “So what DO Y’all Want?” The Brown Bookshelf blog, 1 January 2018, thebrownbookshelf.com/2018/01/01/so-what-do-yall-want. Accessed 18 April 2020. Jenkins, Emily. “On Letting Go.” Reading While White blog, 31 October 2015, readingwhilewhite.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-letting-go.html. Accessed 18 April 2020. Jiménez, Laura M. “My Gay Agenda: Embodying Intersectionality in Children’s Literature Scholarship.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 104–112. Jiménez García, Marilisa. “Side-by-Side: At the Intersections of Latinx Studies and ChYALit.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 113–122. Kelly, R. Gordon. “American Children’s Literature: An Historiographical Review.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, vol. 6, no. 2, 1973, pp. 89–107, www. jstor.org/stable/27747862. Leitich-Smith, Cynthia. “Editor Interview: Lyn Miller-Lachmann on MultiCultural Review.” Cynsations, 19 November 2009, cynthialeitichsmith. blogspot.com/2009/11/editor-interview-lyn-miller-lachmann-on.html. Accessed 18 April 2020.

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Lee & Low Books, Sarah Park Dahlen, and Nicole Catlin. “Where Is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey Results.” The Open Book Blog, 26 January 2016, blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-thediversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Lee & Low Books, Laura M. Jiménez, and Betsy Beckert. “Where is the Diversity in Publishing? The 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey Results.” The Open Book Blog, 28 January 2020, https://blog.leeandlow.com/2020/01/28/2019dive rsitybaselinesurvey/. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Low, Jason. “Why hasn’t the number of multicultural books increased in eighteen years?” The Open Book Blog, 17 June 2013, blog.leeandlow.com/2013/06/17/ why-hasnt-the-number-of-multicultural-books-increased-in-eighteen-years. Accessed 18 April 2020. Mabbott, Cass. “The We Need Diverse Books Campaign and Critical Race Theory: Charlemae Rollins and the Call for Diverse Children’s Books.” Library Trends, vol. 65, no. 4, 2017, pp. 508–522. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2017.0015. Marcus, Leonard. Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Marples, Joanna. “Looking Back: Charlemae Hill-Rollins.” We Need Diverse Books Blog, 27 January 2016, https://weneeddiversebooks.org/looking-back-charlemae-hill-rollins/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Martin, Michelle H. “Brown Girl Dreaming of a New ChLA.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 93–103. Martin, Michelle. Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002. New York/London: Routledge, 2004. Miller-Lachmann, Lyn. “About Lyn Miller-Lachmann.” Lyn Miller-Lachmann, 2012. www.lynmillerlachmann.com/about-lyn-miller-lachmann/. Accessed 18 April 2020. “Vision: Every Student Benefits from Excellent and Diverse Educators.” Minnesota Department of Education, 2019, https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/ equitdiv/. Accessed 18 April 2020.  “Multicultural and Social Justice Books.” Social Justice Books: A Teaching for Change Project, 2018, socialjusticebooks.org. Accessed 18 April 2020. Myers, Christopher. “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.” The New  York Times, 15 March 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/ the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html. Accessed 18 April 2020. Myers, Walter Dean. “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” The New York Times, 15 March 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/ sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html. Accessed 18 April 2020.

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Myers, Walter Dean. “Children’s Books: ‘I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry.’” The New York Times, 9 November 1986, www. nytimes.com/1986/11/09/books/children-s-books-i-actually-thought-we-­ would-­revolutionize-the-industry.html. Accessed 18 April 2020. Naidoo, Jamie. “The Importance of Diversity in Library Programs and Material Collections for Children.” Association for Library Service to Children, 5 April 2014, www.ala.org/alsc/sites/ala.org.alsc/files/content/ALSCwhitepaper_ importance%20of%20diversity_with%20graphics_FINAL.pdf. Accessed 18 April 2020. Nel, Philip. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Nielsen, Anna L. “Building a Core Collection: Muslim Experiences in English-­ Language Children’s Books, September 2001-September 2011.” Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors through Reading, Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2013, pp. 119-128. Official Tumblr of the We Need Diverse Books Campaign. 26 April 2014, https:// weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/post/83943947418/we-need-diversebooks-campaign. Accessed 18 April 2020. Oh, Ellen. “Dear White Writers.” Ello’s World, 16 February 2016, https://elloellenoh.tumblr.com/post/139448275729/dear-white-writers. Accessed 18 April 2020. Lee, Stacey. “Dear Non-Asian Writer.” Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged, 11 February 2016, hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2016/02/dear-non-asian-writer. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Park, Sarah Y. “Representations of Transracial Korean Adoption in Children’s Literature.” Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, Library and Information Science (thesis), 2009. Charleston, SC: ProQuest, Umi Dissertation Library, 2011. Reynolds, Jason (CSKAdmin). “Clap Clap.” CSK Blog, 30 June 2016, https:// olos.ala.org/csk/2016/06/30/clap-clap-2/. Accessed 18 April 2020. Rosa, Kathy and Kelsey Henke. “2017 ALA Demographic Study.” American Library Association Office of Research and Statistics, 2017, http://www.ala. org/tools/sites/ala.org.tools/files/content/Draft%20of%20Member%20 Demographics%20Survey%2001-11-2017.pdf. Accessed 18 April 2020. “Reading While White blog: Our Mission.” Reading While White blog, 2018a, http://readingwhilewhite.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html. Accessed on 18 April 2020. “Reading While White blog: My blogs.” Reading While White blog, 2018b, www. blogger.com/profile/07807138877345669931. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Reese, Debbie. “William Apess (Pequot) on Depictions of Native People in Stories.” American Indians in Children’s Literature blog, 9 March 2016a,

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americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2016/03/william-appesspequot-on-depictions-of.html. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Reese, Debbie. “Dear Scholastic: This is A Test.” American Indians in Children’s Literature blog, 1 March 2016b, americanindiansinchildrensliterature. blogspot.com/2016/03/dear-scholastic-this-is-test.html. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Schliesman, Megan. “Frequently Asked Questions about the CCBC’s Statistics on Diversity in Publishing.” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017, https://ccbc.education. wisc.edu/books/statsfaqs.asp. Accessed 11 June 2020. Sims Bishop, Rudine. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, vol. 6, no. 3, 1990 summer. Slater, Katherine. “Introduction for #WeNeedDiverseScholars: A Forum.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 79–81. Taxel, Joel. “The Economics of Children’s Book Publishing in the Twenty-First Century.” Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010, pp. 479–494. Taxel, Joel. “Multicultural Literature and the Politics of Reaction.” Teachers College Record, vol. 98, no. 3, Spring 1997, pp. 417–448. The Augusta Baker Collection of African-American Children’s Literature & Folklore, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, Debbie Reese, and Kathleen T. Horning. “Much Ado About A Fine Dessert: The Cultural Politics of Representing Slavery in Children’s Literature.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 6–17. Voors, Mary. “Children’s Literature Legacy Award #ALAAC18.” ALSC Blog, 23 June 2018, www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2018/06/childrens-literature-legacyaward-alaac18. Accessed on 18 April 2020. Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). Teen Services Competencies for Library Staff, 2017, http://www.ala.org/yalsa/guidelines/yacompetencies. Accessed 18 April 2020.

What Having Two Mommies Looks Like Now: Queer Picture Books in the TwentyFirst Century Derritt Mason

“Heather Lives in a Little House …” A long long time ago, in the year 1989, a little girl named Heather was born. She had a cat named Gingersnap, a dog named Midnight, a mommy named Jane, and another mommy named Kate. She taught us that love makes a family, and went on to be one of the most well-known and

I am grateful to Heather Osborne for her research assistance, and to Catherine Burwell and Kevin McBean for inviting me to present a preliminary version of this paper at a 2017 University of Calgary conference for K-12 educators. Portions of this chapter—specifically, the overviews of gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and queer childhood studies—have been adapted from my 2015 doctoral dissertation, Notes on an Anxious Genre: Toward an Alternative Pedagogy of Queer Young Adult Literature. D. Mason (*) University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_6

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controversial figures in the history of queer children’s literature. The picture book that tells Heather’s story—Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies—was the ninth “most frequently challenged book” between 1990 and 1999, according to the American Library Association (ALA, “100 most”). When New  York City Chancellor of Education Joseph Fernandez tried to include Heather in his notorious “Children of the Rainbow” Curriculum—a queer-friendly pedagogical resource for first-­ grade public school teachers—he received death threats, yielded to pressures to delist the book, and ultimately lost his job (Myers, Esposito 63). This scandal catapulted Heather into international headlines, and the book has since been parodied on The Simpsons (in an episode entitled “Bart Has Two Mommies”) and in the wildly popular Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey. A few years ago, however, Heather’s publisher went out of business,1 the book went out of print, and although it persists on the ALA’s lists of commonly challenged “children’s books” and “books with diverse content,” the title no longer appears on the ALA’s “most frequently challenged” list.2 This, however, is not the end of Heather’s story: she has been reborn for the twenty-first century. In 2015, Candlewick Press released a radically revised version of Heather Has Two Mommies, featuring vibrant watercolor illustrations by Laura Cornell that depart dramatically from the original austere, monochromatic drawings by Diana Souza. Moreover, Heather 2015 jettisons a substantial amount of the narrative, paring down Newman’s script in favor of clipped sentences and a reduced quantity of text on each page. And like the book’s tenth anniversary edition (also published by Alyson Books), the new version omits the original’s lengthy, didactic, and controversial descriptions of lesbian romance and courtship, artificial insemination, pregnancy, and childbirth. This chapter deploys three versions of Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies—the original Alyson edition (1990), the tenth anniversary re-­ release (2000), and the new Candlewick version (2015)—to illustrate how representations of queer characters in picture books have (and have not) shifted as we proceed into the twenty-first century. In my view, the new Heather’s most striking attribute is how it sidelines the titular mommies at the level of both text and image, creating space for the child protagonist to take center stage while downplaying the lesbian relationship. Heather 2015 represents a noteworthy ontological shift in the trajectory of queer picture books, many of which now permit the proliferation of children’s queernesses instead of using kids as ciphers in didactic projects that seek to

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explain and normalize adult gay and lesbian relationships. In the new Heather, this entails a heightened focus on Heather’s day at school that results from Jane and Kate’s omitted backstory—yet, as I will explore later in this chapter, the absented queer adults haunt the text throughout. As Kathryn Bond Stockton writes, “Now that we’re squarely in the twenty-first century, we who write on childhood need new ways to approach its strangeness” (2016, 505). The contemporary queer picture book seems to have taken Stockton’s call seriously. At first glance, changes made to Heather over the course of its 25 years in print mirror the development of gay, lesbian, and queer thought and activism. From a sociopolitical perspective, we have witnessed a gradual shift in focus from adult rights (marriage and parental rights in particular), to popular and legal discourse surrounding the recognition and protection of queer and trans youth.3 In the 1970s, academia saw the emergence of gay and lesbian studies, which focused on heightening gay and lesbian visibility and reclaiming the place of lesbians and gays in the literary canon. The 1990s brought us queer theory, and the twenty-first century has seen this discipline take tremendous interest in theorizing its relationship to the child and childhood. The fact that picture book content adjusts accordingly recalls Katie Trumpener’s description of this form as having “ambitions to represent the world itself”; often, Trumpener writes, the picture book “understands itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a work integrating multiple art forms and appealing to multiple senses), and hence reflecting more general trends in visual, literary, and intellectual culture” (55). Keeping in mind the ostensibly parallel trajectories of the queer picture book and queer theory, I propose two somewhat conflicting arguments. First, the queer picture book has developed along a timeline similar to “gay and lesbian studies” and “queer theory”: its content shifts from the didactic “lesbian and gay” picture book, which aims to explain gay adults to readers, to picture books that make space for the queerness of children. In the context of picture book history, the queer child seems to be a contemporary phenomenon; queer children in picture books are increasing in numbers and becoming more recognizably queer in their modes of self-­ expression. As Stockton writes, “Increasingly, now, in Anglo-America, ghostliness is falling off the gay child” (2016, 507). I maintain that, however, the picture book’s queer adult is simultaneously becoming spectral. The most recent edition of Heather epitomizes this twenty-first-century moment: it centralizes the queer child while ghosting its adults.

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Second, and in tension with my first argument, the twenty-first-century picture book’s queer child is not entirely a contemporary phenomenon. This child sometimes functions as a “genderless ideal,” in Susan Honeyman’s words, a trope that has circulated since the Romantic era and has roots in John Locke’s metaphor of the child as tabula rasa (169).4 The Romantic child, Honeyman claims, “can be seen as a theoretical precursor to the queer/postmodern end of gender” (169). So in many ways, Heather 2015—whose protagonist defies easy gendering—recuperates a familiar avatar. Moreover, the picture book seems to have come full circle where queerness is concerned. It moves from largely suggestive forms of queerness to depictions of explicitly lesbian and gay adults, and then, as in Heather 2015, represents latent or proleptic forms of childhood queerness. The picture book’s connotatively queer child is perhaps best explained through Stockton’s theorization, in The Queer Child (2009), of the “ghostly gay child.” This child, Stockton writes, is “the publicly impossible child whose identity is a deferral (sometimes powerfully and happily so)” (11). The ghostly gay child’s queerness signifies through attachments, desires, relations, and bodily motions that cannot be reduced to gay or lesbian identity as such. Since ghostly gay children often cannot align themselves with the normative telos of “growing up”—adult heterosexuality—they often understand themselves as “growing toward a question mark” (7), which entails both “fascinating asynchronicities” (what Stockton calls “growing sideways”) and “required self-ghosting measures” (11). Stockton is not the first to conjure a spectral metaphor in service of conceptualizing queerness. In Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993), Alexander Doty aims to “raise and name various ‘ghosts’ in mass culture production and reception that could lay claim to actually articulating the queerness ‘in’ texts” (xii). For Doty, these ghosts are rendered material through queer reading practices. “Queer readings aren’t ‘alternative’ readings, wishful or wilful misreadings, or ‘reading too much into things’ readings,” he writes. “They result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along” (16). Similarly, in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), Terry Castle summons the lesbian who “has been ‘ghosted’—or made to seem invisible—by culture itself,” since she so often threatens “patriarchal protocol” (4–5). Although these critics offer different queer phantoms, they together illustrate the usefulness of hauntology for theorizing queerness as a

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shadowy, spectral presence in a cultural landscape dominated by heteroand gender normativity. Several of these ghosts haunt pre-Heather picture books, too, among them The Story of Ferdinand (1936), Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s picture book about a sensitive, flower-loving bull, which Disney famously adapted into the animated short “Ferdinand the Bull” in 1938; Charlotte Zolotow and William Pene du Bois’ William’s Doll (1972), the story of a boy who wants a doll and is labeled a “sissy” and “creep” as a result; and Tomie de Paola’s Oliver Button Is a Sissy (1979), in which the protagonist contends with bullying because, like William and Ferdinand, “he didn’t like to do things that boys are supposed to do.” In all of these texts, queerness appears only as a veiled signifier: primarily, through attachments to “non-masculine” objects, relations, and activities. Ferdinand, William, and Oliver Button do not openly identify as “gay,” nor do they engage in activities that allow us, as readers, to concretely identify them as such. Instead, their latent queerness haunts these texts.

Heather 1990: “Insert the Lesbian …” In the late 1970s and 1980s, alongside the emergence of gay and lesbian studies, the picture book landscape shifted. Treading the same waters as the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Jagose 27), gay and lesbian studies was invested in promoting visibility, civil rights, and tolerance for lesbians and gays. This era also brought us gay and lesbian adults in picture books, typically in the context of didactic narratives that “explain” these adults and their relationships to readers (we can imagine, here, that both children and adults are the implied audiences of these texts). Jane Severance and illustrator Tea Schook’s When Megan Went Away (1979) was the first American picture book to feature lesbian moms5; it was followed in 1981 by Susanne Bösche and photographer Andreas Hansen’s Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, a Danish photo book that is arguably the first in the world to feature gay men as parents. Like the original Heather, Bösche’s book aspires to explain same-sex child-rearing through documentary-style realism—albeit with photography instead of textbook-like medical and anatomical descriptions. With illustrator Jan Jones, Severance published another title, Lots of Mommies, in 1983. Then, in 1989, Newman self-published Heather, fundraising (“mostly in $10 donations,” according to Newman) to finance an initial run of 4000 copies before Alyson Books purchased all remaining stock along with the rights to re-publish the title in 1990 (Maughan).

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Heather’s basic framework remains constant across all three editions. Heather’s favorite number is two; she has two mommies, Mama Kate (a doctor) and Mama Jane (a carpenter); and two pets, Gingersnap the cat and Midnight the dog. Together, the family participates in a variety of activities: simulating the mommies’ professions, playing at the park on sunny days, and baking cookies on rainy ones. One day, Jane and Kate announce that Heather will be joining a playgroup (in the original, Heather is three years old; in the newest version, Heather is starting school and presumably older). At the school/playgroup, Heather enjoys a day of playing with toys, dressing up as a fire fighter, snacking, and napping. During story time, prompted by the tale of a boy and his veterinarian father, a classmate asks Heather about her father’s job. Unable to respond, Heather wonders: “Am I the only one here who doesn’t have a daddy?” Molly, Heather’s teacher, invites the class to draw their families, which produces a range of configurations: single-parent homes, adopted siblings, families with two daddies, among others. In Heather’s first two editions, these families are sketched by Dana Lee Kingsbury, a five-year-old friend of Newman’s (Higgs). “Each family is special,” Molly explains. “The most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other.” Mama Kate and Mama Jane arrive to collect Heather from her school/ playgroup, Heather shows off her work, and they all happily head home. Although the original Heather made a resounding political splash and garnered tremendous public attention, critics were not entirely enamored with the book’s narrative and visual qualities. “Hardly anyone tries to defend Heather on its literary or artistic merits,” writes Melynda Huskey. “[A]t thirty-six pages, it’s too densely textual for children the age of its protagonist” (66). Indeed, readers of the original Alyson Heather might find their patience tested by Newman’s verbose explanations of Jane and Kate’s courtship (“A long long time ago, before Heather was born, Mama Jane and Mama Kate were very good friends,” 15 lines of text over pages 4–6); thorough documentation of Heather’s conception (“Kate and Jane went to see a special doctor together. After the doctor examined Jane to make sure that she was healthy, she put some sperm into Jane’s vagina,” five lines of text on p. 7); overlong account of Jane’s pregnancy (“About a month went by. Then Jane said she felt a little funny. She was hungry a lot and her breasts felt tender,” ten lines of text over pp. 8–9); and, after what might indeed feel like nine months’ worth of reading from a child’s perspective, a play-by-play of Heather’s birth (“Jane sat up in bed and pushed and pushed. A special nurse called a mid-wife was there for help,” eight

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lines of text over pp. 10–11). At this point, the reader still has over two-­ thirds of the book to go. Summarizing reviews of several Alyson titles, Huskey observes that reviewers tend to “[balance] assertions of social utility with pained acknowledgments that the books are undelightful” (66).6 Kay Chick, citing Mama Jane’s artificial insemination, writes that “the lack of developmentally appropriate content and believable characters … makes it difficult for children to identify with the story’s plot or protagonist” (17). “That content,” she concludes, “makes the book a poor choice for preschoolers and tedious for children in the elementary grades” (17). Neither are Diana Souza’s grayscale illustrations acclaimed. Huskey calls them “graceless” and claims they “lack the energy or skill to engage the eye during the relatively long time required to read each page out loud” (66). Elizabeth A.  Ford writes that “Souza’s drawings exude a crude energy” and “the faces of her characters morph alarmingly from page to page,” conceding only that “the vitality of her work, with its frenetic textures and decoration, almost makes up for lapses of technique” (204). In a piece on Alyson Wonderland, Cat Yampell points out that “a common criticism of booksellers, teachers, and parents against [Alyson’s titles] is the rather poor quality of both the writing and illustrations” (33). Yampell quotes a lesbian mother interviewed in a 1994 Publishers Weekly article who “complains that ‘the stuff that’s out there isn’t particularly appealing to children. I’d like to see better art and more entertaining stories. But it’s all that we have, so I buy it’” (33). Regardless of its perceived shortcomings, Heather the First ushered in a new era of picture books on similar themes in the early to mid-1990s. Like Newman’s book, most of these titles offer reassuring and normalizing portraits of gay and lesbian couples, many of whom are parents to children who do little more than focalize the narrative. These include Rosamund Elwin and Michele Paulse’s Asha’s Mums (1990); Michael Willhoite’s Daddy’s Roommate (1990) (another highly controversial Alyson title) and Uncle What-Is-It Is Coming to Visit (1993); Lois Abramchik and Alaiyo Bradshaw’s Is Your Family Like Mine? (1993); Johnny Valentine and Melody Sarecky’s One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads (1994); and Judith Vigna’s My Two Uncles (1995). Critics quickly (and, I would argue, accurately) charged many of these titles—and those that would follow in subsequent years—with homonormativity. Lisa Duggan defines this term as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and

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sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). Indeed, we can easily imagine how many of these books might fail to offer much beyond a plea to recognize that gay and lesbian parents are—except for that awkward sex stuff—exactly like heterosexual ones. Writing in 1998, Kenneth Kidd notes that “such picture books typically downplay even adult sexuality in favour of a normalizing rhetoric of family values” (114). Similarly, Jasmine Z. Lester points out that the most widely represented adults in gay and lesbian-themed picture books are “nonthreatening queers … those who seem most like people mainstream Western society considers normal: people who conform to expected gender roles, who have a vested interest in parenting, and who are White and upper middle class” (245). In The Trouble With Normal (1999), Warner provides the broader socio-political context for this moment in queer history, arguing that “the official gay movement” has become “more and more enthralled by respectability.” “Instead of broadening its campaign against sexual stigma beyond sexual orientation,” he continues, “it has increasingly narrowed its scope to those issues of sexual orientation that have least to do with sex. Repudiating its best histories of insight and activism, it has turned into an instrument for normalizing gay men and lesbians” (24–25). Many of these critiques come from scholars of queer theory, which was at the time still a nascent field. While “queer” is often deployed as an identity-based placeholder that describes non-normative sexualities and modes of gender presentation—often appearing in lieu of bulky acronyms like LGBTTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Two-Spirit, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual), “queer” via queer theory aims, broadly, to unsettle and challenge popular conceptions of and investments in identity and normalcy. Queer theory distinguished itself from gay and lesbian studies through commitments to disrupting the notion of identity, embracing sexual shame as grounds for collectivity, and recuperating not only the gay and lesbian voices absented from the canon, but also modes of relationality—public sex, cruising, kinks and fetishes, activism in the face of HIV/AIDS—that have been demeaned and labeled perverse.7 In her introduction to a 1991 special issue of differences entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” Teresa De Lauretis coins queer theory to “convey[] a double-emphasis—on the conceptual and speculative work involved in discourse production, and on the necessary critical work of deconstructing our own discourses and their constructed silences”

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(iv). “Queer,” De Lauretis continues, “juxtaposed to the ‘lesbian and gay’ of the subtitle, is intended to mark a certain critical distance from the latter, by now established and often convenient, formula” (iv). In Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996), Annamarie Jagose builds on the rich corpus of queer theory that appeared in De Lauretis’ wake—including key texts by Judith Butler on gender performance (1993) and Lee Edelman on the discursive production of homosexuality (1994)—by positing an appropriately flexible definition of “queer.” “Queer,” Jagose writes, “describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire,” relations that position heterosexuality as the normative model (3).8 In “Innocence, Perversion, and Heather’s Two Mommies” (1998), Eric Rofes offers an extensive and thoughtful critique of such hetero- and homonormative trends in ostensibly “queer” picture books. He describes how, in response to “the ‘protect-the-child’ rhetoric” mobilized by the Right in the 1990s,9 gay and lesbian activists began foregrounding “issues of domestic partnership, gay marriage, and the lesbian baby boom” as opposed to “1970s concerns such as sexual freedom, children’s liberation, and the creation of innovative kinship patterns” (4). In order to deflect “societal conceptions of the homosexual as pervert,” he argues, “queer discourse about children and youth” tended to “affirm[] childhood innocence and reif[y] the family as a sanitized site of safety” (5). Discourse about children—even in supposedly queer venues, Rofes argues—tended to reflect mainstream conservative values that view children as “objects or commodities to be protected, instructed, and controlled by adults” (18). Picture books like Heather, he claims, do little to challenge normative ideologies of the heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family. Instead, in Heather, a lesbian couple simply serves to replace a heterosexual couple as the source of knowledge and authority within the family unit. Children retain the characteristics they have been granted within mainstream American culture (cute, innocent, simple, asexual), and the family unit in this body of literature escapes without being problematized (18–19).

For Rofes, Heather stifles any potential for a queer critique while denying the existence of queer children.

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Kidd concurs with Rofes, observing in 1998 that “we have no picture book about a lesbian or gay child despite the existence of such self-aware children and the example of foreign films such as Du Er Kanne Alene, Voor een Verloren Soldaat, and Ma Vie en Rose (about a [trans] boy)” (114). “This lack,” he explains, “is due to both the reticence about sexuality in general in children’s books and to the lingering belief that homosexuality in particular is incompatible with, or even antithetical to, childhood and its culture” (114). Lester indicates that even when children’s books do feature queer characters (like Heather’s two mommies), “they are portrayed with gender presentations that are less threatening to hegemonic discourse, that is, gender presentations that mimic those associated with heterosexuality—for example, people assigned female at birth adhering to normative prescriptions of femininity” (250). By exorcising its ghostly queers and replacing them with visibly lesbian and gay adults, the queer picture book of the 1990s rendered itself less queer. The ghostly gay children of bygone decades—Ferdinand, William, and Oliver Button—are, arguably, more queer in their coded and slippery signification than the homonormative model of domesticity offered by Mama Jane and Mama Kate. Or, in Huskey’s words, “while foregrounding homosexuality … robs the picture book of its queerness, seeking it where it ‘isn’t’ establishes it most fully” (68). Elizabeth A. Ford, however, turns away from the lesbian mommies to locate the text’s queer potential in Heather herself. In her essay “H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe,” originally published in 1998, Ford considers the gender of Newman’s child protagonists in Heather and Too Far Away to Touch, Newman’s 1995 picture book about a young girl (Zoe) whose uncle is sick with AIDS. In the latter, according to Ford, Catherine Stock’s illustrations depict Zoe as conventionally feminine to provide “adult readers with a comforting, gendered little hand to hold in a slippery space—a text that includes a positive if low-key portrait of gay lovers, one an AIDS sufferer” (209). Ford casts Heather, on the other hand, as a dangerous, disruptive, genderqueer figure. Heather’s “clothing bears little overt gender coding,” Ford observes; “she appears once bare-chested, and usually wears shorts, pants, and high-tops”; “her loose-fitting garb looks archaic, rough, male,” and perhaps monstrous, since “Odd bends of sleeve and trouser might even mask misshapen limbs. Her hair and face resemble stylized renderings of gender-neutral putti” (204–205). Whether or not we find ourselves convinced by the occasional extremes of this argument (Heather’s arms and legs do not appear

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“misshapen” when she appears shirtless with Mama Kate), Ford persuasively shifts the focus of queer inquiry from Jane and Kate onto Heather. “Heather provokes the fear that gay or lesbian parents will produce gay or lesbian children,” Ford concludes, “because her clothing, her features, her body, signal androgynous child, not boy or girl” (205, emphasis in original).10 Ford invites us to consider how “Heather herself”—not her mommies, their relationship, or their (soon-to-be omitted) artificial insemination process—“may be the most controversial component of this often banned book” (205). By asking readers to perceive Heather as something of a ghostly gay child—a queer specter that haunts the scene of homonormative domesticity—Ford complicates the flurry of critiques calling out the text’s political flaccidity and locates subversive queer potential in Heather despite its conservative elements. It is also worth noting that Heather sits among Ferdinand, William, and Oliver Button as the rare ghostly gay child who is not male. Although Victoria Flanagan, in her study of gender nonconformity in children’s literature, remarks that “Female-to-male cross-dressing is by far the most commonly occurring type of gender-bending behavior” in the genre, queer male protagonists dominate the picture book (20). To see young girls and women demonstrating gender insubordination and queer attachments in the twentieth (and, to date, much of the twenty-first) century, it appears that we must largely turn to other forms and genres: to fairy tales, film, young adult literature (see Flanagan), and comics like the 1950s series Li’l Tomboy (see Abate). Heather’s potential queerness, then, marks her as something of a gender outlier.

Heather 2000: “… and Watch Her Disappear” The shift in focus from queer mommies to daughter would be made manifest in subsequent iterations of Heather, as Newman and her publisher expunged Jane and Kate’s backstory from the narrative. In 2000, Alyson Wonderland released its tenth anniversary edition of Heather, which omits eight pages detailing Jane and Kate’s courtship and Heather’s conception. The remaining text also was trimmed, from 1541 words squeezed into 36 pages to 923 words over a more expansive 48 pages. In the 2000 edition’s afterword, Newman explains that feedback “over the past decade from teachers, children’s book experts, parents, librarians, child psychologists, and kids” motivated these revisions. “The text is shorter,” she points out, “as I was told many, many times that there were just too many words for

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children in this age group to listen to.” Regarding her choice to exclude these pages, Newman clarifies: Over the years I have heard from countless parents who wanted to bring Heather into their child’s classroom, but were afraid that the explicit explanation of how Heather came to be was a huge deterrent in getting the book read at story time. Many teachers felt the same way. And since omitting those pages did not compromise the story or the message of the book (which is, as Molly tells Heather’s classmates and thus children reading the book, “The most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other”), I decided to forgo these pages in the hope that Heather, along with her message of respecting and celebrating all types of families, would reach as wide an audience as possible.

We likely can appreciate the impetus for Newman’s editorial decisions, especially in light of critical reactions to the first Alyson edition. However, I find it most compelling to think through the unintended effects of these omissions, which vanish the lesbian backstory and position Heather’s conception and birth as sites of the text’s danger. As Newman explains, teachers and parents claimed this portion of the narrative prevented them from reading the book to students. Certainly, the characters of Jane and Kate are not without their homonormative elements, but I wonder: is there not something subversively queer about the act of detailing lesbian reproduction in the context of a children’s picture book—something that disrupts heteronormativity by making explicit a method of conception that does not require a daddy? Excised from the tenth anniversary edition, the seeds of Jane and Kate’s relationship, the process of artificial insemination, and Heather’s birth become spectral remnants of the previous version. As Castle writes, “Insert the lesbian and watch her disappear” (6)—the lesbians themselves remain, but the story of lesbian love, reproduction, and non-heterosexual family-making evaporates. In the 2000s, picture books about families with lesbian and gay parents and relatives remain en vogue. These include, for example, Molly’s Family (Nancy Garden and Sharon Wooding, 2004), Mom and Mum Are Getting Married (Ken Setterington and Alice Priestly, 2004), Uncle Bobby’s Wedding (Sarah S. Brannen, 2008), and Newman’s Daddy, Papa and Me and Mommy, Mama and Me (both 2009). However, this decade also brings us queer fairy tale characters (Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland’s 2002 King & King and 2004 King & King & Family; Cornelia Funke

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and Kerstin Meyer’s 2004 The Princess Knight) and queer animal protagonists such as Harvey Fierstein and Henry Cole’s The Sissy Duckling (2002); Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s (in)famous And Tango Makes Three (2005, about the Central Park Zoo’s “gay” penguin couple); and Jennifer Bryan and Danamarie Hosler’s The Different Dragon (2006). In Newman and Peter Ferguson’s The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (2004) and Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray’s 10,000 Dresses (2008), we see the gradual (re)emergence of the child whose queerness manifests through attachments to objects or language that signify queerly. This typically involves a boy who wants to wear a dress11 or speaks in coded terms; in Newman and Ferguson’s book, the protagonist overuses a word often associated with gay parlance (Urban Dictionary ranks the “top definition” of “fabulous” as “the ultimate compliment in the gay community”). Step aside, gay and lesbian adults: the queer child and its “passion for signification” are back (Stockton 2016, 505), and the contemporary queer picture book seems to have at least partially abandoned yesteryear’s “oppressive images of children” (Rofes 19). These early twenty-first-century picture books mirror trends in queer theory, which built upon Freud’s “Infantile Sexuality” (1905) and other psychoanalytic writings on child sexuality to begin shaping the field of queer childhood studies. Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), and Stockton’s The Queer Child, or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009) broke new ground by considering the multiple ways children—figural, fictional, and real— embody and perform queer movements, desires, and relations, and/or signify in opposition to queerness. These theorists highlight the semantic queernesses of children alongside the multiple contradictions and paradoxes inherent in our cultural constructions of the child.12 Bruhm and Hurley, for example, identify a “dominant narrative about children: first, children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual” (ix). Stockton points to how contemporary children are legal paradoxes: they are seen as incapable of consenting to their own sexual activity, yet they can be tried as adults when their crimes are deemed heinous enough to warrant it (Queer Child 16). These tensions—between innocence and experience, purity and sexuality, helplessness and agency— are precisely what matter to queer childhood studies, and what make the child such an enthralling site of inquiry for queer theorists.

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Summarizing queer theory’s contribution to childhood studies, Kidd argues that there are “two traditions of child relation in queer theory, one concerned with queering the child, or exposing the child’s latent queerness, and the other more interested in underscoring the Child’s normative power” (2011, 183). These theoretical approaches, Kidd points out, are not mutually exclusive, although some critics are more invested in one perspective over the other. In No Future, which belongs to the latter camp, Edelman argues that the Child is central to what he calls “reproductive futurism,” the heteronormative ideology that structures how we think about politics (2). For Edelman, the Child—as symbol of the future—is the figure upon which all political decisions are based and justified, and so queerness should negate the child, or name “the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (2004, 3). But for the other camp—theorists like Stockton, Bruhm, and Hurley—the ambiguities that have haunted childhood since the eighteenth century are precisely what make the child inherently queer. The concept of the “queer child” embraces these opacities while strategically evading definition through the deconstructionist theoretical mechanisms of queer theory. Bruhm and Hurley acknowledge that children’s queer behavior is (generally speaking) acceptable so long as it is “rationalized as a series of mistakes or misplaced desires” experienced while growing up into normative heterosexual adulthood (xiv). The temporality of childhood thus allows space and freedom for a child’s queer desires to manifest themselves, but only for so long. Because the child functions not only as an embodied individual but as “a metaphor, a kind of ground zero for the edifice that is adult life and around which narratives of sexuality get organized” (Bruhm and Hurley xiii), the child has tremendous political and cultural symbolic heft. The queer child has the potential to unsettle and endanger the heteronormative script, but can also feel trapped within it, “growing sideways,” as Stockton writes, through desires and erotic investments that sit outside narratives of progression from childhood through adolescence into heterosexual adulthood (Queer Child 7). The second decade of the twenty-first century has brought an increasing number of trans, genderqueer, and gender creative picture book protagonists.13 Examples include Phyllis Rothblatt’s All I Want to Be is Me (2011), Eileen Kiernan-Johnson and Katrina Revenaugh’s Roland Humphrey Is Wearing a What? (2012), Amy Fabrikant and Jennifer Levine’s When Kayla Was Kyle (2013), Maya Christina Gonzalez’s Call

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Me Tree (2014), and the autobiographical I Am Jazz, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, with illustrations by Shelagh McNicholas (2015).14 Academic interest in queer picture books has grown alongside the number of titles on offer, and recent studies tend to echo those homonormativity critiques discussed earlier. In a 2016 article, for example, Renée DePalma summarizes a number of UK-based queer picture book studies (many of which examine titles listed above): While to some extent, all of these [queer picture] books have the potential to productively trouble the heteronormative spaces of schools by the mere presence of characters who do not conform to sex/gender/sexuality expectations, … some of them have also been criticized for reproducing heteronormative family structures and implicit values …, reinforcing certain powerful identity discourses to the exclusion of easily defined queer experiences … and failing to go beyond ‘vanilla strategies’ … that feel safe in primary school settings (830).

In addition to the studies DePalma cites, the early twenty-first century has seen such critiques as Lester’s “Homonormativity in Children’s Literature” (2014), Nathan Taylor’s “U.S. Children’s Picture Books and the Homonormative Subject” (2012), B. J. Epstein’s “We’re Here, We’re (Not) Queer: GLBTQ Characters in Children’s Books” (2012), Jane Sunderland and Mark McGlashan’s essay on the “representation of two-­ Mum and two-Dad families in children’s picture books” (2012), and Jennifer Esposito’s “We’re Here, We’re Queer, but we’re just like heterosexuals” (2009). These authors draw conclusions akin to what Rofes and other critics of homonormativity argued in the 1990s: that contemporary picture books with queer protagonists are in fact not offering anything queer at all. Instead, these texts feature mostly white, middle-class protagonists who, even when negotiating a trans identity, remain confined within a gender system structured by binaries and a prescriptive formula involving race. As Lester points out, “These stories present the idea of two opposite genders and no other options. The dominant narrative is that of a girl trapped in a boy’s body or, less commonly, vice versa … gender-queer identities seem nonexistent” (251–2). Even in the twenty-first century, then, it would seem as though Jody Norton’s 1999 argument about trans characters in children’s literature still holds. “As a discipline and as a body of texts,” she writes,

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Children’s literature continues to operate on the basis of an outmoded binary paradigm of gender, in part because psychiatry, the social sciences, legal theory, education, and the humanities continue to function, for the most part, as though it had not already been clearly demonstrated that there are neither two sexes and two genders, nor two sex/genders (295).

Such titles also risk reducing the complexities of gender identity to something visible and transparent: typically, a boy’s desire to wear a dress. Robert Bittner et al.’s recent study of queer and transgender themed picture books flags how “female-to-male (FTM)” experiences are consistently underrepresented (954), and of the 68 picture books in her 2014 study, Lester observes that “only nine … feature children as queer characters,” while “the other eight books featuring queer children characters focus on White transgender children whom the narration describes as transitioning from one binary gender identity to the other” (259). Here, Lester points us to another enduring problem: the picture book’s queer child is all-too-often white.15 Lester concludes that queer picture books not only reinforce gender binaries, but also “privilege whiteness and perpetuate White supremacy, a system of power relations that maintains White as superior to other races,” where “White” refers “to the socially constructed racial category associated with lighter skin and European heritage” (254). Of the 68 books she examines, Lester finds that “there are 102 queer, human, adult main characters; only 11 of them are discernably of color; 10 can pass for White or for characters of color, and 81 are discernably White. There are six queer, human, children characters; five are White and one is discernably non-White” (255). These children, ready for idealization as symbols of queer futurity, are bound up with notions of innocence, which—as Robin Bernstein has signaled—“is itself raced white, itself characterized by the ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness” (8). Likewise, several critics chide contemporary queer picture books for failing to interrogate the structures of power against which queer families must often struggle; the versions of queer parenthood we see, the argument goes, are too rosy. Esposito, for example, writes that “it is important to foster imagination and creativity in children,” but “they should also understand at an early age that some people have more power and privilege in the world than others and they should understand why this is so” (77). Taylor suggests that “in a queer world” picture books would look quite different: they might depict forms of kinship not limited to

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conventional family structures, include diverse characters “not for the sake of diversity alone,” and “take on various systems of oppression, not only those that affect homonormative subjects” such as “the prison and military-­industrial complex, providing health care and welfare to street workers, the lives of the queer working poor” and trans folks (148).

Heather 2015: Queer Kids and Ghostly Adults Many of these critiques might be leveled at the updated edition of Heather Has Two Mommies. Yet, in my opinion, Heather 2015 is worthy of our attention, given how vividly its thematic and formal revisions reflect queer child-centric trends in picture books and contemporary queer theory. As Katie Cunningham of Candlewick Press tells Shannon Maughan in a Publishers Weekly interview: “Our primary goal was to return this book to the child-centered object that Lesléa intended this book to be when it was first published.” Because Newman “wanted it simply to be a kids’ book,” she insisted that this edition should not contain a foreword or parents’ note (Maughan). Moreover, Heather continues to offer us the rare female protagonist who resists gender binaries through her potential to be read as genderqueer, gender creative, or even as a “ghostly gay child.” In addition to its vivacious new illustrations, omitted content, and liminal adults, the length of Heather 2015 reflects its child-centric ambitions. Besides cutting the original word count in half, from 1541 to 747 words, the Candlewick edition is only 32 pages long, including front and back matter.16 The cover of the new Heather proclaims that it is aimed at readers aged 3–7 years, which positions the title somewhere between an “early picture book” and a “picture book for older readers” (Burby 14, 16–17); previous versions of the book had no publisher-determined audience. We might also describe these changes as shifting the book from what Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott call a “narrative text with occasional illustrations” or a “narrative text … (not dependent on image)” to an “‘expanding’ or ‘enhancing’ picture book (visual narrative supports verbal narrative, verbal narrative depends on visual narrative)” or even a sequential “picture narrative with words” (12). The child—and the image—are fundamental to Heather’s newest incarnation. The book’s first image of Heather and her mommies sets up a child-­ centric gaze: in a tight close-up of their three faces, Heather is in the middle with her mommies on either side, eyes downcast on their daughter, directing the reader’s focus. Heather’s own eyes are closed in delight

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as she munches on an apple (4–5). Throughout the text, Heather typically carries the most visual weight, and she is framed by other characters—usually her mommies, sometimes Midnight and Gingersnap—as they play doctor (6), build a treehouse (7), play baseball (8), make cookies (9), and read a bedtime story (10–11).17 By comparison, the original version features seven full pages of Kate and Jane without their daughter; when Heather does appear, she is typically paired with Jane or Kate and not bordered by a pet or her other mommy. The consequence—or rather, the sine qua non—of this child-centric approach in Heather is the ghosting and marginalization of its adults. This occurs most vividly beginning with a two-page spread of Heather arriving in her classroom (12–13). Children are scattered throughout the room, engrossed in a variety of activities. The adults cluster by the door on the far-right side, with the exception of one father who kisses his son goodbye. Molly, Jane, and Kate are having a conversation, while a man—mostly hidden behind Molly and Jane—peeks over Molly’s shoulder to wave goodbye to his daughter. So obscured is this man—his pale face and light blond hair blending with the watery orange of the school hallway behind him— that he is difficult to see. Later, when the class draws pictures of their families, we learn that the girl’s name is Stacy and the man waving is one of her two fathers. He is—dare I say it?—a ghostly gay dad. On the pages that follow (14–15), the reader’s perspective shifts dramatically: we are no longer in the classroom with the children, but looking over the shoulder of the mommies as Heather walks away. We see the class from the precise position of the ghostly gay dad on the previous page; we are now on the periphery, with the adults. Even though Jane and Kate fill the page, Heather retains most of the visual weight. Moreover, this is a moment in the story when text and image contradict one another in ways they originally did not. The text in all three editions reads: “[I]t’s time for Mama Jane and Mama Kate to leave. They kiss Heather goodbye, and Heather cries. But only a little.” Cornell replaces the original image of a sad-looking Heather being hugged and comforted by Jane and Kate with an image of Heather smiling as she bids her mommies adieu. Does she really cry, even a little bit, as she sends the queer adults on their way? Or is the crying reference a melancholic remnant of the previous editions, when the child and her story relied on queer adults in ways they no longer do? For the duration of the story, readers maintain the perspective of a ghosted adult while children dominate each page. Following the farewell

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scene, Souza placed readers directly in the action with Heather (e.g., in a close-up of Heather dressed as a firefighter), whereas Cornell positions our gaze above Heather and her classmates as they play and nap. In the original story time scene, Souza centered Molly in the frame, facing the reader and bearing most of the visual weight, while students gathered around her, backs facing us; readers see the scene from the point of view of a child receiving a lesson about diverse family configurations. In Heather 2015, Molly is marginal and the students central; readers see things from a spectral perspective, hovering slightly above the class and looking over Molly’s shoulder. We already know what lesbian moms and other queer adults look like, the new Heather seems to tell us. This lesson is no longer vital to the story. Only the children matter; look at them, not the teacher. The new edition thus takes for granted its audience’s knowledge of non-nuclear, non-heterosexual family structures. As in the “Heather cries” (but does not cry) image, the 2015 illustrations reinforce that queer adults are no longer a “problem” or source of sadness for Heather. In the original, when questioning whether or not she’s the only one in the class without a daddy, Heather stares out at the reader in close-up—her bewildered face a mirror for those who also needed gay mommies and daddies explained to them. In the new edition, no similar “mirror” of a troubled Heather exists. Heather does not express uncertainty at her lack of a father, nor does she require adult intervention to restore her cheerful mood. Moreover, in the new version, five-year-old Kingsbury’s drawings of family configurations—highlighted on individual pages in the Souza versions—have been replaced with sketches presumably done by Cornell herself. And, strikingly, the child-artists are always positioned to obscure a clear view of their work: they sit on the pictures as they complete them (20–21), obstruct our gaze as they mount the portraits on the wall (22–23), and stand in the way while presenting them to Molly (24–25) and to their parents (26–27). While the Alyson versions read, “Molly hangs up all the pictures and everyone looks at them,” the new text promises that “Ms. Molly looks at all the pictures,” while picturing only the students. The children are the agents, we (as Molly) are passive, invisible onlookers, and the lesson about families no longer requires the same emphasis. Instead, the queer child becomes our point of focus. Recall Lester’s observation that of the 68 picture books she examined, only nine “feature children as queer characters” (259). Her study does not include Heather 2015, but it does raise the question: What constitutes a “queer child”? Huskey suggests that “the picture book has never been

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without a queer presence. There’s no shortage of queer picture books if you’re looking in the right places, or with the right eyes” (68). When we look at Heather, what do we see? While Ford argues that Souza’s Heather is defiantly and subversively androgynous, Cornell’s Heather is even more so. This Heather possesses what Stockton calls the queer child’s “passion for signification” (2016, 505), demonstrating attachments to objects and clothing that confound her gender instead of neatly cohering it through one particular garment. In the cover illustration, she sports an oversized yellow, orange, and red striped shirt, a pink tutu over blue pants, purple cowboy boots, her favorite blue blanket as a cape, and two flowers in her cropped, messy hair. Images of Heather’s bedroom include myriad toys: a measuring tape, a stuffed penguin and lizard, a roll of scotch tape, a baseball, and glove. Everything is covered in bandaids, a presumed result of Heather’s play. A droopy-eyed and weary-looking Midnight is festooned in a pipe-cleaner crown, blue bandanna, and red collar, with gold and beaded bracelets on one paw and a colorful charm bracelet—similar to Heather’s—on the other. This version emphasizes a sense of play that extends from activities and games to Heather’s gender itself. Cornell’s images center on Heather’s genderqueerness, evinced by an array of objects that signify in excess of a normative or traditional female-gendered child. In his critique of the original Heather, Rofes asks: “Do we want the children of lesbians to conform to prevailing notions of childhood in American culture?” (19). The new Heather seems to reply, No, we do not. The children of queers can be as queer—or potentially, even queerer—than their lesbian mommies. For better or worse, Heather is no longer a book about explaining lesbian parents or non-heterosexual reproduction to kids and other adults. Instead, Heather 2015 is about celebrating children and the queerness of childhood. In her essay on “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature,” Norton offers us a “test” for “a successful children’s text”: “its capacity to reflect its characters’ phenomenological and psychosocial reality with an intensity that could facilitate the engagement of the child reader’s or child auditor’s own perceptions, fantasies, and desires” (299). “We can intervene in the reproductive cycle of transphobia through strategies of transreading,” Norton continues, “by intuiting/interpreting the gender of child characters as not necessarily perfectly aligned with their anatomies” (299). Heather 2015 succeeds on this level, welcoming genderqueer readings of its protagonist and offering an antidote to the “boy in a dress” story. However, inasmuch as Heather 2015 might invite

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“transreadings” that emerge from Heather’s play with a variety of genderobscuring signifiers, we should also consider how a kind of playful, “innocent,” “genderless” childhood signifies vis-à-vis Heather’s whiteness and the persistent, pervasive whiteness of the twenty-first-century picture book’s queer children. Additionally, whereas the twenty-first-century picture book’s queer child might express desires for objects and forms of clothing, they are still not permitted to be sexual. In fact, Heather seems to care very little about social relations at all, other than her attachment to her mothers. In Heather 2015, there is no point at which we see her engaging with her classmates: she plays with building blocks and dresses as a firefighter by herself; she snacks with her eyes closed, physically distanced from the other children. Insofar as Heather is centralized and her mommies marginalized, the story and its images remain unable to fully move beyond its titular mommies and the ghostly adult perspective, and onto other childhood social and sexual forms. As Castle writes about the apparitional lesbian, “Only something very palpable … has the capacity to ‘haunt’ us so thoroughly” (7). I find myself strangely haunted by the purged content from Heather’s previous versions. Certainly, there’s something deeply homonormative about Heather that invites (and, arguably, deserves) critique. However, there’s also something queer about Heather’s ghosts, something transgressive about the original, detailed story of non-heterosexual reproduction, one that makes visible the means through which queer women meet, fall in love, and reproduce without the presence of a “daddy,” and—perhaps above all else—making this type of sexual knowledge visible in the context of a children’s picture book. Perhaps, as I’ve illustrated, the new Heather hasn’t entirely exorcised its spirits. Castle suggests that “Within the very imagery of negativity lies the possibility of recovery” (7). The new version of Heather might allow for the possibility of recovering its past—despite its centering of the queer child, the text still invites us to adopt the perspective of the ghostly queer adult, haunting the scene. And, as we progress into the twenty-first century, I imagine we will continue to discover new ways of reading, writing, and representing the picture book’s queer children and adults, be they ghostly or otherwise.

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Notes 1. Heather was originally self-published by Newman and illustrator Diane Souza, before Alyson Wonderland—the children’s imprint of queer publisher Alyson Books—acquired the title in 1990. In 2010, Alyson Books’ parent company Here Media (also responsible for gay periodicals The Advocate and Out) announced that Alyson would cease to release print books and focus instead on e-publishing. Since then, Alyson has faded into oblivion. See “Alyson Books Will Restructure as E-book Only House,” Publishers Weekly (1 Oct 2010). 2. For all of the lists cited above, visit the ALA’s website at: www.ala.org/ bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks. 3. See Warner for a description of gay and lesbian civil rights movements in the 1990s. For a mere two examples (among many) of the recent explosion of popular discourse on trans kids, see the January 2017 special issue of National Geographic entitled “Gender Revolution” and the NPR story “A New Generation Overthrows Gender” (Brooks). 4. Michael Cobb makes a similar claim about queer theory’s child, arguing that “There’s nothing extremely new about the sudden number of texts devoted to thinking about children in recent queer and queer-friendly work” (119) and flagging that “interest in queer children has been around ever since queer theory’s own fraught childhood” (125). 5. The question of the “firstness” of these titles is the source of some contention. See Thomas Crisp for an interview with Jane Severance; reacting to the claim that Heather often receives credit for being “the first text depicting lesbian characters,” Severance says: “Mostly I think that this is done as an honest mistake. Lesléa is a hustler and she happened to print something in the right place at the right time and knew how to run with it. It does irritate me when Lesléa, who knows me personally, allows her book to be touted as the first lesbian children’s book. She knows that’s a lie” (94). 6. Some alternative presses offered reviews with somewhat muted praise. In her review in Off Our Backs: A Women’s Newsjournal (1990), Joanne Stato writes that Heather “is a truly welcome book, even if it does simplify life a little bit” (30). See also a piece in GLBT Reviews (1990/1991), in which Nancy A.  Higgs writes that “Newman uses vocabulary and explanations geared to young children without talking down to them,” and describes Souza’s “black and white illustrations” as “somewhat stylized, but very attractive.” 7. See Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction, which provides a comprehensive overview of queer theory’s emergence in the context of social and political changes in the latter half of the twentieth century. See also

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Berlant and Warner (1998), Bersani (1989, 1995), Duggan (2002), Sedgwick (1993, 2003, 2008), and Warner (1999), among many others, for more on the politics of sexual shame, r­ espectability, public sex, HIV/ AIDS, and queer theory’s interrogation of normalcy and normativity. 8. Jagose’s definition draws on Sedgwick’s frequently cited description of queer: “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Tendencies 8). As Edelman writes in No Future, “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). 9. “Protect-the-child” rhetoric, thoroughly critiqued by Edelman in No Future, is still deployed in the twenty-first century. See Archibald for examples of how conservative politicians use such language to defend transphobic laws like North Carolina’s now-repealed House Bill 2, which barred transgender people from using the washroom of their choice. 10.  Ford’s use of the non-binary adjective “androgynous” to describe Heather (as opposed to, say, “masculine” or “tomboyish”) is noteworthy, especially given how gender noncomforming boys were typically described as “feminine” or “effeminate.” See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” (1991). In the twenty-first century, as I discuss later in this essay, the language of “trans” and “transgender” (as well as “gender creative”) has become more common relative to young people. Much remains to be written about the language used to gender (or resist gendering) young characters in children’s literature. 11. Other “boy and a dress” stories include Cheryl Kilodavis’ My Princess Boy (2010), Christine Baldacchino’s Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (2014), and Sarah and Ian Hoffman’s Jacob’s New Dress (2014). For a book that injects some much-needed racial and cultural diversity into this popular theme, see Vivek Shraya’s The Boy and the Bindi (2016). 12.  Through the multiple definitions of “child” in the Oxford English Dictionary, we get a distinct sense of the term’s slipperiness: (1) a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority; (2) an unborn or newborn human being; (3) a son or daughter of any age (“Child”). Instability is contained within even the first definition: not only does the legal age of majority fluctuate given cultural contexts, but according to this definition, the category “child” also describes what might be otherwise known as youth, adolescents, teenagers, and/or young adults. Taken together, all three OED definitions allow for a “child” that could be anything from a fetus to a senior citizen.

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13. I include these three terms to reflect the diversity of language used in discourse about children, gender, and sexuality. While many theorists and critics use “trans” to talk about children, “gender creative” is also a popular term. See, for example, Diane Ehrensaft’s The Gender Creative Child (2016), and a number of support organizations like Gender Creative Kids Canada (gendercreativekids.ca/) and, in the US, Gender Spectrum (www.genderspectrum.org/). The OED added “gender-fluid” in 2016, the same year that Merriam-Webster began including “cisgender,” “genderqueer,” and “Mx.,” a gender-­neutral title (Gutierrez-Morfin). 14. Lilly and Sage Mossiano’s My New Mommy (2012) describes a child adjusting to a trans parent. Jessica Walton’s Introducing Teddy: A gentle story about gender and friendship (2016) explores trans identity through an anthropomorphized stuffed animal. Flamingo Rampant, a Torontobased micro-press, was founded in 2015 “with a single mission: better kids’ books about gender” (www.flamingorampant.com). 15. See readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflectingdiversity-in-childrens-book-­publishing/ for a visual aid, co-created by Sarah Park Dahlen (who also contributes to this volume), representing the lack of racial diversity in contemporary children’s literature. 16. In How to Publish Your Children’s Book, Liza N. Burby indicates that 32 pages is, generally speaking, the industry standard for children’s picture books. She also breaks the broad category of picture books into 250word “baby books” (12); “Toddler books” that average 300 words for children aged 1–3 years (14); “Early picture books” or “storybooks” that average 32 pages and 500 words, and are written for children aged 3–5 years (16–17); and “Picture books for older readers” (6–10 years old) that typically contain between 1000 and 1500 words and 32 and 64 pages (19). 17. See Perry Nodelman’s Words About Pictures (1988), in which he explains: “Objects in pictures become meaningful in relation to the extent to which we notice them and single them out for special attention. The more we notice them, the more visual weight they have” (101).

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“Gender Revolution.” National Geographic, Jan 2017, www.nationalgeographic. com/magazine/2017/01/. Accessed 17 Jun. 2017. Gonzalez, Maya Christina. Call Me Tree. Children’s Book Press, 2014. Gutierrez-Morfin, Noel. “‘Gender-Fluid’ Among Recent Additions to Oxford English Dictionary.” NBC News, 16 Sept. 2016, www.nbcnews.com/feature/ nbc-out/gender-fluid-among-recent-additions-oxford-english-dictionary-n649571. Accessed 14 June 2017. Herthel, Jessica, and Jazz Jennings. I Am Jazz, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas, Penguin, 2014. Higgs, Nancy A. “Book review: Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman.” GLBT Reviews, vol. 3, no. 1-2, 1990. www.glbtrt.ala.org/reviews/heatherhas-two-mommies/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2017. Hoffman, Sarah, and Ian Hoffman. Jacob’s New Dress, illustrated by Chris Case, Albert Whitman & Co., 2014. Honeyman, Susan. “Trans(cending) gender through Childhood.” The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane, U of Georgia P, 2013, pp. 167-182. Huskey, Melynda. “Queering the Picture Book.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002, pp. 66-77. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York UP, 1996. Kidd, Kenneth. “Introduction: Lesbian/Gay Literature for Children and Young Adults.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, 1998, pp. 114-119. ——. “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 182-188. Kiernan-Johnson, Eileen. Roland Humphrey is Wearing a What?, illustrated by Katrina Revenaugh, Huntley Rahara Press, 2012. Kilodavis, Cheryl. My Princess Boy, illustrated by Suzanne DeSimone, Aladdin, 2011. Leaf, Munro. The Story of Ferdinand. 1936. Illustrated by Robert Lawson, Penguin Young Readers Group, 2017. Lester, Jasmine Z. “Homonormativity in Children’s Literature: An Intersectional Analysis of Queer-Themed Picture Books.” Journal of LGBT Youth, vol. 11, no. 3, 2014, pp. 244-275. Maughan, Shannon. “A Second Life for ‘Heather Has Two Mommies.’” Publisher’s Weekly, 16 Mar. 2015, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/ childrens-book-news/article/65886-a-second-life-for-heather-has-two-mommies.html. Accessed 4 May 2017. Mossiano, Lilly. My New Mommy, illustrated by Sage Mossiano. PublishAmerica, 2012. Myers, Steven Lee. “How a ‘Rainbow Curriculum’ Turned Into Fighting Words.” The New York Times, 13 Dec. 1992, www.nytimes.com/1992/12/13/weekin-

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review/ideas-trends-how-a-rainbow-curriculum-turned-into-fighting-words. html. Accessed 2 May 2017. Newman, Lesléa. Daddy, Papa and Me, illustrated by Carol Thompson, Tricycle Press, 2009a. ——. Heather Has Two Mommies, illustrated by Diana Souza, Alyson Wonderland, 1990. ——. Heather Has Two Mommies: Tenth Anniversary Edition, illustrated by Diana Souza, Alyson Wonderland, 2000. ——. Heather Has Two Mommies, illustrated by Laura Cornell, Candlewick Press, 2015. ——. Mommy, Mama and Me, illustrated by Carol Thompson, Tricycle Press, 2009b. ——. The Boy Who Cried Fabulous, illustrated by Peter Ferguson, Random House, 2004. ——. Too Far Away to Touch, illustrated by Catherine Stock, Clarion Books, 1995. Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work. Routledge, 2006. Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. University of Georgia Press, 1988. Norton, Jody. “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature.” 1999. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, University of Michigan Press, 2011, pp. 293-313. Pilkey, Dav. Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People. Scholastic, 2006. Richardson, Justin, and Peter Parnell. And Tango Makes Three, illustrated by Henry Cole, Simon & Schuster, 2005. Rofes, Eric. “Innocence, Perversion, and Heather’s Two Mommies.” Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 3-26. Rothblatt, Phyllis. All I Want to Be is Me. Createspace, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. University of California Press, 2008. ——. “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.” Social Text, no. 29, 1991, pp. 18-27. ——. Tendencies. Duke UP, 1993. ——. Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. Setterington, Ken. Mom and Mum Are Getting Married, illustrated by Alice Priestly, Second Story Press, 2004. Severance, Jane. Lots of Mommies, illustrated by Jan Jones. Chapel Hill, NC: Carolina Wren Press, 1983. ——. When Megan Went Away, illustrated by Tea Schook. _______: Lollipop Power Inc., 1979. Shraya, Vivek. The Boy and the Bindi, illustrated by Rajni Perera, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016.

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Stato, Joanne. “Affirmed in Fiction: New Books about children of lesbians and gays.” Off Our Backs, vol. 21, no. 7, 1991, 20-21. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009. ——. “The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects.” GLQ, vol. 22, no. 4, 2016, pp. 505-539. Sunderland, Jane, and Mark McGlashan. “The linguistic, visual and multimodal representation of two-Mum and two-Dad families in children’s picturebooks.” Language and Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012, 189-210. Taylor, Nathan. “U.S. Children’s Picture Books and the Homonormative Subject.” Journal of LGBT Youth, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 136-152. Trumpener, Katie. “Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M.O.  Grenby and Andrea Immel, Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 55-75. Valentine, Johnny. One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dad, illustrated by Melody Sarecky, Alyson Wonderland, 1994. Vigna, Judith. My Two Uncles. A. Whitman, 1995. Walton, Jessica. Introducing Teddy: A gentle story about gender and friendship, illustrated by Dougal MacPherson, Bloomsbury, 2016. Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard UP, 1999. Willhoite, Michael. Daddy’s Roommate. Alyson Wonderland, 1990. ——. Uncle What-Is-It Is Coming to Visit!! Alyson Wonderland, 1993. Yampell, Cat. “Alyson Wonderland Publishing.” Bookbird, vol. 37, no. 3, 1999, pp. 31-33. Zolotow, Charlotte. William’s Doll, illustrated by William Pene du Bois, HarperCollins, 1972.

PART III

Representing Youth, Claiming Identity, and Exercising Agency

Laughing Out Loud or Lost in the Woods? Tween Girl Identity in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels for Children Nina Christensen

Nine years old “is the age where you understand that your childhood will come to an end. That something else will happen,” says visual artist Julie Nord. “It is like the point in the thriller movie where you hear the sound and know the murderer is about to arrive” (Mygind 2016: 4). Nord, a Danish artist born in 1970, often pictures tween girls in her drawings and recalls her own 9-year-old self in these words. Less dramatically, the standard Danish dictionary defines “tween” as “A young person who is not a child anymore, but not yet a teenager, either” (ordnet.dk). This double negative definition points to a fundamental uncertainty concerning tween identity that is reflected in portraits of tween characters in twenty-first century picturebooks and graphic novels. Tween characters express confusion, doubt, insecurity, and lack of ability to find a precise verbal or visual expression of how they feel, who they are, and who they will become, and this uncertainty is predominant both in publications

N. Christensen (*) Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_7

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aimed at children and adults. While the term “teenager” has a connection to a specific timespan, and “child” biologically denotes an individual who has not reached puberty, the word “tween” refers to someone in a waiting position, occupying a limbo or a no man’s land between two categories which are terms for transitory stages. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh write: “The idea of tween may be a way to fill the conceptual category of the time of transition between a girl’s childhood and her adolescence. It is not a stable category, though, but one that seems to be shifting ever so slightly downward” (C. Mitchell and ReidWalsh 2005: 13). Adult attention toward what childhood is and what children will become has traditionally been expressed in fairy tales and cautionary tales. In cautionary tales, a child character is either rewarded for incarnating virtues or punished for acting out vices in a realistic narrative. In fairy tales, the main character is confronted with and overcomes dangers in a fantastic environment. Fairy tale expert Vanessa Joosen points to the blending of these two genres: In Charles Perrault’s French version of “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697), the wolf eats the protagonist, and Perrault explicitly addresses young girl readers, explaining that from this story they must learn to “stay on guard against all sorts of men” (Joosen 2006). This warning expresses adults’ wish to prepare and protect children, especially girls, against possible risk behavior in relation to the opposite sex. Talking wolves belong to a fantasy world, but a need for caution and a wish to protect children is present in the real world of readers across history. Children’s right to protection is integrated in discourses concerning childhood, and a keyword in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). However, the life conditions of tween girls are (again) rapidly changing, with social media as an important factor. Tween girls in the Western world may have their own Instagram accounts where girlhood can be performed among peers, and one of the most popular YouTubers in Denmark in 2018 was then-9-year-old Naja Münster, who at that time  boasted more than 166,000 followers (Johansen 2017). Adolescents sexting photos to each other is another issue that raises concern, debates, and juridical questions. Are tween girls performing on YouTube and Instagram to be protected against consequences they are unaware of, and must their range of action therefore be limited? Or are they using their right to express themselves and the possibility of having an influence on the way they are represented, also on social media (James 2007)? Public debates on such matters tend to polarize with advocates for

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tween agency on the one hand and promoters of a need for adult control on the other. This chapter intends to focus on positions in between: the grey zones, the dilemmas, and conundrums surrounding fictional tween identity in picturebooks and graphic novels. In the first key example, The Girl in Red (2012), author Aaron Frisch and illustrator Roberto Innocenti present a story of possible child abuse (or event murder) in a narrative with both realistic and fairy tale elements. The main character in Frisch and Innocenti’s book is a girl around 10-12 years old, an allusion to Little Red Riding Hood in a hyper-urban setting, but the intended age of the audience in relation to this picturebook is less clear (Marshall 2015, 160–175). The second example, Danish author Annette Herzog’s and illustrator Katrine Clante’s graphic novel Pssst! (Herzog and Clante 2013), is a realistic and humorous story about the everyday life of a Danish tween girl around 2010. Both books address bodily changes, choices in relation to physical appearance, and the influence from visual culture, including magazines and advertisements, topics central to fictional depictions of tween girls in the 2010s. The analyses will pay special attention to the depiction of the tween body and the ways in which tween characters are confronted with and relate to ideals concerning the female body, and to tween identity as it is represented and addressed in commercials, magazines, and shopping contexts. Related to this discussion of in-between-ness is a discussion of a possible media-specific connection between visual narratives and depictions of the complicated transition from child to teenager. The analysis of tween girl characters will be preceded by an introduction to graphic novels and picturebooks as hybrid media, and to research in representations of childhood within children’s literatures studies that account for transitory stages: the so-called kinship model proposed by Marah Gubar.

Between Words and Images, Children and Adults, Now and Then In graphic novels and picturebooks verbal text and images are combined, and this composite narrative could be described as an “imagetext,” to use W. J. T. Mitchell’s term (1994: 5). From the last decades of the twentieth century, comics, graphic narratives, and picturebooks have developed in relation to content, intended audience, complexity of image-text relationships, and narrative perspectives.

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After the publication of Art Spiegelman’s graphic depiction of the Holocaust in Maus (Spiegelman 1986, 1991) it was not surprising to be confronted with serious topics in graphic narratives (Chute 2008). Around the turn of the millennium, a number of now-canonical autobiographical graphic novels included descriptions of difficult transitions from child to teenager, examining the changes inherent in the child body and in the gendered body. Among these were Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2006), and David B.’s L’Ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic, 1996–2003). While Satrapi describes her childhood, family, and friendships in a violent political context in Iran after the fall of the Shah in 1979, complex family relations are at the core of David B.’s and Bechdel’s visual narratives. These authors and illustrators show that visual narratives can transmit complex, thought provoking, and sometimes troubling narratives. While they link childhood experiences to war, annihilation, civil war, illness, and trauma, the depiction of sexual assaults on children is a more recent phenomenon in visual narratives. Examples include the Swedish graphic narrative for children Elin under havet (2012) by Sofia Malmberg, the Swedish graphic narrative for adults Om någon vråler i skogen (2010) by Malin Biller, and Frisch and Innocenti’s The Girl in Red. The publication of such works points to the fact that the target group for visual narratives is less predictable today. Established conventions concerning visual and verbal language, content, and materiality of picturebooks point to a pre-tween individual as the intended target group for the majority of picturebooks. Increasingly, authors and illustrators challenge these conventions and publish books that seem directed at an older audience of tweens or teenagers, or that blend elements of picturebooks and comics in a manner that invites a plural readership. The terms “crossover picturebooks” and picturebooks “for all ages” have been applied to picturebooks that appeal to a dual or double audience of children and adults (Beckett 2012; Ommundsen 2015). Furthermore, the borders between picturebooks and comics are being blurred in ways that has fertilized scholarly debates of the intersection between the two media (Hatfield and Svonkin 2012; Christensen 2017). Traditionally, comics have been linked to a young readership seeking entertainment, and comics scholar Hillary Chute points to the fact that “graphic novel” was a term created for marketing purposes: “the term was urgently needed in a practical sense as a label that could distinguish serious, adult work from comics for children” (Chute 2008: 453). Chute prefers the term “graphic narrative,” partly because it includes nonfiction,

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and ironically, graphic novels are today also written, published, and marketed at tweens and teenagers, taking advantage of the relationship between the perceived-lowbrow reputation of comics and the perhaps more sophisticated and mature moniker of the graphic narrative. In visual narratives, relationships between image and texts are manifold—from the most simple to the enigmatic. In picturebooks for young children and in mainstream products, words and images tend to support each other, and thus transmit the exact same message or narrative through two different codes simultaneously. Picturebook scholars Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott have created categories describing more complex forms of interaction between words and images in picturebooks, among these “complementary” books, where text and images narrate different aspects of the story, and “counterpointing” picturebooks where the visual and verbal narratives might present contradictory narratives (Nikolajeva and Scott 2001: 12). In contemporary picturebooks for children, one finds examples of counterpointing interaction between visual and verbal narratives that create a humorous, ironic, or unsettling story. Such narratives suggest an implied competent, visually literate young reader with a growing sense of double meanings, paradoxes, doubt, or irony. Creating a tension between narratives told in visual and verbal text, respectively, is one of the ways in which tween dilemmas unfold. Furthermore, hybrid forms of visual texts that combine elements from the visual language of picturebooks and comics are flourishing, as indicated by perennial U.S. series including Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants and Dog Man books, Ursula Vernon’s Dragonbreath books, and Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid titles. Recent experiments with the interaction between image and text in narratives, and the blurring of boundaries among reader demographics, might present a problem in relation to research fields, genre categories, and marketing. However, such changes are hardly problematic, or surprising, for readers who grow up in a society where they use crossover social media that encourage them to use and produce combinations of words and images all the time, and where age categories are less fixed. Finally, in picturebooks and graphic novels, the combination of visual and verbal codes makes it possible to present different perspectives on a synchronic and a diachronic level. In Bechdel’s Fun Home, a first-person narrator represents an adult Alison’s perspective on childhood events in textboxes above the frame, recalling childhood, while the images and speech bubbles within the frame represent what the child, tween, or

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teenage Alison is saying, thinking, and doing. Fun Home thereby presents Bechdel’s experiences and memories in both the past and the present tense in every panel, allowing the wisdom and regret of hindsight to comment on and suffuse the images of a childhood before the elements of the “family tragicomic” had been interpreted. Similarly, in Persepolis, an adult retrospective first-person narrator shares her remarks in expository text above the frames. This adult voice explains key elements in the historical events, while the experiences of the child are again presented in the present tense in dialogue and images within the frames. This possibility of simultaneously reliving the past and reflecting from a present-day standpoint might be one of the reasons why autobiographical graphic narratives have been so successful in the early twenty-first century: The reading experience takes place in a tension between what a child experiences, what “actually” took place, how it is remembered, and how it is told in retrospect.

Transition from Childhood to Adulthood: A Continuum A need for discussing fixed terms and multiple perspectives is also present within children’s literature studies, where the terms “child” and “childhood” have long been considered unstable categories. As Jacqueline Rose famously stated, “There is no child behind the category children’s fiction, other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes” (Rose 1984: 10). Rose’s controversial 1984 claim is still debated among critics of the child and the book. From a social constructivist position, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein describes the way the terms “child” and “childhood” are very much linked to specific cultural, geographical, and historical contexts (Lesnik-Oberstein 1994, 2011). Drawing on social studies and anthropology more recent studies have directed the attention to children as individuals with agency, including the right to express themselves and to have an active influence on their own situation (James 2007; Kelen and Sundmark 2017). In relation to the representation of tween identity in contemporary picturebooks and graphic novels, one needs concepts and theories that account for the ways in which children and young people participate in the creation of their own identity. For instance, Farah Malik describes how tween girls use fashion magazines and shopping in their identity formation, and how they do not regard themselves as passive victims of commercial culture, but as

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individuals with agency who use shopping and magazines as a means to discuss and negotiate tween identity with peers, friends, and family (Malik 2005). In retrospect, the approaches of Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein are implicitly dependent on the opposition between children and adults as categories, even when the terms are regarded as discursive categories or as socially constructed. The more recent approach, the so-called kinship model developed by Marah Gubar, forms a more relevant background in this context. In “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism,” Gubar discusses three models, or discourses, concerning childhood: “the deficit model,” “the difference model,” and “the kinship model.” The deficit model refers to the child as an individual lacking abilities, skills, or power that he or she will slowly acquire in the process of becoming an adult. The difference model refers to a discourse that identifies the child as a fundamentally and ontologically different kind of being who incorporates qualities he or she will lose when becoming an adult. Finally, the kinship model is premised on the idea that children and adults are akin to one another, which means they are neither exactly the same nor radically dissimilar. The concept of kinship indicates relatedness, connection and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality. (Gubar 2013: 453)

The focus on transition, interaction, and variations concerning child and adult identity, and the fact that this model makes it possible to discuss terms such as “child” or “tween” as words describing a process or a continuum, make the kinship model especially relevant for discussions of tween characters and discussions of tween identity. Gubar writes: even though the categories “child” and “adult” neatly carve up the human community into two separate classes of people, kinship-model theories try to counteract that tendency by stressing the gradual, erratic, and variable nature of the developmental process. (Gubar 2013: 454)

The terms “tween” and “teenager,” established gradually during the twentieth century, reflect a gradual transition between child and adult, but it was not until the first decades of the twenty-first centuries that tween girls were perceived as a specific target group in children’s literature and graphic narratives. The following analyses show how tween characters in

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picturebooks and graphic novels represent characters whose experience of physical and emotional development is anything but rational, comprehensible, or meaningful on an immediate level.

Fatal Change Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch’s The Girl in Red is the latest of many retellings of “Little Red Riding Hood” (Beckett 2014). Before the story of Sophia begins, the reader is confronted with a picture showing a miniature old lady, sitting in a chair on the table in a kindergarten. The word kindergarten in itself reflects Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-­ century idea that children should grow up in in close contact to nature, and with as little contact to civilization as possible. The old lady begins her story in a similar archaic manner: “Draw close, children, and I will weave you a tale” (Frisch and Innocenti 2012), but objects on the table and on the shelves seem startling in a conventional fairy tale or kindergarten context: A toy gun, a hand grenade, and an armed toy soldier lie on the table, suggesting ambient violence. The setting, the objects, and the old lady do not signal that this is a bedtime story for young children, and an adult reader might interpret the violent elements as a reference to the alarming number of school shootings taking place especially in American high schools in the twenty-first century. The old lady warns her young audience: “Stories are like skies. They can change, bring surprises, catch you without a coat” (Frisch and Innocenti 2012), and her warning links The Girl in Red explicitly to fairy tales and cautionary tales. While fairy tales retold in a contemporary context tend toward happy or neutral resolutions, the typical plot of the cautionary tale presents a transgression or violation of a prohibition, and punishes transgression with a terrible consequence, often death. In a variation of the cautionary narrative, the main character accepts the prohibition, takes the advice, or listens to the warning and is subsequently rewarded with a gift or the promise of a happy life. Cautionary tales were central to the development of fiction for children from the eighteenth century onward, where narratives were considered effective means in the character development of child readers (Grenby 2011). Frisch and Innocenti’s modern cautionary tale is set in a mega-city where Sophia, a young girl who lives is a run-down neighborhood, leaves her home to take fruits and cakes to her ailing grandmother. The kitchen in Sophie’s home is presented as a safe and orderly home, with a mother

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who looks lovingly at her daughter, but violent cartoons in the background still address violence as a recurrent theme in young children’s lives. As she leaves, wearing the signature red coat that lets her stand out in every crowded image, her mother reminds her to “Stay on the main trail all the way.” The tenement stairs in her house are full of graffiti and the immediate sidewalk surroundings are full of garbage with homeless people sleeping in the street. On this image showing this, the reader also sees the back of a person on a motorbike who anticipates Sophia’s meeting with the hunter/wolf. She passes a policeman guarding the scene of a homicide in the street, crosses heavily trafficked intersections, and finally passes through “The Wood,” a huge shopping mall where she admires a display of toys. Afterward, she is picked up by a stranger, “A smiling hunter,” on a motorbike. He takes her some of the way, then leaves her; readers see him sneaking into the grandmother’s trailer home before Sophia arrives. The fatal event is not represented explicitly either in text or in images, but must be created in readers’ minds. Readers know that the hunter has entered the grandmother’s house through the backdoor, and they see Sophia standing outside the trailer house. They will understand that the hunter is inside the house and that Sophia is unaware. With a turn of the page, the reader is confronted with a verso image of the building where Sophia lives and her mother waiting up in the night, paired with a recto image of the hunter, with a wolf’s head, sneaking out of the trailer in the darkness. A blank white space next to this image encourages readers to imagine Sophia and her grandmother’s fates. The two next double spreads present two endings: One in which the police arrive too late, and another in which the storyteller addresses her child audience directly and tells a version with a happy ending. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter Charles Perrault combined his printed version of “Little Red Riding Hood” (1697) with a moral warning toward young women. Traditional fairy tales were not originally sweet stories about love and happiness. On the contrary: they “do not flinch from the hard, even sordid facts of life: child abandonment, infanticide, incest, rape, abuse, cannibalism, murder, necrophilia, and madness, among others” and “the events and lessons contained in fairy tales often seem to be anything but moral: children are imprisoned, seduced, and devoured; adults are guilty of violence, abuse and murder” (Beckett 2015: 50). In a certain sense, Frisch and Innocenti confront contemporary readers with the original content of oral fairy tales, which were neither published in print nor explicitly or solely directed at a child

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audience. When fairy tales became associated with children at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and The Grimm Brothers’ versions became part of the education of boys and girls, the content changed: They “eliminated Perrault’s sexual innuendo and added a happy ending that mitigated the violence, or at least its consequences” (Beckett 2015: 52). The shock of reading the Innocenti and Frisch version of the fairy tale might be interpreted as caused by a return of the repressed, or rather a possible return to the uncanny elements of Northern European children’s literature in the first decades of the nineteenth century, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker (1816) and Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Ida’s Flowers” (1835). In both Hoffmann’s and Andersen’s tales, a tension is staged between the well-known and cozy and the unknown and scary, a tension famously discussed by  Sigmund Freud in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny,” 1918). A similar tension appears in The Girl in Red, when Sophia enters the mall.

Tween Identity Between Idyll and Depravation In The Girl in Red, tween identity is presented as a fragile and vulnerable position, and the depiction of its shopping mall, The Wood, explicitly presents the dangers (Fig. 1). At first glance, The Wood resembles an average shopping mall, crowded with people, escalators, advertisements, crying children, parking lots, and so on. The level of detail resonates with sunnier hide-and-seek books like

Fig. 1  Roberto Innocenti’s depiction of “The Wood” in The Girl in Red by Aaron Frisch © Creative Editions (2012)

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Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo series, but surreal elements—people enter the escalators through a huge cornucopia—bring to mind nightmarish visions like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1500). In Bosch’s triptych, heaven and hell appear side by side, and strange creatures combine elements of human beings, animals, and objects. Similarly, Innocenti’s teeming image of The Wood places the reader at the center of the mall in a symmetrical composition that is reinforced by linear perspective; the viewer’s attention is drawn to the exact center of the image, in the style of a cathedral’s stained-glass windows. The spatial composition may be classical, but the mosaics’ motifs are unusual. A strange female figure with a halo, dressed like a stripper, holds a weapon in her hand. A sign that says “Bingo” is placed in front of her. Shops line the nave of this amoral church, immense campaign posters shout ironic slogans like “Arrogance Is Power,” and advertisements promote megabrands such as gun producers, fast food companies, and banks. In the area where a cathedral choir and mosaics might stand, a Spanish translation of “The Wood” appears—“El Bosque”—and echoes the Spanish translation of Hieronymus Bosch’s name; El Bosque may be known to visitors of Madrid’s El Prado, where The Garden of Earthly Delights is exhibited. In his painting, Bosch introduces the spectator to heaven as a garden full of wonders, and hell as terrifying but fascinating in its strangeness. Innocenti depicts The Wood as a place full of dubious and destructive elements, where idealized women have sexualized bodies, huge breasts, are dressed in underwear, and are placed in cliché postures that suggest an encouragement to sexual activities. As in the original fairy tale, The Wood is an enticing place where terrible things can happen. Sophia has entered a place that could also be named The Depraved Church of Consumerism. The depictions of female sexuality read like caricatures and reflect an overt critique of tween girls’ confrontation with mass media representation of gendered bodies. Amid these surroundings, Sophia is depicted as a girl in a stage between innocence and depravity. Looking over her shoulder, the reader sees a variety of models for identification, as Sophia admires the display in the toy shop. Her in-between-ness is stressed in the text: “The window of wonders. Sophia stops and get to dreaming. Before her are monsters, princesses, dark fates, and happily-ever-afters. Images of the past and of the future.” Smiling figures of Pinocchio and Little Red Riding Hood wear traditional children’s fairy-tale clothing and refer to canonical stories from the socalled golden age of children’s literature (Fig. 2). Behind them, a teddy

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Fig. 2  The main character Sophia confronted with multiple versions of girl- and womanhood in The Girl in Red by Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch

bear represents a protected and safe child life, and a football connect childhood to outdoor freedoms. These elements as well as the figure of a female ballet dancer in a pink dress create a link not only to Sophia’s past, but also to ideas of childhood as a lost paradise of fairy tales, gentleness, simplicity, and innocence (Christensen 2006; Kümmerling-Meibauer 2007). Despite the presence of these old-fashioned tropes, figures of Romantic childhood do not dominate the display: Instead, five variations of Barbie dolls provide stereotypical caricatures of “sexy” women, and one of them points a gun directly at Sophia. This doll stands among a third category of figures, consisting of gnomes, warriors, and science fiction figures that carry different kinds of weapons. A tank, a helicopter, another hand grenade, and even in the upper corner a Ku Klux Klan figure holding a torch seem to represent the opposite of Arcadia: the violent, racist, sexist culture that Sophia explicitly faces. These consumer goods echo those in the kindergarten classroom, where the storyteller weaves her tale. Hereby, a strong dichotomy is presented: As a girl you are either innocent and sheltered or the victim of a violent, sexualized gaze and culture. The subsequent image of a young, white, blonde girl who balances on a thin tightrope above the

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mall seems to suggest that it is almost impossible to find a balance, and the scene predicts the “inevitable” fall of Sophia. The text states that she “longs to linger,” and though she leaves, she is presented as a little lamb that is, and will be, lost in The Wood for good. These images, as well as the plot, present a critical approach to consumer culture and the way it allegedly determines female tween identity. When the police arrive in the first of the two endings, enormous advertisements touting fashion, cigarettes, and gold stand in the background and create a deliberate connection between capitalism, aggressive marketing, and the destruction of tween girls’ innocence. On the image showing the “happy” ending, in which Sophia seeks comfort in her mother’s and grandmother’s warm embrace, such blatant signs are gone, but the cheerful conclusion also encourages skepticism, given the number of policemen, agents, and media persons present. The second ending does not present an attractive alternative: The pink color on the sign “Happy Ending” matches the pink, tight outfits worn by two female television journalists who interview the police or try to get a comment from Sophia. In contrast, different kinds of policemen are dressed in dark colors and armed in a military way, and thus the few pink elements give the impression of a thin layer of hope and happiness on a surface of massive violence. The Girl in Red becomes a tale with either a depressing or an unlikely ending.

Tween Identity in Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante’s Pssst! Based on a Northern European middle-class context, Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante’s graphic novel Pssst! introduces gendered and embodied tween identity as a more playful and yet troublesome phase. The analysis focuses on how the advent of change is represented, and particularly on the extent to which the girl is depicted as having an influence on the changes and her own situation, that is: her agency. The dialogue between girls’ own ways of expressing themselves, and the ways they are represented and addressed by adults is a central topic in the narratives of tween girls in general, and in Pssst! in particular. On the cover of author Annette Herzog and illustrator Katrine Clante’s Pssst!, the main character Viola sits in a green sleeping bag looking directly at the reader (Fig. 3).

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Fig. 3  Cover of Annette Herzog and Katrine Clante: Pssst! © Høst & Søn (2013)

Drawings depicting her grandfather, her close family, and a school photo point to the importance of family and friends in this character’s life. Images of insects signal a theme of biological heritage and development, and depictions of a rose and a butterfly link this theme to the idea of vanitas symbols symbolizing the transitory character of life in Renaissance paintings. In the context of the insect imagery, the sleeping bag itself looks like a cocoon, anticipating comparisons between the transitions from caterpillar to butterfly and from girl to woman throughout the book. The cover gives the illusion of being made by a child, due to the use of childish handwriting, a drawing allegedly made by a child, and motifs that might appeal to a young person. The possible “author” of the collage could be the main character. Viola is being represented and portrayed as from outside, but her own perspective is also present in drawings and handwritten text in the style of a young person. The collage reflects that three aspects of Viola’s life are central to her identity formation: relationships, biology and bodily change, and creative expression. The graphic narrative is told in 12 chapters in which Viola, the first-­ person narrator, tells readers about her life, her thoughts, her friends, and

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her family, in a white, middle-class family in Denmark around 2010. The narrative unfolds in a combination of comic sequences using frames and double spreads in imitation of a scrapbook or a visual, collage-style diary. Readers imagine Viola as the creator of this journal, and thus seem to have access to her innermost musings and imagination. On one of the collages, the question “Who am I?” is written in capital letters across the pages, and this existential question accompanies a surreal image: A family in nineteenth-­century clothing goes for a walk, but their human heads are replaced by nonhuman enigmas, from a tureen atop the long dress, a giraffe’s head on the man’s suit, and a rose on the body of a little girl. The image (partly presented as Viola’s composition) alludes to drawings of the nineteenth-century French illustrator Jean Grandville, whose combinations of animals and human beings preceded surrealism, and thereby also to the Surrealist game Cadavre Exquis, in which three people each draw one third of a body without knowing what the other two participants have drawn. Inevitably, composite, humorous, imaginary characters are the result. This detail may be interpreted as Viola’s feeling of being in a phase where she might turn into something or somebody unpredictable and grotesque. This feeling of insecurity is explicit when the girl introduces a dream she has had: “You change when you grow. But who can predict what the result will be?” (Herzog and Clante 2013: 34). Viola climbs into a sleeping bag, falls asleep, and suddenly jumps out of the bag as a full-grown woman/elephant/frog-like creature with butterfly wings. The grotesque scene captures the tween girl’s combined feeling of fear and lightheartedness toward the body Viola expects to sprout. Fortunately, in the final image on the page, Viola wakes up as her normal self, looking shocked by her experience in the dream. The surreal character of her fantasy of change includes a lot of bodily hair, breasts, and long, red fingernails, and is depicted in a humorous, yet scary manner. The figure transgresses the borders of the frame and points to a fear of uncontrollable and limitless change (Fig. 4). This transformed body represents the fantasy of a possible future identity and brings to mind other depictions of fantastic monsters, among them Francisco de Goya’s etching “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (1799). In Pssst! such fantasies are combined with small realistic narratives showing ordinary moments in a young person’s day. For instance, Viola stands in front of the bathroom mirror and makes faces at herself as she enacts different personalities—the funny, the cute, the pious,

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Fig. 4  The main character Viola’s nightmare of uncontrolled bodily change in Herzog and Clante’s graphic novel Pssst!

the cool, and so on. In this case, future identities become a play-like activity and a reflection on potential. Elsewhere, Viola is depicted—or depicts herself—as a paper doll in a range of outfits that could be classified as “sporty,” “elegant,” “casual,” “sweet,” or “sexy.” In yet another sequence she stands in front of a mirror with her older sister while her sister tells her she needs help to look more fashionable and mature, her parents are critical toward her wearing a short skirt and using makeup. Viola talks with her friends about boys, but representations of sexual feelings or experiences are not part of her life.

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Through the portrait of Viola, young readers are invited to share the girl’s feelings of insecurity and even fear, and thereby earn the impression that this anxiety is a normal part of being a tween girl. Meanwhile, an adult reader might be reminded that even though it is a condition of modern society that one’s own identity is continuously questioned and negotiated, the degree and extent of change and uncertainty is overwhelming for a tween girl. Viola is depicted as a sexually innocent girl, who is still very much under the influence and protection of adults, but she is also very active in her search for ways of articulating how she sees herself. One of Viola’s coping strategies in the process is to manipulate with the images of girlhood she is confronted with through magazines, and I will return to this aspect after a discussion of a different view on tween identity from another cultural context.

Tween Characters Creating in Dialogue with Consumer Culture As a genre, the cautionary tale developed in a society where vices and virtues were well established, and where individuals had to incorporate this value system in order to be considered a member of a society based on order and reason. Frisch and Innocenti present a society where basic rules are “you must consume” and “desires must be filled,” and the tween character becomes the passive victim of this culture. An empirical study by Farah Malik suggests an alternative position for tween girls. In “Mediated Consumption and Fashionable Selves: Tween Girls, Fashion Magazines, and Shopping,” Malik describes following 13 tween girls on shopping trips and interviewing them in focus groups as well as individually. Among other things, Malik was interested in the ways in which tween girls were influenced by magazines: “whether girls accept, interpret, contest or reject images of consumption that are dispersed through magazines”(Malik 2005: 260). Malik presents an alternative to research where the starting point is that girls are vulnerable and “victims of media and marketing manipulation,” and instead she lets young girls speak and reveal that “they are not unknowing and naïve” (ibid.). Malik concludes that the girls she interviews also experience “instances of the empowering and liberating possibilities of self-invention through style and fashion” (ibid.), and suggests that tween girls’ shopping and consumption of fashion and magazines can also be seen as symbolic acts that function as a central part of the

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rite de passage from childhood to adulthood. Where Frisch and Innocenti interpret urban space and consumer culture as fatal to childhood, critics like Malik propose a more affirmative reading of girlhood, more in line with a feminist social praxis. Malik’s sociological data aligns with the tale of possibility in Herzog and Clante’s graphic narrative about Viola. In Pssst!, the reader is confronted with the main character’s fictive attempt to negotiate and question the influence of visual culture related to fashion. Viola’s mother tells her to turn the television off and read something instead, and Viola grabs a tween magazine that presents headlines such as: “Ask the stylist,” “Create a new image for yourself,” “Two cool posters with the cuuute Justin Bieber,” and “Give your love life a total makeover” (Herzog and Clante 2013: 79). Subsequently, a series of images depicts Viola cutting up the magazine while asking herself: “Is this an attempt to form us? Or is it true what Dad says—that they only want our money?” (Herzog and Clante 2013: 79). Viola reorganizes the magazine’s words into new phrases, resulting in a “total makeover” of the headlines. Her re-created narrative is a humoristic deconstruction of consumerism, calling attention to unrealistic body ideals: “Two brand new pimples were too cool. The stylist agreed: You look like breasts on sale. At a hot party they met the cuuute Justin Bieber…. Two pimples on the nose became Justin Bieber’s new image” (Herzog and Clante 2013: 80). Viola finishes her collage, sends it to the magazine and states laconically that the magazine will probably not earn money on that. In Pssst!, tweens are not solely consumers (or consumed), but individuals who participate in the creation of their future identities and consciously manipulate the ways in which they are addressed. By rearranging consumer culture, Viola exerts influence on who she is and will become. Ironically, when Viola asks her mother for a stamp, the mother is busy watching the television. The tween girl inhabits a liminal phase, in-between adult control and a need to question the given order, yet she may already be a more literate consumer than her distracted parent.

Tween Identity Between Hope and Despair The dystopian perspective on tween identity in The Girl in Red and the representation of an insecure, but also basically optimistic tween character in Pssst! who seeks refuge in humor and in her own creative production, are two examples of how contemporary fiction presents tween

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identity as transitory stage. The books themselves are between readerships: While Pssst! appears to address tween girls, it also gives the adult reader a trustworthy and detailed portrait of Viola’s thoughts and feelings. The adult reader might find associations to Goya and Grandville, but unlike the tween character be unaware of the importance of Justin Bieber. While The Girl in Red looks like a child’s picturebook at first glance, it implies an audience of critical, more mature readers who are able to relate to a critique of capitalist consumer culture, a violent society, and stereotypical gender roles. Pssst! presents a reflective and critical tween, while Innocenti and Frisch could be said to use the image of an innocent tween girl as a passive agent in their fixed narrative of innocence lost. Sophia is a victim of consumer culture, but for the reader she also becomes a victim of a stereotypical ideal of childhood, one that is far from the reality of tween girls today. The narrative—or even the moral—of The Girl in Red seems almost deterministic or even nihilistic: In this kind of society girls will get lost, and the only way to stay innocent is to die. My impression is that author and illustrator direct this pessimistic message at an adult audience, in order to criticize violent, sexist, consumerist elements in Western societies in the twenty-first century. However, The Girl in Red thereby depend on very traditional ideas of established age categories and gender roles. For a child reader the book might primarily be a source to adults’ ideas of idealized childhood, fears, and anxieties concerning childhood among adults, and adult lack of trust in children’s ability to act and make changes happen. In contrast, Pssst! presents a view on borders between childhood and adulthood that seem to be in more concordance with Marah Gubar’s kinship model and her ideas of borders between childhood and adulthood as transitory. These narratives are told in media that are in themselves hybrid forms, using elements from both picturebooks and comics. The combination of words and images makes it possible to show how important appearance, physical changes, and other people’s gazes are to girls going through a process of change. Multiple visual and verbal points of view address a fluid audience of children, tweens, young people, and adults. Thereby such narratives create a possibility of telling stories that simultaneously depend on and stand in opposition to contemporary notions of the childish and the mature.

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References B. David. L’Ascension Du Haut Mal. Paris: L’Association, 1996-2003. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Beckett, Sandra Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for all Ages. Children’s Literature and Culture 82. New York: Routledge, 2012. Beckett, Sandra. “From traditional fairy tales, fairy stories, and cautionary tales to controversial visual texts. Do we need to be fearful?” In Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts, edited by Janet Evans. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 49–70. Beckett, Sandra. Revisioning Red Riding Hood Around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Biller, Malin. Om någon vrålar i skogen (If someone cries in the woods). Göteborg: Optimal, 2010. Christensen, Nina. “What Is a Child? Childhood and Literature for Children in Selected Texts by Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen, and Their Contemporaries.” Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 2006, eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser and K.  Brian Söderquist, Berlin/New York: Walter de Groyter, 2006, pp. 148–164. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 452–465. Christensen, Nina. “Between Picture Book and Graphic Novel: Mixed Signals in Kim Fupz Aakeson and Rasmus Bregnhøi's I love you Danmark.” More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People, ed. Naomi Hamer et al. New York: Routledge, pp. 155–170. Frisch, Aaron, and Roberto Innocenti (illus.). The Girl in Red. Mankato: Creative Editions, 2012. Grenby, M. O. The Child Reader, 1700–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Gubar, Marah. “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 450–557. Hatfield, Charles, and Craig Svonkin. “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37.4, 2012, pp. 429–435. Herzog, Annette, and illustrator Katrine Clante. Pssst!. Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 2013. James, Allison. “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials.” American anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2, 2007, pp. 261–272. Johansen, Stine Liv. “Børn på YouTube. Nydelse og nørderi.” Nordicom-­ Information 39, 2017, pp. 26–30.

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Joosen, Vanessa. “Cautionary Tales”. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, online version accessed 14 February 2018. Kelen, Christopher, and Björn Sundmark. Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature. Where Children Rule. New York: Routledge, 2017. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. “Images of Childhood in Romantic Children's Literature.” Romantic Prose Fiction, eds. Gerald Gillespie and Dieterle Engel Manfred Bernard, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 183–203. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. Children in Culture, Revisited. Further Approaches to Childhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Malik, Farah. “Mediated Consumption and Fashionable Selves: Tween Girls, Fashion Magazines, and Shopping.” Theorizing Tween Culture within Girlhood Studies, eds. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, New  York: Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 257–277. Malmberg, Sofia. Elin under havet (Elin under the sea).  Stockholm: Rabén och Sjögren, 2012. Marshall, Elizabeth. “Fear and Strangeness in Picturebooks: Fractured Fairy Tales, Graphic Knowledge, and Teachers’ Concern.” In Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts, eds. Janet Evans. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 160–170. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. “Theorizing Tween Culture within Girlhood Studies.” Seven Going on Seventeen, eds. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, New York: Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 1–21. Mitchell, W.  J. T. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Mygind, Johanne. “Skolen lærte mig, at ondskaben findes (School Taught Me Evil Exists).” Weekendavisen, 2016, pp. 4–5. Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picture Books Work. Children’s Literature and Culture 14. New York: Garland, 2001. Ommundsen, Åse Marie. “Who Are These Picturebooks For? Controversial Picturebooks and the Question of Audience.” Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks. Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts, ed. Janet Evans, New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 71–93. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. A Survivor’s Tale, 1-2. New  York: Pantheon Books, 1986, 1991.

“Ganesha Is My Best Friend”: Homological Boyhood in Hindi Mythological Animated Films Anuja Madan

Mythological Animated Films Hindu mythology has been and continues to be an endless source of inspiration for all forms of artistic expression in the Indian subcontinent. The two main Indian Sanskrit epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, have in particular been retold endlessly over centuries, in multiple languages, for rural, urban and cosmopolitan audiences, in a variety of media, from oral storytelling to dance and theater, puppet forms, plastic arts, film, music, TV shows and so on. In the twenty-first century, Indian public culture has witnessed a resurgence of narratives drawn from or inspired by Hindu mythology, in a range of media targeted at adults and children: Hindi TV shows, English language fiction,1 a new wave of English comics and graphic novels,

A. Madan (*) Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_8

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multilingual picturebooks, and animation films and TV shows in different languages. Integral to the mythology boom is the rapid expansion of the Indian publishing industry; according to a 2015 report, India is the third-­ largest English-language print book publisher in the world and the sixth biggest publishing market globally (“Perspectives on Publishing in India”). This includes children’s publishing—evident, for example, in the emergence of a distinct young adult segment. The twenty-first century has also seen rapid growth in the children and youth entertainment sectors, including TV programming meant especially for children. The period between 2008 and 2013 saw a wave of experimentation with locally produced animation. The push toward local animation or “Desi Toons” in this period was an attempt to supplement American and Japanese animated shows that dominate Indian children’s TV programming. Much of this new content was mythological, mainly because Hindu mythology was seen as a safe bet by film and TV producers. Media statements of animation producers reveal that they marketed mythological animations as educational entertainment, much like Anant Pai did with the ubiquitous and vastly popular Amar Chitra Katha comics (Chanda 2008; McLain 2009), in order to appeal to middle-class Hindu parents (the famous Amar Chitra Katha [ACK] comics, founded in 1967, were long synonymous with Indian comics for generations of children in the nation and diaspora). The most commercially successful animated Hindi feature film was Hanuman (2005), which narrated the life story of the eponymous popular Hindu god. The other notable success was an animated TV series titled Chhota Bheem (“Small Bheem”), loosely modeled after one of the main characters from Mahabharata. The show proved to be enormously popular among Indian children. The multilingual series has aired on popular Indian children’s TV channel POGO since 2008 and been accompanied by spin-off TV shows, made-for-TV films and comics, as well as a range of merchandise for children. Shubra Dixit writes that the series “is said to have garnered over 40 million viewers in its nine years, with a 2013 study valuing the brand at 300 crores (or $42,148,500). Rajiv Chilaka, its creator, is possibly India’s most commercially successful animator” (Dixit, “The Curious Case of Indian Animation”). Inspired by the success of Hanuman and Chhota Bheem, a range of subsequent animated films and TV shows depicted the adventures of male Hindu gods or epic heroes. For instance, Green Gold’s four-part Krishna film series (2006–2007) and Reliance Animation’s Little Krishna: Darling

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of Vrindavan TV series (2008) narrated the famous legends of child Krishna; Shemaroo Entertainment’s Ghatothkach: Master of Magic (2008) and Ghatothkach 2 (2013) showcased the exploits of the son of Mahabharata hero Bheem; Kanipakam Creations’ Lava Kusa: the Warrior Twins (2010) and Amar Chitra Katha Animation Studio’s Sons of Ram (2012) focused on the last part of the Ramayana, where the sons of Ram defeat their father in battle; UTV Motion Pictures and Walt Disney collaborated on Arjun the Warrior Prince (2012), which narrated the adventures of Mahabharata hero Arjun; Shemaroo Kids produced the Bal Ganesh film series (2007–2010) on popular Hindu god Ganesha’s childhood; Percept Pictures tried to imitate the success of their 2005 Hanuman film with a sequel, Return of Hanuman (2007) and a spin-off TV show, The New Adventures of Hanuman (2010–2011); and the Chhota Bheem film franchise included a few multilingual titles in which the titular character enlists the help of boy-gods to fight villains, such as Chhota Bheem and Krishna (2008), Chhota Bheem and Ganesh (2009), and Chhota Bheem aur Hanuman (2012). Though most animations recount pre-existent myths and legends, some TV shows such as Roll no. 21 (2010–2015) and The New Adventures of Hanuman (2010–2011), as well as films such as Return of Hanuman (2007) and The My Friend Ganesha trilogy (2007–2010), situate the gods in present-day India and create entirely fictional storylines around them.2 A noteworthy aspect of mythological animation is that most films in this genre have featured child manifestations of male heroes and gods, and these figures have often been cast as superheroes. In another essay, I have explored the incorporation of superhero tropes, and the possible reasons behind the attraction toward boy-gods (Madan 2017). One immediate, strategic reason on the part of the producers for the portrayal of child-­ gods is that the target audience of the films is children ages 6–12. Showcasing the gods as children arguably makes them closer in age and more relatable to a young audience. The genre of mythological animation films and TV series has received almost no scholarly attention,3 though some work has been done on the history of Indian animation, most notably by John Lent. This essay analyzes four films which feature significant Hindu gods Krishna and Ganesha in their child manifestations: Rajiv S.  Ruia’s My Friend Ganesha trilogy (2007–2010; henceforth MFG), and Main Krishna Hoon (2013). These films are composite—that is, they feature a mixture of live action and animation. The child gods in the films are animated, and

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they interact with eight-to nine-year-old boys, played by real actors. The premise of the films is similar. In each film, a young Hindu boy finds himself in difficult circumstances and is led to seek the help of Ganesha/ Krishna. The animated boy-god then descends to earth, becomes friends with the boy (only he can see the god), helps him solve his problems, and returns to heaven after helping him achieve some closure. Composite films work well for the conceit that the boy-gods are invisible to everyone except the protagonist. The special relationship of the boy protagonists with the gods is meant to evoke in young Hindu children the idea that they too can commune with Ganesha or Krishna if they pray to them and sincerely ask for their help. The composite films continue a long tradition of live-action mythological films in popular Indian cinema. Rachel Dwyer regards the mythological as “one of the most productive genres of [India’s] early cinema” and defines it as “one which depicts tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, mostly from the large repository of Hindu myths, which are largely found in the Sanskrit Puranas and the Sanskrit epics” (Dwyer, 15; see also Dharap 1983). The religious orientation of the composite films is explicit, as is common for this genre. For instance, they contain bhajans (Hindu songs of worship) and scenes of prayer in front of Ganesha/Krishna idols. The MFG films take place in the context of Ganesha Chaturthi, an Indian festival dedicated to Ganesha that is celebrated with much fervor in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, where the god is especially popular. The films end with the immersion of the Ganesha idol in the river on the last day of the festival, and the return of the animated god to heaven. For the visual reconfiguration of the gods, Rajiv Ruia seems to have been inspired by Hanuman (2005) in which Baby Hanuman was modeled on Disney animations (Madan  273). Both Krishna and Ganesha have a Disneyfied look with a roly-poly body, oversized head, saucer-shaped, and big eyes. A crucial deviation from earlier mythological films is that affective friendship seems to displace the traditionally deferential relationship between god and devotee. The relationship between the young protagonists and the gods is filled with repartee and good humored-teasing, establishing their relationship as “friends.” However, the impetus toward de-sacralization doesn’t entail a shift away from religiosity. The boys invoke Ganesha by chanting a mantra (Vedic hymn) that pays homage to the god. In fact, in the MFG series, the child becomes the conduit (along with the housemaid Gangutai) for bringing back religion to the familial

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space. The boy’s insistence to his parents in both films that the Ganesha idol be brought home and worshipped for the duration of the festival becomes a turning point in the family’s fortunes. The preoccupation with ritualistic worship in the MFG trilogy is indicative of a growing anxiety about the place of religion in urban middle-class family life. The Indian middle class is united by a discourse that posits the loss of existing practices supporting traditional family values as a central concern for modern society (Wessel 113). These four films create a homological relationship between the boy-­ gods and the young protagonists, as well as the implied child audience, which draws on the Hindu cultural ideal of the child as divinity. However, in exclusively privileging the boy-child as a reflection of god, the films reinforce the widespread cultural valorization of male infants in India which continues to the present day. The preferential treatment toward boys in traditional Hindu society has historical roots in the patriarchal-­ Brahmanical bias of Hindu scriptures toward the boy-child, as well as nationalist-era conceptions of childhood, which emphasized the importance of boys to the project of nation-building. In fact, Ruia’s films reinforce an unreconstructed exaltation of boyhood that underlies the entire genre of mythological animation films. It is significant that none of these indigenously produced animated TV shows or films have revolved around any female mythological heroes or Hindu goddesses popular in the Indian subcontinent, of which there are a range. Female heroines and goddesses have been the subject of some Amar Chitra Katha comics, twenty-first century mythological comics, and older live-action mythological films. However, Hindu male gods/heroes have dominated mythological narratives in contemporary Indian comics and animations. These films also speak to issues of class in the nation-state. The Ganesha series deals with middle-class families in urban and rural settings, while Main Krishna Hoon revolves around an orphan’s desire to belong to a middle-class family where he will be loved. Scholars have noted that the middle class has come to embody India’s transition to a liberalizing nation (Fernandes 32), and has become a class that speaks on behalf of all others (Baviskar and Ray 9). The cultural dominance of this class is evident in these films. Ruia’s films reflect contemporary constructions of middle-­ class childhood, including the discourse of failure surrounding the middle-­ class child. Boyhood, as represented in these films, exemplifies tensions informing middle-class identity in the contemporary moment. It becomes a space for negotiating globalization-fueled anxieties about the loss of

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cultural values and reaffirming conservative gender roles. A masculinized boyhood is made to become paradigmatic. At the same time, the contemporized gods and their friendship with the boys helps reinforce consumerist ideals of the middle class by embodying the idealized lifestyle that the new middle class aspires toward.

The Animation Industry in India Animation in India goes back to 1915, but sustained and continuous production of animated films did not begin until 1956. Most of the early films dealt with educational and social welfare themes, but some retold Hindu myths (Lent 102–103). In the 1970s and 1980s, animation was largely created by independent production houses, state agencies, and a film institute (Lent 104). The 1990s saw a rapid liberalization-fueled expansion of the animation industry “as new companies came on the scene, mainly to serve overseas studios, initially through an abundance of inexpensive, English-speaking labor and a competitive cost of living, and later, with sophisticated computer software. The entire industry changed as a result [.]” (Lent 105). Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, India is predominantly an outsourcing hub for global giants such as Walt Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros. (“Animation: India as the Outsourcing Hub”). Films like The Jungle Book, Life of Pi, Shrek, and How to Train Your Dragon have relied on Indian studios for their visual effects (Dixit,  “The Curious Case of Indian Animation.”). The turn toward indigenous content or “Desi Toons” was perhaps a logical outcome to the break-neck speed of the industry’s expansion. However, despite the optimism about Indian animation at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, most mainstream home-grown animated films and shows, mythological and non-mythological, have not been successful. Though there are exceptions, the quality of many mythological animated films and TV shows is poor and they often suffer from weak scripts and unoriginal storytelling. Most have not been released in theaters; instead they have been broadcast on children’s TV channels as well as on YouTube. The mythological animation films which were released in theaters (such as the 2010 Ramayana, the 2013 Mahabharata and the 2017 Hanuman Da’ Damdaar) have flopped at the box-office, with the 2005 Hanuman being an exception. According to Vijay Sampath, CEO of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) Media  from 2011 to 2016, there are a few factors behind indigenous

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animation not having taken off. He told me that since the onset of economic liberalization in the 1990s, Indian children’s TV has been dominated by foreign content. Cheap animated content imported from the US, Japan and other Asian markets costs significantly less than local content. Since the Indian government doesn’t subsidize animation, producers find it hard to create high quality content while remaining economically competitive (personal communication, May 15, 2015). Mr. Sampath mentioned that ACK Animation collaborated with a Malaysian studio on their own high-quality production of Sons of Ram (2012) to bring down costs. Yusuf Shaikh, former  Business Head of Production, Distribution, Acquisition and Intellectual  Property  Rights management at Percept Pictures, had a similar story about the state of animation in India. He characterized it as a vicious cycle—producers didn’t invest in making sophisticated animation (in terms of form and content) because of the huge economic costs and the competition from foreign products, underwhelming young Indian audiences used to the slick visuals of American products (personal communication, May 12, 2015). The lackluster performance of animations is also linked to many producers’ assumption that as long as the content is mythological, it will sell. The overtly didactic tone of some of these texts may have a role to play as well. Mumbai-based director Rajiv S. Ruia’s composite films attempt to be innovative by creating fictional storylines and contemporizing the gods. Ruia’s films present Ganesha and Krishna as friendly boy-gods who wear modern clothes, play guitars, ride bikes and so on. Yet, like most other films in the genre of mythological animation, they are characterized by uneven scripts, unconvincing plots and overt didacticism. Despite this, the films have enjoyed fair circulation. They were made for TV, and My Friend Ganesha 1 and Main Krishna Hoon have been telecast on children’s channels multiple times. As of January 2019, My Friend Ganesha 2 has approximately 7.1 million views on YouTube. Ruia’s films  are worth investigating because they negotiate with discourses of childhood, religiosity, motherhood and gender roles within the context of a globalized nation increasingly dominated by Hindu fundamentalist forces. The next section offers a brief overview of continuities between conceptions of childhood in ancient Hindu culture, the nationalist era and the contemporary moment.

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Constructions of Childhood, Past and Present The emergence of childhood as a special category in India has been traced back to the new normative discourses on family in the nineteenth and twentieth century which focused on children’s character formation. Such discourses recurrently conceived of the “family” as an isolated private domain, separate not only from the kinship system but also from a brutal outside world (Bose 118). The boy-child in particular was central to the formation of this discourse and “came to be regarded as a person with distinct attributes—impressionability, vulnerability, innocence—that required a correct, prolonged period of nurture” (Bose 118–119). Increasingly, the child was negatively valued as an inferior version of the adult—“as a sweet, endearing, tender, impulsive being who was at the same time dependent, vulnerable, unreliable and wilful, and thus a being who needed constant supervision, guidance care and surveillance” (120). Pradip Bose argues that “the needs of the nation and the model of cultural improvement were projected on to the child…[and he] became the source that could be used to satisfy the grandest national aspirations” (120). Such a conception resisted the equation of childhood with cultural and political immaturity which had gained currency ever since colonialists conceived of India as a young and primitive society being led toward adulthood by Britain (Nandy 57). Ashis Nandy notes that the “Indian middle-class child became, under the growing cultural impact of British rule, the arena on which the battle for the minds of men was fought between the East and the West, the old and the new, and the intrinsic and imposed.” Thus, childhood became an “area of adult experimentation in social change in mid-nineteenth century India” (66). Satadru Sen makes a similar argument: Confronted with the demands of modernity and British critiques of native degeneracy, elite parents, writers and educators in India sought to reconstruct the child…as the repository of imperilled, pre-modern and essential pasts that might be regenerated within the colonial present…Childhood became a window through which the native elite imagined the impact of colonialism upon the Indian self, derived their reformulations of the self, and engaged in a variation of the ‘passive revolution’ that Partha Chatterjee has ascribed to bourgeois nationalism in the colonized world (6–7).

The ideal child in the discourse of native elites was one whose body and mind were properly disciplined: “he should be accustomed to put his body

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under severe strain and engage his mind in more worthy pursuits than mere comforts, bodily pleasures and display…[his] life should be regulated by the ideal of the future glory of the nation (Bose 141). Since childhood became a site of national regeneration, mothers were accorded a crucial role as educators, nurturers and medical auxiliaries and were to be educated accordingly (Bose 125; Bagchi 2217). Thus, while the boy-child became the embodiment of aspirations for the nation’s future, the girl-­ child’s training was limited to being a good future mother and wife. An elaborate code of socialization was devised for the girl-child to ensure that she fitted into the patrilineal, patrilocal structure of caste-Hindu society in India (Bagchi 2214). Dinesh Sharma notes that the twenty-first century has seen shifts in cultural models of parenting and child development, triggered by significant population-specific changes and socioeconomic conditions (6). As Patricia Uberoi argues, “Indian ideals of childhood and patterns of socialization are—and are likely to remain— quite heterogeneous, mediated in complex ways by factors of caste, socio-economic class, occupation, and lifestyle aspirations” (94). Although it is not within the scope of this chapter to discuss all these shifts in detail, below I highlight several continuities as well as divergences between contemporary and older notions of middle-­ class childhood currently prevalent in India. For instance, the replacement of extended families by nuclear families across the country in the last few decades has reinforced the conception of the family as a private domain which is the repository of important values, which had been a feature of nationalist discourse. Despite a substantial increase in access of middle-class girls to education, they are still encouraged to prepare for their roles as good wives and mothers—this is the case even in those families where they are encouraged to be career-oriented (Verma and Saraswathi 108). Middle-class parents’ focus on their children has increased over time. However, parental involvement in the contemporary moment is especially high in the area of academic achievement (N.  Kumar 229; Verma and Saraswathi 109). However, in a significant difference from colonial-era conceptions of childhood, children are no longer trained to work for the glory of the nation. If boys were perceived as important future citizens of an imagined nation in the colonial era (Bose 120), contemporary middle-class children bear the burden of parental expectations and aspirations for upward mobility (N. Kumar 222). Furthermore, contemporary middle-class childhood is marked by tensions between the national and the global even more so than in the

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colonial era. Ashis Nandy notes that “with greater and more intense cross-­ cultural contacts childhood now more frequently becomes a “battleground of cultures.” He writes that “this is especially true of many third world societies where middle-class urban children are often handed over to the modern world to work out a compromise with cultures successfully encroaching upon the traditional life style” (65). Nandy’s paradigm of “battleground of cultures” is particularly useful in discussing the representation of boyhood in Ruia’s films. His protagonists are caught between the impetus to be “global” and Indian; to preserve traditional values while representing the aspirations of a liberalized middle class in an international economy.

Ruia’s Films and Middle-Class Childhood A brief plot summary of the films follows. In the first two films of MFG series, the boy protagonists live in Mumbai with their upper middle-class parents. In MFG 1, Ashu feels neglected by his working parents while in the second film, the couple is having severe marital problems, which causes Vashu to slip into depression. Gangutai, a full-time maid servant, features in all three Ganesha films and becomes a surrogate mother to the protagonists. In MFG 3, Ganya is an orphan living in a small town with his aunt and uncle who mistreat him and try to get his substantial trust fund transferred in their name. Gangutai informally adopts Ganya as her own son when he escapes. Gangutai is a staunch Ganesha devotee and urges the boys in each film to ask the god to become their “friend,” which the boys proceed to do. Main Hoon Krishna begins with the discovery of a baby found abandoned on the streets on a stormy night. The founder of an orphanage takes him in and names him Krishna, after the popular Hindu god. The films draw on the ancient and widespread cultural ideal of the child as divinity among Hindus (Kakar, The Inner World 210). For example, the title of the film Main Hoon Krishna means I Am Krishna, referring to the collapse of identity between boy and god. The correlation between the boys and gods is made explicit in all films. In MFG 3, for instance, Ganesha/Ganya runs away from his home to another town and hides himself behind a Ganesha idol in a temple. Coincidentally, Gangutai, is praying to the god for a son. On discovering Ganya behind the idol, she immediately believes him to be Ganesha’s blessing personified in human form and adopts him. Furthermore, the gods imbue the protagonists with

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divine powers (often illustrated through special effects) whenever the boys need to fight villains. In some scenes, the gods enter the boys’ bodies such that they become invincible. Since all the films center around a boy protagonist and exclusively privilege the boy-child as a reflection of god, they reinforce the widespread cultural valorization of male infants in India. Sudhir Kakar observes that “the preference for a son when a child is born is as old as Indian society itself. Vedic verses pray that sons will be followed by more male offspring, never by females. A prayer in the Atharvaveda adds a touch of malice: ‘The birth of a girl, grant it elsewhere, here grant a son’” (The Inner World 57). In a similar vein, Vasanthi Raman observes that classical Hindu texts like Manusmriti had no place for either girls or children of the lower castes. Traditional brahmanical-sanskritic texts “referring to children or childhood had only the boychild as its reference point” (4060). Current studies show that gender discrimination is still very prevalent in India (Verma and Saraswathi 108). These films not only perpetuate the patriarchal-­ brahmanical bias of Hindu scriptures toward the high-caste boy-child, but also enact the near erasure of the girl-child from the familial space. In none of the films does the boy have a sibling. They also extend the colonial-era focus on boys. Furthermore, Ruia’s films reflect ideas of middle-class childhood that have gained currency in the contemporary moment. Crucial to the construction of middle-class children are processes of consumerism which differentiate them from lower-class children, and produce self-consciousness among middle-class children about their status (N. Kumar 223). Ashu and Vashu’s bedrooms bear markers of their privileged socio-economic status, such as desktop Macs, DVD players, and large flat- screen TVs. The films reinforce the portrayal of the middle-class child as a consumer, which has become prevalent in advertising imagery (Uberoi 105). Nita Kumar observes that the Indian middle-class child is “authentically” Indian and yet “obsessed” by the global (224); these films reflect such a preoccupation. Moreover, in the twenty-first century, middle-class childhood is “scripted as a time of leisure, pleasure and play, these being the envied attributes of upper class lifestyles” (Uberoi 104). Crucially, in Ruia’s films, the boy-gods are also co-opted into this space of leisure and fun. When in heaven, Ganesha is shown snow-boarding and riding sledges with a Santa hat on. When on earth, he has fun with his “friends.” Ganesha single-­ handedly forms Vashu’s rock band so that the latter can practice for his

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dance competition. Ganesha creates his own clones to play the drums, guitar and other accompanying instruments. In Main Krishna Hoon, the boy-god Krishna is a huge “fan” of Hrithik Roshan, a Bollywood star. He is absolutely insistent that his earthly namesake arrange a meeting with the star so that he (the god) can see the Bollywood hero in person. Friendship here is very specifically a middle-class and consumerist construct— the boy-gods and boys watch films, dance, eat and listen to music together. In one scene, for instance, we see Ganesha lying down on the Vashu’s bed with big earphones on. Thus the homological relationship of the boy-gods and boys in Ruia’s films extends two ways—on one hand, the boys’ divinity is highlighted, and on the other hand, the gods are fashioned in the image of middle-class boys, both literally (e.g., Ganesha wears modern clothes in the second film) and figuratively, by mirroring the child in his consumerist practices. We see in these films a continuity with Percept Picture’s Hanuman franchise, which had modernized the technological universe and contemporized toddler Hanuman in one film  (Madan, 275–276). Ruia goes a step further, for in his films gods explicitly become consumers and embody the idealized lifestyle that the new middle class symbolizes and aspires toward; the film posters (which show Ganesha in modern clothes playing drums and guitars, riding a bike or riding a snow sled) reinforce this imagery. One major category of identity within the non-homogenous Indian middle class is the level of English-language fluency, since the availability of “good” English-language and English-medium education differs radically from region to region in India (N. Kumar 233). Neoliberal economic processes mean that education is especially important for skilled, professional jobs in the new economy, both at home and abroad, and proficiency in English is crucial to educational success (Scrase and Ganguly-­Scrase 120). Even conservative parents seek Western, English-medium education for their children, “partly to fulfil their status ambitions and partly to create a manageable bicultural space or an interface with the modern world within the family (Nandy 65). English is not only a superior cultural marker, but it also leads to active and passive kinds of social exclusion (Nayar and Bhide 333). It is thus significant that the boy protagonists of these films (and their parents) often switch between Hindi and English. The gods speak in Sanskritized Hindi, so the boys take it upon themselves to teach them a few English words. In all the films, the boys tease the gods for not understanding them when they speak in English. While these scenes are meant to reinforce the playful, teasing friendship that the

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protagonists are shown to be sharing with the boy-gods, they implicitly reinforce the superiority of English to other Indian languages, and affirm fluency in English as a marker of middle-class status. However, the films also expose the burden borne by contemporary middle-class children. Nita Kumar argues that “middle-classness is defined and supported by the success of the child, and destroyed by the child’s failure,” and that parents spend enormous resources to ensure their children’s academic success, even though statistics show that practical success is very rare (220-245). The first two films of the Ganesha trilogy illustrate these anxieties. Ashu and Vashu are both under-performing in school, much to their parents’ dismay. Vashu’s father is a surgeon and wants his son to follow in his footsteps. However, Vashu’s depression causes him to sleep through class and forget to do his homework, prompting the school principal to meet the parents for an intervention. Ashu and Vashu are also regularly bullied in school and are too diffident to fight back. Nita Kumar suggests that the most important sites of production of middle classness—the home and the school—emphasize to the child that s/he must conform and obey all the rules: “The middle-class child typically attends large crowded schools that emphasize conformity, where facelessness inside the school and entitlement outside the school walls…is of the essence.” (223). Furthermore, advertising imagery creates the “effect of specialness in anonymity.” Thus the middle-class child experiences being simultaneously special and faceless many times over (223). It is the facelessness that is emphasized in the representation of the child protagonists’ lives in the first two parts of the Ganesha series. We see the boys’ indistinct position among hundreds of school children in large schools. Ganesha rescues the children not only from failure, but also anonymity. In the first film, Ashu shoots to fame when he rescues a school girl from a kidnapper after Ganesha imbues him with divine power, and ends up winning an award for bravery. In the second film, the boy-god helps Vashu win an inter-school dance competition, and saves him from getting humiliated during a scene in which the school inspector is testing his academic  knowledge while the class bullies are playing pranks on him. Ganesha also scares off the bullies in both films, and gives his “friends” the strength to counter them on their own. It is worth noting that Ganesha’s intervention in the children’s scholastic activities includes the academic as well as extra-curricular, since the success of the middle-class child is premised on the acquisition of economic, social and particularly cultural

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capital (N. Kumar 221). Moreover, Ganesha teaches the boys the values of hard work in academics as well as co-curricular activities. For example, in MFG 1, he lectures Ashu for lying to Gangutai about having finished his homework, and makes Ashu promise that he will watch TV only after having completed his school work. In MFG 2, he chides Vashu for his over-­ confidence and talks to him about the importance of industriousness. The god’s intervention in the boys’ lives ensures that they are saved from the specter of failure that haunts middle-class families. Thus the films suggest that the middle-class child can escape his/her facelessness and distinguish himself/herself from millions through religiosity. MFG 3 and Main Krishna Hoon focus on orphans and convey an anxiety about unprotected children’s helplessness and marginalization in a materialistic, brutal world in which children are routinely exploited. In MFG 3, Ganya is imprisoned inside the house by his aunt and uncle while they try and usurp his substantial property and money. Main Krishna Hoon goes a step further by drawing attention to the issue of child labor. Krishna Kumar claims that “in most developing societies, globalization has brought with it the withdrawal of the state from welfare, negatively affecting women and children…childhood as a category represents a cultural frontier where the project of modernization has come under threat from globalization” (4034). Main Krishna Hoon succeeds in showing the precariousness of childhood in an exploitative labor economy. There are moments in which Krishna’s intervention may be read as an attempt to step in for the failed welfare state. He helps his human namesake expose criminals responsible for adding toxic substances to the milk in the city, as well as the underworld gang holding child laborers captive. However, the nation never looms large as an entity in any of the films. As we observed earlier, an important distinction between colonial-era discourses of childhood and contemporary ones is that in the current moment, children are not disciplined to bring glory to the nation; rather, their aspirations are mainly focused within the familial domain. The emphasis on family in the films is reflective of the major role the family unit plays in the socialization of the child despite the fast pace of social change (Verma and Saraswathi 108). Drawing on her fieldwork among middle-class youth in an Indian city, Margit van Wessel concludes that the family is a site on which young people locate important tensions and through which they shape their selfhood. She also notes that conceptualizations of “tradition” and “modernity” are central to their understanding of cultural challenges they engage with (101). Along those lines, Henrike

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Donner and Geert De Neeve note that the everyday performance of middle-­class identities is fraught with tensions and discrepancies: [N]ovel images of what an appropriately gendered middle-class person ought to be might lead men and women to present themselves as part of a crowd of daring consumers and global achievers seeking exposure, while they are simultaneously under pressure to embody ‘traditional’ attitudes informed by adherence to caste, gender, and generational and religious norms…Thus, public and private spheres are reformulated through the search for an adequate middle-class persona, as individuals struggle to create ‘suitably modern traditionally Indian’ ways of being in the world (15).

In the composite films, tensions between traditional and modern gender identities within the family form a recurrent theme. In MFG 1 and 2, the boys’ biological mothers (Aarti and Anita) are depicted as educated, independent and assertive working women. The conservative politics of the films disallows them from simultaneously being good mothers. For example, in the first film, Aarti asks her maid Gangutai to go to the parent-­ teacher meeting since she and her husband are busy. In the second film, Anita is shown to be too preoccupied with her marital troubles to pay attention to her child. She leaves her son’s care to the maid in entirety, even when she is not traveling for work. Ashu’s and Vashu’s cries for friendship with Ganesha emerge out of their deep-seated loneliness and parental neglect. Gangutai is presented as a foil to the real mother in the first two films and to the aunt in the third film. She is nurturing, attentive and protective of the boys in ways that the mother is not—checking that they have eaten, taking care of them when they are not well, etc. She also involves herself in the boys’ lives outside of home. For instance, she helps Vashu win a dance competition by training him rigorously. Thus, Gangutai inhabits the real mother’s supposed role by transmitting traditional values to the children. She tells the boys stories of Ganesha’s conquest over demons, inculcating their interest in Hindu mythology and religion, and helping them cement their relationship with the god. In Main Krishna Hoon, Kantaben is motherly to all the children in the orphanage, but shows a distinct partiality to Krishna, feeding him herself and showering affection on him. Kantaben is not only the founder-­director of the orphanage, but also the children’s teacher, cook and mother rolled into one. In her maternal role, she tells children bedtime stories about Krishna’s miraculous feats. Gangutai’s and Kantaben’s relationship with

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the boys under their care is modeled on the legendary relationship between Yashoda and Krishna. Yashoda (Krishna’s adoptive mother) has been immortalized in Hindu mythology for her boundless maternal love for her son. The symbolism is made explicit in Main Krishna Hoon, when Krishna refuses to go with an affluent middle-class couple seeking to re-adopt him at the end of the film, saying that he can’t forget that Kantaben raised him like Yashoda raised Krishna, and that she was his “Yashoda ma.” The films reflect how important and special the mother-son tie continues to be in Hindu families in the contemporary moment (Kakar, “In Defence of the Inner World” 139). The idealized, mythical relationship between the surrogate mothers and their adoptive sons in the composite animated films seeks to reinforce the Hindu wife’s core identity as mother, and offer a model of maternal devotion to sons that middle-class mothers should emulate. As we discussed earlier,  discourses on middle-class childhood in the nationalist era emphasized the mother’s role in shaping the child’s future. This emphasis continues in present-day conceptions of middle classness as well. Nita Kumar points out that the prototypical mother in Indian middle-­ class families bears “every discomfort in order to give support to the child…the discourse of the ‘self-sacrificing mother’ and the dutiful progeny is par excellence a middle-class, and not an upper- or lower-class discourse” (230). Women are “still expected to embody a reified ‘tradition’ and to transmit its values to the next generation” (Donner 13). Influenced by Gangutai and the institution of the Ganesha idol in their house, both films show Aarti and Anita play a more active part in the domestic space by the end of the film. Gangutai, whose main purpose was to embody the self-sacrificing motherhood expected of the real mother, becomes a temporary, dispensable figure in the lives of the middle-class boys once the mothers re-inhabit their expected roles. MFG 3 takes a different direction, with Gangutai adopting Ganesh/Ganya, since the boy’s biological mother is dead. Ganesha and the boy protagonists similarly uphold traditional gender roles. In a particularly regressive section in MFG 2, Vashu tells Ganesha about his parents’ marital troubles, and the boy-god concludes that Aarti’s father is to blame for his interference in his daughter’s married life. He appears to Vashu’s grandfather in a dream, chiding him for his behavior. Telling him that a son-in-law’s status is higher than that of a son’s, Ganesha asserts that he is lucky to have found a son-in-law like Amit, and that he should apologize to him (Amit). Aarti’s father does so, and urges Aarti to

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treat her husband well. Vashu, of course, is grateful to Ganesha for “solving” his parents’ conflict. In MFG 1, one sub-plot of the film revolves around Ashu’s father’s younger sister. She is depicted as a fashionable college student, and has a boyfriend who she spends a lot of time with. She is punished for her choices when her boyfriend threatens to release compromising videos of her publicly if she doesn’t pressurize her brother (who is a bank manager) to give him a loan. Ganesha saves the day by converting the suggestive videos to those of him dancing, and gives Ashu the strength to defeat the boyfriend in a fist fight. Thus, even as women are circumscribed within the domestic space and traditional gender roles, boys are imbued with a divine-endowed warrior masculinity that upholds patriarchal ideologies. Ruia’s mythological animation films attempt to portray the gods and mythological universe as cosmopolitan, but this move is accompanied by the entrenchment of conservative ideologies. The impetus for the middle-­ class child to be “authentically Indian yet global” in the films (N. Kumar 233) is reflective of the larger struggle of the middle classes to reconcile traditional and modern attitudes and values. These tensions are evident in the construction of boys as pure and divine, as agents of the Hindu family’s (re)turn toward religiosity, and as savvy consumers who reinforce the image of the middle classes as the embodiment of a liberalized nation.

Notes 1. Amish Tripathi has been the most successful author writing in the category of mythological English-language fiction. His Shiva trilogy was enormously successful and his subsequent series, based on the Ramayana, has been the fastest-selling book series in Indian publishing history. Mythological English fiction and Hindi live action TV series are mainly targeted at adults. 2. India has been beset by increasingly strong forces of Hindu fundamentalism, and some of that impact has been felt in the cultural sphere, through right-wing protests of films that are deemed sacrilegious or offensive to Hindu sentiment. Mythological animation films, even when contemporizing the gods, have for the most part maintained a religious tone, and thus have avoided the ire of Hindu right-­wing organizations. 3. See Vamsee Juluri’s article (2010).

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References “Animation: ‘India as the Outsourcing Hub.’” Animation Boss. 8 Jan 2014, www. animation-boss.com/India_as_outsourcing.html Bagchi, Jasodhara. “Socialising the Girl Child in Colonial Bengal.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 41, 1993, pp. 2214-2219. Baviskar, Amita and Raka Ray. “Introduction.” Elite and Everyman: the Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. By Baviskar and Ray. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011. Bose, Pradip Kumar. “Sons of the Nation: Child Rearing in the New Family.” Texts of Power: Emerging Discipline in Colonial Bengal. Ed. Partha Chatterjee. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Calcutta: Samya Books), 1995, pp. 118-144. Chanda, Nandini. The Classic Popular Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008 Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Dharap, B.  V. “The Mythological, or Taking Fatalism for Granted.” Indian Cinema Superbazaar. Eds. Aruna Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983, pp. 79-83. Dixit, Subra. “The Curious Case of Indian Animation.” The Hindu. March 25, 2017. Web. 31 July 2017. Donner, Henrike and Geert de Neve. Introduction. Being Middle-class in India: A Way of Life. Ed. Henrike Donner. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011, pp. 1–23. Dwyer, Rachel. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Fernandes, Leela. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Juluri, Vamsee. “Reimagining Tradition: Globalization in India from MTV to Hanuman.” Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia. Ed. Youna Kim. NY: Routledge, 2010, pp. 59-69. Kakar, Sudhir. The Inner World: A Pyschoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Third Edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. — “In Defence of The Inner World.” Childhood, Family and Sociocultural Change in India. Reinterpreting the Inner World. Ed. Dinesh Sharma. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 138-145. Kumar, Krishna. “Childhood in a Globalising World.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 38, 2006, pp. 4030-4034. Accessed on 7 December 2013. Kumar, Nita. “The Middle-class Child: Ruminations on Failure.” Elite and Everyman: the Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. Eds. Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011, pp. 220-245.

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Brazilian Childhood and Literature in the Age of Digital Technologies Edgar Roberto Kirchof

We live today in a world where communication is increasingly mediated by information technologies, and this phenomenon occurs not only in industrialized nations but on a global scale. From the popularization of desktops in the 1980s and 1990s until today, there has been an unprecedented expansion of mobile and Internet technologies, allowing information technology to move “out beyond the desktop into the sites and situations of everyday urban life” (McCullough 2006, 26). Today some of the most important forms of access, participation, and use of digital technology include social networks, new ways to distribute entertainment linked to large corporations, the Internet of Things, smart cities, location-based technologies, and augmented reality. These developments and the continuously growing popularization of these media around the world also impact on the literary culture produced for and by children. In this essay, I present and reflect on results obtained from research performed between 2013 and 2015 concerning digital literature for Brazilian children, which covered three public schools, including the Pepita de

E. R. Kirchof (*) Lutheran University of Brazil, Porto Alegre, Brazil © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_9

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Leão school in the city of Porto Alegre, capital of the southernmost Brazilian state Rio Grande do Sul/RS. The project was developed with the support of the Brazilian Lutheran University (ULBRA), which funded the research hours, and with two Brazilian funding agencies: CNPq/Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa (National Research and Development Council, cnpq.br), through a productivity in research grant and a scholarship for the graduate student Aline Lupak; and FAPERGS/ Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Rio Grande do Sul (Foundation for Research Support of Rio Grande do Sul, fapergs.rs.gov.br/inicial), which granted a scholarship to the student Geison A. Barbosa. The main objective of the research was to investigate how Brazilian public school children in Porto Alegre, most of whom belong to poor families, read and interpret digital literary works and how their immersion in a globalized culture, which is influenced by the convergence of different types of media, influences their levels of literary and digital literacy. The study focused on the following research questions: How do the students interact with digital literary works? What do they say about this new type of literary production? To what extent do their previous experiences with media influence the way in which they read and interpret these works? According to the last census on basic education in Brazil (Censo Escolar da Educação Básica 2016), the country’s largest basic education network is public and under the responsibility of municipalities, consisting of two-­ thirds of all schools. Of the elementary schools, 50.5 percent are reported to have at least one library and/or one reading room (this percentage is 53.7 percent for those which offer elementary education and 88.3 percent for those which offer high school). On the other hand, the participation of private schools—most of which serve the middle and upper middle class—increased from 21.1 percent in 2015 to 21.5 percent in 2016. Nevertheless, according to the report, Internet access is widely available in the public schools from the South, Southeast, and Midwest regions of Brazil. The research is qualitative and, methodologically, it was organized as follows: During 2013, I carried out an inventory and an analysis of digital literary works produced for children and young people in Brazil and abroad; I also performed a bibliographical research on the academic production focused on literary reading in the universe of digital culture, specifically works for children and young adults. The year 2014 was dedicated to the planning and realization of the empirical work in three public schools: two elementary schools (Pepita de Leão and Escola São Pedro),

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both in Porto Alegre, and one high school (Colégio Estadual Gomes Jardim) in Canoas, a city located in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre. The work consisted of interviews with students, teachers, and the boards of the schools, along with activities of reading and interpreting works of digital literature with the students; these activities were recorded for later analysis of the data. Since technological resources were very limited in the media labs of these schools—which is generally true of most public schools throughout Brazil—it became necessary to choose works that could be read on desktops, eliminating, in this way, the possibility of working with app books. Two graduate students made the recordings and the transcriptions of all the practical activities, and the teachers of the schools where the activities were carried out remained present in the classrooms during all sessions with the children. In 2015, the analysis of the empirical data was carried out and some research results were circulated. As a matter of delimitation, I present here only the data relating to activities performed over the first semester of 2014 in the Pepita de Leão municipal school. The school is a small institution of the Municipal Education Department of Porto Alegre/RS, founded in October 1960, and is located in a poor and peripheral neighborhood in the northern part of the city, the Bairro Passo da Pedras, receiving students from kindergarten until the ninth grade. In my conversations with the school board and with some teachers, I discovered that the students are exposed to a great deal of violence, drug trafficking, and precarious social conditions; the majority of students come from families so poor that they survive mainly thanks to the benefits of the “Bolsa Família,” a federal government program that pays a small sum to families who prove to be living in poverty. According to the teachers’ reports, the permanence of the children in the school guarantees that they receive three meals a day and a certain protection against the hazards of the external environment. The empirical research began with previous visits to the school, conversations with the school board and with the teachers, which occurred in the months of March and April. During May, activities of reading and interpreting literary texts in print and digital format took place with a group of 21 children aged between 9 and 10, 12 girls and nine boys. The main texts selected for the reading activities were the 28 poems found in Brazilian poet Sérgio Capparelli and web designer Ana Cláudia Gruszynski’s 2000 text Poesia visual, published in a print edition by São Paolo publishing house Editora Global and as a multimedia online adaptation (www.ciberpoesia.com.

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br/). The main reason for choosing this work was its literary quality in printed format and, in the case of the poems in digital format, the fact that they are freely available on the worldwide web, being easily downloadable even onto computers with little memory and with poor Internet connection. For each meeting, a lesson plan was prepared with reading and interpreting activities. The main objectives of these activities were, on the one hand, to provide students with contact with literary productions in digital format and, on the other hand, to evaluate how children mobilize their own previous references and experiences with digital media when they interact with these works, and in so doing seek to create their own interpretive paths. Finally, after completing the activities, in addition to responding to a written questionnaire, the students were invited to talk about the meetings, and this conversation was recorded for later transcription. This chapter is divided into two sections. After this introduction, I present a brief discussion regarding convergence culture from the perspective of the American theorist Henry Jenkins, since this helps us to understand the cultural and media repertoires of the children as they interact with and interpret digital literary works. I also reveal some of the principal digital literary genres for children which have been produced in Brazil recently. In the second section, I discuss some of the ways children engage with digital literacy, by presenting the results of the research conducted at the Pepita de Leão school, in which children ages 9–10 read and interacted with computer-based poems by Capparelli and Gruszynski.

The Convergence of Media and Literature for Children Henry Jenkins (2006) proposes the concept of “convergence culture” to refer to the current context of media. In convergence culture, content flows through multiple media platforms, various media markets cooperate in the delivery of information, and users of mass media communication continually migrate in search of desirable entertainment and informational experiences. Smith and Pearson provide an overview of this scenario, stating that “the emergence of digital modes of content creation and distribution, combined with the domestication of Internet technology and digital consumption devices, has led to the digital integration of the production

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and circulation of narrative content across media” (Pearson and Smith 2015, 1). Jenkins (2006, 235) also notes that large media corporations utilize the potential of convergence in order to broaden their public consumer bases. They promote a specific kind of participatory culture, in which consumers are encouraged to abandon their role as passive recipients and become co-producers of the content. In response, consumers increasingly use the Internet collectively and exercise various forms of alternative creativity. One example of such participatory activity in the literary field can be found in the various fan fiction communities that exist in cyberspace, formed by children and teenagers who produce their own texts from works like the Harry Potter series, the Twilight saga, and the Hunger Games trilogy, among countless others. Many of these works are best sellers which come from English-speaking European countries or the United States, but are read by children and teenagers from all over the world, usually in the form of translations commissioned by major publishers. This has ended up promoting what Tanner Mirrles considers “a globally popular culture that complicates nationalist boxes” (Mirrles 2013, viii) and associates actual events and individuals with those in literature for young readers. When analyzing how Brazilian communities make allusions to Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games, for example, Aguiar observed that, during the 2014 Brazilian presidential campaign, many Brazilian fans made analogies between the political configuration of Panem (Collins’ fictional setting) and the social situation in Brazil. In one such post analyzed by Aguiar, one of the fans even made explicit references to one of the Brazilian presidential candidates, Aécio Neves: “If you don’t want the reality of the Hunger Games, in the second round, don’t vote for Aécio” (Aguiar 2016, 58). Neves lost the election to Dilma Rousseff, who was herself impeached and removed from office in 2016; before her ouster, Dilma herself was compared to Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen and described as a gutsy rebel struggling against conservatives. As can be seen from this example, although the main goal of fan fiction communities is entertainment and fun, fans themselves often produce political metaphors in this environment, some of which later circulate in the form of memes throughout social networks, thus configuring what Jenkins et  al. (2013) more recently called spreadable culture. As will be noted in the next section of this chapter, when challenged to interact with works of digital literature,

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children tend to draw on their previous experiences with electronic media as a reference to create their own paths of reading and interpretation. International corporations also increase their number of global consumers and expand the reach of their franchises by diversifying media formats. Thus, a children’s book or another sort of text can be adapted into movies, animated movies, comic books, video games, and book apps, among others, and disseminated through social network sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. In some cases, the same story unfolds through different media platforms while maintaining a certain degree of autonomy in each type, so that the consumer who has already interacted with one of the formats will find something new when interacting with others. Those who watched the film versions of The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003), for example, can seek out an anime anthology titled The Animatrix (2003), graphic narrative collaborations with artists such as Bill Sienkiewicz and authors like Neil Gaiman in The Matrix Comics series (1999–2004), and David Perry’s game Enter the Matrix (Shiny Entertainment, 2003). Although large media corporations such as Warner Bros. produce the most significant examples of transmedia narrative, independent artists and writers perform alternative experiments with the purpose of exploring the aesthetic-literary possibilities of transmedia. In Brazil, Álvaro Andrade Garcia and Ricardo Aleixo developed Poemas de brinquedo (Toy Poems 2016), a work of visual and concrete poetry for children, across three media platforms: the work is available as a printed “book” of loose sheets which allows for multilinear readings of poems; as an audiovisual, interactive text, available in a free desktop format (https://www.managana.org/editor/? community=pb); and as an downloadable app for mobile devices, available from the Apple Store and Google Play. In the era of media convergence, literary works for children such as Poemas de brinquedo undergo fundamental changes, which affect not only the medium utilized for the production and sale of works, but also destabilize literary genres. According to Betty Sargeant, these innovations began in the 1980s, with the advent of the desktop program HyperCard, an interface program developed by what was then Apple Computer and released in 1987. Lev Manovich explains that, in comparison to its previous Apple graphical user interface, “that presented information in overlapping windows stacked behind one another,” the HyperCard program “extended the page concept in new ways. Now users were able to include multimedia elements within pages, as well as to establish links between

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pages regardless of their ordering” (Manovich 2001, 74). Due to its new affordances, it did not take long before some authors started to experiment “with incorporating written text, visuals and audio into digital narratives” (Sargeant 2015, 3), although most of this production was addressed to adults and not children. As a matter of fact, the interest in creating digital formats of literature for young audiences would increase only after the launch of mobile reading devices in the 2000s. On his website, the Canadian poet Chris Joseph endeavored to explain this prevailing lack of interest in children as audiences by artists and authors during that time as follows: […] writers and artists often prefer to create work for mature critics and exhibitions, as adult audiences tend to be seen as more financially or personally lucrative in terms of career development; creating pieces for children is also seen as less contemporary or ‘sexy’ than creating pieces that explore mature or technological themes. In addition children are relatively invisible as a specific audience for digital works outside of computer games and educational software, with the result there are fewer public arenas for new digital content for young people. (Joseph 2018, www.animalamina.com/ about.html).

William Hobart Dickey is an example of a North American artist who experimented with HyperCard, as between 1988 and 1990 he produced a series of hypertextual poems (“The throats of birds,” “Zenobia,” “Queen of Palmyra,” “Dick and Jane,” and “Statue music”) using the program (Antonio 2011, 140). Dickey even stated at the time that HyperCard was able to “abolish the concept of a poem as an object restrained in a fixed and immutable page and forced to follow a linear sequence; it has the advantage of allowing for other structures and organizing geometries” (ibid.). The HyperCard program also became popular among educators at the time who used it in projects, for among other things, to teach children simple drawing and editing procedures. One such project was conducted by Mary Heller and Hilary McLellan, and is documented in Heller and McLellan (1993) and Heller (1999). It consisted of asking the students to write and illustrate their own narratives and then electronically scan the illustrations into HyperCard: “Once their pictures were scanned, the children could access them on the computer, edit to their liking, and program hot spots” (Heller 1999, 339).

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Although several works and projects were conducted with HyperCard in the 1980s and the 1990s, mainly in developed countries, it did not last very long, for “a few years later, designers of HTML stretched the concept of a page even further by enabling the creation of distributed documents; that is, different parts of a document are located on different computers connected through the network” (Manovich 2001, 74). Hence, with the creation and continuous development of HTML since the 1990s, other brands and types of software have expanded the possibilities for performing artistic and literary experimentation in the digital environment. However, most of the literary works from that period continued to be addressed mainly to adult audiences, with a few exceptions such as, among others, Animalamina, by Chris Joseph (www.animalamina.com/) and the electronic adaptation of the animal alphabet book Bembo’s Zoo, by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, which is no longer available online but can still be watched on YouTube. In that context, Flash became one of the most popular pieces of software among digital artists and poets interested in creating works accessible for desktops, which led the theorist Lev Manovich to speak of the emergence of a “Flash aesthetics” that informed “the cultural sensibility of a new generation” (Manovich 2006, 209). As noted by Nancy K. Hayles, except for a few works that require a more active attitude on the part of the user, most Flash poems are “characterized by sequential screens that typically progress with minimal or no user intervention” (Hayles 2008, 28). This can be seen, for example, in the Flash poems for children that are still available on a BBC website, even though it has been archived and is no longer being updated (https://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/longvow/poems/flash/fpoem1.shtmlname). Sérgio Capparelli and Ana Cláudia Gruszynski were among the first artists in Brazil to explore the possibilities of the Flash program to compose multimedia poems for children. From Poesia Visual (Visual Poetry), the artists selected and adapted 12 poems for the digital environment. They presented the poems in three groups of four: “Navio,” “Chá,” “Van Gogh,” and “Babel”; “Cheio,” “Vazio,” “Eu/tu,” and “Xadrez”; “zigue-­ zague,” “primavera,” “gato,” and “flechas” (“Ship,” “Tea,” “Van Gogh,” and “Babel”; “Full,” “Empty,” “I/you,” and “Chess”; “zig-zag,” “spring,” “cat,” and “arrows”). Although some of these poems are merely digitized, ten of these, such as “Chá,” “Xadrez,” “Zigue-Zague,” and “Van Gogh,” are enhanced with multimedia features. In an article published in 2000 to coincide with the print and digital publications of their

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poetry, Capparelli and Gruszynski explained their process of creation of multiple formats of the poems as follows: The procedures were divided into three phases: in the first phase, 28 visual poems were created allowing for the aesthetic and technical convergence of the written text with images of design, painting and other types of drawings. In the second phase, eight of these visual poems were chosen to be reworked hypertextually by different professionals. In the third phase, we went into a partnership with the W3haus cyberstudio for the development of the website (www.ciberpoesia.com.br) and the planning of some more cyberpoems. (Capparelli et al. 2000, 69)

My study focuses on the poems “Chá” (“Tea”) and “Xadrez” (“Chess”), as these poems attracted the most attention of the children during the reading activities. The poem “Chá” requires the reader to use a computer mouse to drag ingredients—a teabag, some tiny stars, some hearts, and a photo—into a cup. Once the reader completes this task, poetic verses emerge from within the cup for the reader: “Let it brew for the appropriate time, until our aromas and flavors blend.” The poem “Xadrez” (“Chess”) consists of a four-by-four-inch black-and-white chess board laid out on an orange background. The 16 small squares are occupied by lowercase letters which form the words amor (love), ardor (fire or pain), and a dor (the pain). The letter “a” of “ardor” is situated off the board, and in the digital adaptation, this letter moves when the reader shifts the mouse in its direction, never allowing itself to be “caught” by the computer mouse. Furthermore, each click on one of the letters produces a sound (such as laughter, sobbing, shots, and glass breaking), followed by a rearrangement of all the letters and words. “Xadrez” constantly acquires new forms or versions after each interaction from the reader. In this sense, the poem has a strongly self-referential character, drawing the attention of the child to the alphabet as a system that, much like a chess match, makes it possible to create new words/new moves but is also limited by rules and constraints. With the emergence of mobile phones, the publishing industry started to consider the potential sales linked to the production of digital works to be read on mobile devices. “In January 2006,” writes Lara Srivastava, “there was already more than one mobile phone for every three inhabitants on the planet, with the total number reaching 2.17 billion. In January 2007, the number of mobiles in the world doubled the number of fixed lines, at

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2.6 billion” (Srivastava 2008, 17). According to John B. Thompson (2013, 347), when Apple released the first version of the iPad, it quickly sold 3 million units, and the second version (iPad2), released in March 2011, sold more than 15 million devices. Probably because of this significant and continuous growth in sales of mobile devices, the child audience is now seen as a very promising niche for consumers not only of electronic devices, but also of content produced for such devices. Henceforth, there has been a corresponding growth in the production and/or adaptation of literary works for children into digital formats in recent years. In this market, two main types of book emerged for sale: eBooks and book apps. The former, eBooks, are characterized as print media transposed to the digital environment using software (e.g., Epub and pdf) and imitating the characteristics of a book in print. The latter, book apps, are created as original applications without necessarily having print analogues. Betty Sargeant clarifies that “[a]pps are computer software programs that are well suited to delivering high levels of interactive, media-rich content […]. Apps can be designed for use on any computational device. They can seamlessly integrate written text, visuals, audio and interaction design” (Sargeant 2015, 459). The book app is, therefore, a hybrid product, both a book and an application and, for this reason, most book apps “include at least an oral reading of the story text. In addition, they may involve symbolic elements typically not used with printed books: live-action video, digital graphics, animations, music, sound effects, and interactivity of text (e.g., highlighting of text while it is narrated)” (Smeets and Bus 2013, 176). As noted by Lynne McKechnie and Kathleen Schreurs: a report from Pure Oxygen Lab in 2014 indicates there are approximately 70 billion apps available for download and more than 80% of the top selling paid apps are in the category targeted at children (Shuler, Levine, and Ree 2012). These apps frequently include recordings of the text read aloud by a narrator, illustration animations, music, video, sound effects, and interactive game components. Young children are found to especially respond well to these enhanced features (Korat 2008). (McKechnie and Schreurs 2017, 3).

International researchers have been quick to study this rapid development of book apps for children in terms of aesthetic and literary value, as well as pedagogical potentials. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (2015), Junko Yokota and William H. Teale (2014), Cristina Correro and Neus Real (2014), Frank Serafini (2016), Betty Sargeant (2015), Daisy Smeets

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and Adriana Bus (2013), and Bill Cope and Diana Kalantzis (2001) are among the leading scholars who have dedicated themselves to studying this new literary form. In the international perspective, there are already some initiatives aimed at stimulating the production of digital works with high aesthetic quality for children. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, which, in 2012, created the “Digital Ragazzi” prize, in order to recognize achievements in digital applications for children. In 2014, the “Bologna Digital” was launched at the Fair, the purpose of which is to encourage technology studios to produce quality applications, products, and digital content. In Brazil, a similar initiative was taken in 2015 by the Câmara Brasileira do Livro (CBL) (the Brazilian Book Chamber), which included “digital books for children” among the categories of the Brazilian literary prize “Jabuti” (created in 1958, it is the most traditional book award in Brazil). According to its Annual Report (2014), the objective is to stimulate the production of Brazilian digital works for children with high aesthetic quality. As of now, there have already been three editions of the prize. In 2015, the award winner was Meu aplicativo de folclore (My folklore application), consisting mainly of folk poems such as trava-línguas (tongue twisters), ditados (proverbs), adivinhas (riddles), and parlendas (nursery rhymes) created and adapted by the Brazilian children’s poet Ricardo Azevedo. In 2016, the winner was Pequenos grandes contos de verdade (Small great tales of truth), consisting of three stories by the Brazilian author Isabel Malzoni and accompanied by the illustrations of the Chinese artist Oamul Lu. In 2017, in turn, the winner was Kidsbook Itaú Criança, a collection of stories by the Brazilian authors Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Alexandre Rampazo, Luís Fernando Veríssimo and Willian Santiago, Fernanda Takai and Ina Carolina, Adriana Carranca and Brunna Mancuso, Antonio Prata and Caio Bucaretchi.

Digital Reading in Context In this section, I discuss reflections on the results obtained from research performed in a public school in the city of Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, during the first semester of 2014. As stated before, the school is part of the Municipal Department of Education, or SMEDE (Secretaria Municipal de Educação), and is situated in an underprivileged neighborhood of the city. Thus, students come from low-income families or from those in very precarious financial and social states. Our research

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group consisted of 12 girls and nine boys, all between the ages of 9 and 10. Our proposed activities did not have the primary intention of teaching literature or reading. Indeed, the activities provided a context for reading digital works, from which it was possible to observe how these students interacted with these works and what they said about this new type of literary production based on their previous experiences with media and literature. While there are already a number of book apps for children in Portuguese, it was not possible to utilize them for these activities, owing to the financial constraints that face Brazilian public schools. Furthermore, the students that attend these types of school are not able to buy such applications, much less iPads or other types of tablets. In the Brazilian context, the high cost of these products makes them accessible only to middle- and upper-class families. However, because some public schools have special rooms with desktop computers and Internet access, we chose Poesia Visual to share with the children. Initially, we utilized the poems’ printed versions, and we later turned to the digital adaptations accessible on desktop. We recorded all of the activities on video and audio, and later transcribed the recordings to facilitate data analysis. Furthermore, we interviewed the children and asked them to write responses to a questionnaire which assessed their levels of literary and digital literacy, as well as conditions of access to and use of desktops, tablets, mobile phones, and the Internet. In answer to the questionnaires, none of the children claimed to own computers for personal use, although nine claimed to have at least one computer for shared use at home. Further, only six students said that they had mobile phones with Internet access in their homes, while others said they only had “old mobiles,” a term used by them to refer to devices which are not smart phones. On the other hand, almost all confirmed that, although they did not have their own devices, they had constant and frequent access to smart phones and computers with Internet access. This is due to the fact that they share devices with family members and friends and because they also have access to computers at school. The fact that even poor children in an economically peripheral country, such as Brazil, seek alternative and creative forms of access to electronic computing devices, points to a great desire to be part of the culture promoted by globalization and media convergence. This can be partly explained by the very strong appeal of marketing strategies of international entertaining corporations, which promote their products by

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hybridizing local and global cultural references, while promising great satisfaction to all those who are willing to participate in what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called a “society of consumers”: The “society of consumers” is a kind of society which […] “interpellates” its members (that is, addresses them, hails, calls out to, appeals to, questions, but also interrupts and ‘breaks in upon’ them) primarily in their capacity of consumers. While doing that, “society” (or whatever human agencies armed with weapons of coercion and means of persuasion hide behind this concept or image) expects to be heard, listened to and obeyed; it evaluates—rewards and penalizes—its members depending on the promptness and propriety of their response to the interpellation. (Bauman 2007, 53)

During group interviews, several children stated that they had Facebook profiles. When asked about their most frequent activities on the Internet, the vast majority stated that they spent most of their time playing games. In turn, when asked about their preferred types of games, some children referred in general terms to categories such as car and motorbike games, horror games, shooting and target games, games with animals, games available on Facebook, cooking games, and games for dressing up characters. Several children, however, were more specific and mentioned games such as the horror Labirinto do terror (which they referred to as Maria Degolada [Beheaded Mary], at www.jogalo.com/jogos-de-terror/jogolabirinto-do-exorcista.html), GTA (Grand Theft Auto), Monster High, Dragon City, Minecraft, the Barbie games, and a game called Pou, among others. Quite strikingly, despite the Brazilian context of their use in my study, almost all of these games are American franchises. Several of them are part of a universe, which includes toys, cartoons, children’s books, and social network groups. Monster High, for example, is an American franchise which includes a wide variety of products such as stationery, bags, key chains, various toys, video games, a television series, a web series, films on DVD, and even a book series. Similarly, Barbie was originally created as a toy doll, but nowadays this franchise has already incorporated a line of other products, including video games. In his studies on convergence and spreadable culture, Henry Jenkins points out that digital media provide an increasing level of active participation by consumers in recent years. In more recent reflections, however, Jenkins also acknowledges that “many people are still excluded from even

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the most minimal opportunities for participation within networked culture” and that “new grassroots tactics are confronting the range of corporate strategies which seek to contain and commodify the popular desire for participation. As a consequence, elites still exert a more powerful influence on political decision-making than grassroots networks, even if we are seeing new ways to assert alternative perspectives into the decision-making process” (Jenkins 2014, 272). The fact, then, that children not only know but are also extremely enthusiastic about these games reveals to what extent these youngsters have been captured by the convergence culture promoted by large multinational corporations. This promotion occurs not only as a means to entertain, but mainly in order to encourage the consumption of their products in various countries around the world. According to Latin-American theorist Nestor García Canclini, in the globalized world, the very notion of citizenship is increasingly linked to the capacity of consumption, which is part of a project designed by the so-­ called intellectuals of globalization (administrators, economists, marketers, etc.), who “promote universalization by maximizing the potentialities of thought and taste in all societies: otherwise, the worldwide generalization of computers and credit cards, Benetton clothes and Barbie dolls would not have been possible” (García Canclini 1995, 113). On the other hand, the specific way that the children interact with these games reveals that, in this interaction, rather than mere abstraction, what takes place is the hybridization between the cultural references, pointing to the fact that globalization is not only about homogenization, but also about recognizing and making use of regional practices and specific cultural references. Based on the studies of Renato Ortiz, García Canclini concludes that multiculturalism does not disappear even in the most pragmatic business strategies of major corporations: “The homogeneous/heterogeneous opposition loses importance, it is necessary to understand how globalized segments—for example, the young, the old, the fat, the disenchanted—share common habits and tastes” (García Canclini 1995, 113). This mixture of cultural references can be seen, for example, by the way that the children refer to the game Beheaded Mary. This game is actually called “Labirinto do terror” (Labyrinth of horror) and is available on a few Brazilian Internet sites; its challenge is to move around the walls of a labyrinth without touching any of them. When failing to accomplish the task, the player is punished with the sudden appearance of the character Regan McNeil from the film The Exorcist (1971). The children called this frightening character Beheaded Mary, in reference to a regional folklore

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narrative from Porto Alegre, in which a youngster, a long time ago, had been beheaded by her policeman-lover. Indeed, many people in this region continue to believe that it is possible to achieve a degree of grace by praying to Beheaded Mary. Although several of the video games are accessed in Portuguese via pages addressed to Brazilian and Portuguese children, some children access the games in the English language and navigate them even without understanding English. One English-language version required the player to move through various stages of the game, and the child followed successfully; we observed another student accessing the Flipline Studios (http://www.flipline.com/) page, where only games in the English language are available. The fact that Brazilian children from underprivileged families are attracted to the content of web pages in English, despite their lack of fluency, reveals the seductive power exercised by certain North American franchises. What’s more, it demonstrates the role that these franchises play in the dissemination, around the world, of a global culture which calls for consumption and expands through media convergence. The children’s predilection for video games on computers and mobile phones strongly affected the way in which they reacted to the reading activities of digital literary works, which were proposed as part of the research. In fact, most of them seemed to regard the desktop computers foremost as a gaming space, and this seems to be a tendency not only of Brazilian children. In their report on work developed with Canadian children and documented in Children’s Experiences and Perceptions of E-Book Reading (2017), McKechnie and Schreurs state that the children in their project regarded their iPads and other devices as gaming spaces first and foremost: Suzanne (8 years) was delighted to discover the games embedded in most of the picture book apps available for children. After Marietta’s mother opened Pixel and Parker, an interactive e-book, on the family’s iPad Mini, Marietta’s hand shot across the screen, closed the app and then opened a game. At the time of data collection Marietta had just turned three. When asked what he used his iPad for Jake (12 years) responded: “Well, I play games. I have lots of games on it. I used to watch hockey on it. And I probably watch videos on it too.” One of the children, Joel (8 years) insisted that his family’s iPad had no books on it, only games when in fact it held a fairly large number of e-book apps. (McKechnie and Schreurs 2017: 13)

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Upon learning that they would read poems in print and proceed to the computer room to interact with the same poems in digital format, the children at the Pepita de Leão school were euphoric with expectation. However, upon actually having contact with the digital poems, several students demonstrated disappointment because they had been expecting games and not literary works, even if some of the works they interacted with were close to games in their structure. As a matter of fact, most digital works for children tend to incorporate many features of games, which has motivated a debate among current researchers not only on “how to incorporate the new enhanced features of e-books for children, but also whether they can or should still be considered books.” McKechnie and Schreurs summarize this discussion as follows: Lisa Guernsey (2011) is among those who argue that a certain percentage of non-textual elements make the product something other than a book and more like a movie or a game (p. 30). For Madej (2003) it makes sense to examine and use the conventions of video games to reshape digital narrative in a positive way to make it more immersive and engaging, so that “[children] have before them, combined, all of the storytelling media of the past rolled into one”. (McKechnie and Schreurs 2017: 6)

Although strict definitions of video games should be avoided since they “represent a rapid evolving medium based on computer technology” (Bourgonjon 2015: 15), it is important to clarify that “video games” mean “both games played on game platforms (such as the Sony PlayStation 2, the Nintendo GameCube, or Microsoft’s XBox) and games played on computers” (Gee 2003: 1). Further, in comparison with Hollywood movies and TV shows, which are visual, linear, and not interactive, Carrie Heeter explains, in an interview with Jenkins, that games involve player actions, “their interactions with other players, and sometimes customization of their avatar. And, […] the physical and social context and interpersonal dynamics with other players help define and shape the experience of playing a game” (Jenkins 2009). The fact that the children expected works with a structure closer to games led some of them to resist reading and answering questions posed by the teacher-researcher to facilitate the interpretation of the literary aspects of the works—for example, when the teacher/researchers asked, “What are the verses of the poem ‘chá’ about?,” some students even repeated the phrase, “Oh, but it’s not a game.”

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In an interview carried out with the students after the completion of the activities, the majority stated that, among the digital poems available on the Capparelli and Gruszynski site, “Chá” (“Tea”) had been most appreciated. Compared with the others, this poem boasts many multimedia features, and its online presentation displays more features of a game than the other poems on that page, because the reader only gains access to the poetic verses of the poem if they are capable of overcoming the challenge of gathering together all the ingredients necessary to make a cup of tea. During the interaction, however, many students refused to read the verses which appear on the cup after the challenge is completed. They merely played with the poem’s multimedia features. Some students went so far as to complain that the poem did not progress to another stage with different obstacles, as occurred in what they referred to as the “real games.” Briefly, while they found the challenge of “fazer o chá” (make the tea), with a mouse and multimedia features, relatively entertaining, many students did not like reading the poetic verses which accompanied these features. Education researchers who study children’s reading of digital texts have highlighted the fact that “when reading digital books, children may focus their attention on interactive animated visuals and play-based features, and these may disrupt learning and narrative comprehension […].” Similarly, “the convergence of animated film, game design and picture book conventions can lead to a destabilization of narrative structures within children’s digital books” (Sargeant 2015: 4). Such warnings, derived from studies with children in classroom reading situations, serve as valuable parameters not only for artists and companies interested in producing works of digital literature for children, but also for educators interested in introducing these new products into classroom pedagogy. The fact that the students had hoped to find a similar structure to that of the games which they were already used to, also meant that many of them had difficulty understanding the proposal of each of Capparelli and Gruszynski’s poems, when read in digital format. Curiously, this difficulty was not so obviously present when the poems were read in printed form. One visual poem which was read both in printed and digital formats was “Xadrez” (“Chess”). While reading this poem in print, the students, together with the teacher/researcher, identified the words present on the chessboard. The researcher proposed that, in pairs, the children made the largest possible number of words using only the letters on the chessboard: a, m, o, r, d. The children reacted positively and formed a surprising

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number of words, which they wrote by hand on a piece of paper that was given to them later. When the children went to the computer room to interact with the multimedia version of the same poem, however, they had difficulty understanding the proposal. Furthermore, they had trouble writing the words which were found from the combination of letters of the poem, this time not on a sheet of paper, but on an Excel file in the form of a table. Briefly, the children found it easier to write the words with a pen on a sheet of paper than to type them onto the computer file. This finding reveals a low level of critical digital literacy and typing ability among the students, despite the fact they readily perform the complex interactions demanded by video games and social networks.

Conclusions Even children from underprivileged families in Porto Alegre are immersed in the globalized culture that has spread on a global scale through the convergence of media. In his work, Henry Jenkins defends the theory that the convergence of media is promoting more democratic and grassroots ways of participation in the cultural practices of the contemporary society, although he also acknowledges “that not all consumers have access to the skills and resources needed to be full participants in the cultural practices I am describing” (2006: 22). As a matter of fact, despite his optimistic perspective on the power of media to transform social and cultural landscapes in positive ways, Jenkins is also aware of the “participation gap” that exists among different social groups around the planet. For that reason, he stresses the need to change the focus of current academic discussions from the issue of “access” to the question of “participation”: “As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices.” (Jenkins, 2016: 22) Although in developed countries like the United States, access limitation to Internet and mobile technologies may have been overcome in recent years, in less developed countries, such as Brazil, this issue is still a serious problem to be faced. Nevertheless, despite their unfavorable financial situations, the children in this study revealed nonconventional ways of getting access to the Internet and even to mobile technology through school and the sharing of mobile devices with family members and friends. However, their participation is predominantly mediated by globalized culture and focused on consumption of international entertainment media

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products, most of them North American. This can be seen in the children’s predilection for video games such as the Barbie game, Minecraft, Monster High, Dragon City, Pou, and others. On the other hand, it is also possible to see a hybridization of cultural references, through the way that children interact with these franchises—for example, in the interpolation of a character from an American movie (The Exorcist) with another from the regional folklore of Porto Alegre (“Beheaded Mary”). Further, this study reveals that the immersion of children in the convergence culture strongly affects their digital literacy and literary levels. It was possible to observe, during the research, that the majority of children were apt to look for and play video games that they are interested in, even when these games were not in their mother tongue, and that several children were familiar with social networking sites, especially Facebook. However, while reading the digital poems, many students encountered difficulty in using the computer and in understanding the kind of interaction that the poems proposed. This difficulty was even more evident in the activity of writing with software programs, since several children were unable to enter simple words onto an Excel table. Based on the data obtained in this study, it is possible to establish a relationship between the influence of techno-pop culture propagated by large multinational corporations and the fact that the children expressed disappointment when interacting with the digital poems of Capparelli and Gruszynski, since these are similar but not identical to the video games. As noted by many scholars who study digital literature for children, these works are hybrid in nature, and therefore cannot be defined solely by parameters of traditional literature nor as pure electronic games. In fact, these works consist of semiotic elements that come from both the literary system—such as the poetic use of the verbal language and the artistic use of images to produce narratives—and the culture of media entertainment, which includes games, graphic novels, comics, and so on. Because the children were used to playing electronic games but not so used to reading poems, several of them explicitly expressed disappointment when asked to focus on the more literary elements of the digital work by Capparelli and Gruzsynski. On the other hand, when asked about the poem that they most appreciated, they chose “Chá” (“Tea”), exactly because it is the poem which has a structure most similar to that of the video game. The main conclusion that can be drawn from the data analyzed in this research is that the meaningful participation of children in the digital literary culture depends not only on initiatives of the publishing market—such as the Bologna Digital and Jabuti Digital prizes, which stimulate the

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production of digital works with aesthetic and literary quality—but also on the engagement of educators in the study of these new literary forms, as well as in the development of new media literacy strategies. Correro and Real (2014: 11) are among several other scholars who stress that “without proper facilitation, these products are mainly received as games and as fun at the expense of literary learning and interpretation; consequently, it is imperative that professionals receive continuous training on these materials and their possible didactic possibilities inside and outside the classroom.” Finally, it is important to note the necessity for the expansion of literary and cultural experiences possible in the digital world for children in the twenty-first century, regardless of their country of origin or social class. For Jenkins, convergence “is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots convergence” (Jenkins 2006, p. 8), even though the power between these forces is not always in balance. In the case of the children in this research, the process seems to be taking place more as a top-down corporate-driven than as a bottom-up process, and this imbalance will never be overcome without initiatives by governmental bodies, the publishing and the entertainment market as well as by educators. In an article dedicated to digital literacy, Katie Clinton, Jenkins, and Jenna McWilliams state that new media platforms are giving students much greater opportunities for communication and expression that could have been imagined by any previous generation. But to be able to participate meaningfully, young people needed to be able to read and write; they needed to know how to connect their contemporary experiences to a much older tradition, and the literature classroom represents a particularly rich environment for focusing these different ways of learning (Clinton et al. 2013: 5).

In this sense, perhaps working with digital literature in classrooms, mainly book apps, could, in the near future, provide alternative, less commercial ways to engage children in the media convergence universe. Digital literature might encourage and promote meaningful participation, rather than mere entertainment aimed at boosting the consumption of international franchises.

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References Aguiar, Jacqueline. Identidades juvenis na cultura da convergência: um estudo a partir do fandom online de jogos vorazes. Canoas: ULBRA, 2016. Dissertação de Mestrado. servicos.ulbra.br/BIBLIO/PPGEDUM221.pdf The Animatrix. Directed by Peter Chung, Andrew R.  Jones, et  al., Warner Bros., 2003. Antonio, Jorge Luiz. “Poesia hipermídia: estado de arte.” Questões de literatura na tela. Eds. Guilherme Rettenmaier and Tania Rösing. Passo Fundo: Ed. UPF, 2011, pp. 123-149. Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Bourgonjon, Jeroen. Video game literacy: Social, cultural and educational perspectives. Gent: Gent University, 2015. Doctoral dissertation. www.onderwijskunde. ugent.be/files/download_jbourgon_Bourgonjon_-_Doctoral_dissertation.pdf Capparelli, Sergio, Ana Cláudia Gruszynski, and G. Kmohan. “Poesia visual, hipertexto e ciberpoesia.” Revista FAMECOS, Porto Alegre, vol. 13, 2000, pp.  68-82. revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/view/3082 Câmara brasileira do livro. Relatório Anual 2013. São Paulo: Via Impressa Edições de Arte Ltda, 2014. Censo Escolar da Educação Básica 2016: Notas Estatísticas. Inep: Brasília, 2016. download.inep.gov.br/educacao_basica/censo_escolar/notas_estatisticas/2017/notas_estatisticas_censo_escolar_da_educacao_basica_2016.pdf Clinton, Katie, Henry Jenkins, and Jenna McWilliams. “New Literacies in an Age of Participatory Culture.” Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-­ Dick in the English Classroom. Eds. Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley. New York: Teachers College Press, 2013, pp. 3-24. Cope, Bill, and Diana Kalantzis, eds. Print and Electronic Text Convergence: Technology Drivers across the Book Production Supply Chain; from Creator to Consumer. Altona, Melbourne, Australia: Common Ground Publishing, 2001. Correro, Cristina, and Neus Real. “Panorámica de la literatura digital para la educación infantil.” Textura, Canoas, vol. 32, 2014, pp. 224-244. www.periodicos. ulbra.br/index.php/txra/article/view/1255 Garcia, Álvaro Andrade, and Ricardo Aleixo. Poemas de brinquedo (Toy Poems). São Paulo: Peirópolis, 2016, www.managana.org/editor/?community=pb. García Canclini, Nestor. Consumidores y Ciudadanos. Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. México, D.F.: Editorial Grijalbo, S.A., 1995. Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Hayles, K.  N. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2008.

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Heller, Mary. Reading-Writing Connections: From Theory to Practice. New York/ London, Routledge, 1999. Heller, Mary F. and Hilary McLellan. “Dancing with the Wind: Understanding Narrative Text Structure through Response to Multicultural Children’s Literature (with an Assist from HyperCard).” Reading Psychology, vol. 14, no. 4, 1993, pp. 285-310. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/027027193140402 Jenkins, Henry. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 2014, pp. 267-297. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New  York: New  York University Press, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: An Interview with Yasmin B.  Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, 12 January 2009, henryjenkins.org/2009/01/ beyond_barbie_and_mortal_komba.html Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Joseph, Chris. Animalamina, multimedia poetry, 2018, www.animalamina.com. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. “The impact of new digital media on children’s and young adult literature.” Digital Literature for Children: Texts, Readers, and Educational Practices. Eds. Mireia Manresa and Neus Real. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2015, pp. 57-72. McKechnie, Lynne, and Kathleen Schreurs. “‘Every Single One Is My Favourite’ (Theo, 4 years): Children’s Experiences and Perceptions of E-Book Reading.” OCLC/ALISE research grant report, OCLC Research, 2017, www.oclc.org/ content/dam/research/grants/reports/2014/mckechnie2014.pdf Manovich, Lev. “Generation Flash.” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Thomas W.  Keenan. New York/London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 209–218. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. The Matrix. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers, Warner Bros., 1999. The Matrix Comics. Ed. Spencer Lamm. WhatIsTheMatrix.com, 1999-2004. Web series. The Matrix Reloaded. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers, Warner Bros., 2003. The Matrix Revolutions. Directed by the Wachowski Brothers, Warner Bros., 2003. McCullough, Malcolm. “On the Urbanism of Locative Media.” Places, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 26-29. Mirrles, Tanner. Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization. New York/London: Routledge, 2013. Pearson, Roberta, and Anthony N. Smith. Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Perry, David. Enter the Matrix. Game. Shiny Entertainment, 2003.

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Real, Neus and Cristina Correro. “Valorar la literatura infantil digital: propuesta práctica para los mediadores.” Textura, Canoas, vol. 42, 2018, pp.  8–33. http://www.periodicos.ulbra.br/index.php/txra/article/view/3639/2782. Sargeant, Betty. “What Is an Ebook? What Is a Book App? And Why Should We Care? An Analysis of Contemporary Digital Picture Books.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 4, December 2015, pp. 454–466. Serafini, F., D. Kachorsky, and E. Aguilera. “Picture Books in the Digital Age.” Reading Teacher, vol. 69, no. 5, 2016, pp. 509-512. Smeets, Daisy, and Adriana Bus. “Picture Storybooks Go Digital: Pros and Cons.” Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core Standards. Eds. Susan B.  Neuman and Linda B.  Gambrell. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 2013, pp. 176-189. digilitey.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ Picture-Storybooks-Go-Digital.pdf Srivastava, Lara. “The Mobile Makes Its Mark.” Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. Ed. James E. Katz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 15-28. Thompson, John B. Mercadores de Cultura. Translated by Alzira Vieira Allegro, São Paulo: Ed. UNESP, 2013. Yokota, Junko, and William H.  Teale. “Picture Books and the Digital World: Educators Making Informed Choices.” Reading Teacher, vol. 67, no. 8, May 2014, pp. 577-585.

PART IV

Coming of Age in the Anthropocene

Animals in Children’s Development Gail F. Melson

Within psychology, recognition that non-human animals, and the natural world more broadly, shape children’s development is fairly recent. (Note: Although humans clearly are animals, I will follow customary usage and use “animal” to refer to non-human animals only.) Historically, psychologists have assumed that formative social ties involved only other humans— family, schools, friends, caregivers—reflecting an anthropocentric bias (Melson 2001). However, by the closing decades of the twentieth century, a handful of studies and theoretical essays calling attention to what was then called “the human-animal bond” coalesced into a nascent field. The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) took note and, in 1987, convened the first nationally recognized workshop of experts to assess the state of knowledge of this emerging area. Since then, the study of non-human animals in the lives of children has proliferated as part of an emerging field called “human-animal interaction” or HAI. Practical applications in therapy, enrichment, and education have spawned hundreds of programs in animal-assisted therapies (AAT), animal-assisted interventions (AAI), and animal-assisted education (AAE).

G. F. Melson (*) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_10

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However, carefully controlled evaluations of the effectiveness of such programs continue to lag behind. While the importance of animals for children’s development is now more widely accepted, theoretical frameworks to explain existing findings and to guide future inquiry remain lacking. Two decades into the twenty-first century, it is an opportune time to take stock of what we do and do not know about the significance of animals in children’s development. The twenty-first century has seen an explosion of forms and platforms on which children encounter animals, whether material or artificial. While literature and media for young audiences commonly feature animal characters, advances in multimedia technologies make animals on the screen alternatively more lifelike and more fanciful. On electronic devices, children “adopt” virtual pets and “interact” with wild animals, imagining robotic animals alongside or instead of living ones, or use apps to blend animals’ facial features with their own in photographs. Using virtual reality technology, children experience the illusion of visiting jungles, deserts, and savannahs alongside and among animals. Live-streaming webcams installed in zoos and in backyard, parkland, and wilderness settings bring high definition close-up images of captive and wild animals onto children’s screens. A few clicks bring one to Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology’s numerous bird-cams or Pennsylvania’s Hays Eagle Cam “capturing” nesting eagles. Children also experience wild and farm animals through nature documentaries and amateur video, edited to present the supposed drama or hilarity of animal lives. Animals as symbols, talismans, and avatars are omnipresent in cartoons, movies, videos, websites, and television shows. These proliferating platforms are accompanied by a wide array of research related to children’s engagement with animals. In psychological studies, most attention remains focused on the role of pets in children’s development. This is not surprising, given the widespread presence of companion animals in children’s homes and ample evidence that children consider them important ties. However, there is growing recognition of the ways children—even those in dense urban centers—encounter untamed animals of all kinds. Children acquaint themselves with animals not just in zoos and aquariums, but through everyday activities like backyard wild bird feeding, beachcombing, or digging in a patch of dirt. Such close contact with real animals increasingly is valued, even as contact with undomesticated animals grows more mediated by cages, parks, and nature trails.

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The varied nature of children’s involvement with animals makes assessment of the state of the field challenging. Moreover, evidence remains scattered and piecemeal, lacking a unified structure. Indeed, the field of HAI grew out of an interdisciplinary interest, rather than a discipline-­ specific domain. Thus, in addition to psychologists, other scholars, such as anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural and literary critics, economists, environmental educators, historians, biologists, veterinarians, and sociologists have made important contributions to our understanding of this multi-faceted subject. For example, Alexandra Horowitz, an animal behaviorist, takes us “Inside of a Dog” (2010), in part to deepen understanding of human-canine play (Horowitz and Hecht 2016). Josephine Donovan, a historian, uncovers rural peasant attitudes toward animals in early nineteenth-­century America and Europe by analyzing stories and novels of the period (Donovan 2013). Catherine Grier (2006) brings pets back into the story of American history. From the perspective of geography, Rebekah Fox (2006) examines the blurred animal-human divide inherent in pet-­ keeping. As a result, there are many puzzle pieces, but no clear way to fit them all together in a common understanding of children’s shifting relationships to non-human animals in the home and outside.

Relationship Theories Theoretical frameworks are especially suited to such a mosaic of knowledge from different perspectives. Such frameworks help to unify and integrate disparate findings and suggest underlying mechanisms for a twenty-first-century theory of animals’ roles in children’s development. As a developmental psychologist, I survey this mosaic, applying psychological frameworks that have proven useful in understanding children’s relationships with other humans. Specifically, the following theories have been most influential in guiding inquiry into children’s social bonds: (1) ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner 1979); (2) attachment theory (Bowlby 1969); and (3) social role theory (Biddle 1986). Each theory has a rich history and considerable empirical support applied to understanding how human relationships—for example, with parents, siblings, peers, and teachers—influence children’s development. By expanding these frameworks to consider relationships with non-human animals, we test the robustness of the theories and also provide ways to integrate the study of cross-species relationships with intra-species relationships.

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Ecological systems theory: In his seminal volume, The Ecology of Human Development, Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) advanced ecological systems theory (EST), an approach to understanding development that placed context at its heart. While recognizing the importance of genetic contributions—the “nature” in the nature-nurture phrase—Urie Bronfenbrenner reintroduced to scholars the complex layers of environmental influence within which genes are expressed. This theory describes a nested set of environments, much like a set of Russian dolls, with the smallest, or most proximate, environments being the family and school where children have face-to-face daily contact with significant others. These intimate settings, in turn, are nested within larger contexts of neighborhood, region, and culture, all exerting indirect but pervasive influence on the child’s development. At every level of the environment, from the most proximate to most distal, Bronfenbrenner recognized the importance of relationships. Yet he assumed that these relationships involved only humans. Attachment theory grew out of the pioneering work of John Bowlby (1969) and Mary Ainsworth (1978), who separately documented the development of the critical bonds between a caregiver (initially only mothers were considered) and an infant. Their emphasis was on the reciprocal exchanges through which caregivers provide a sense of security and safety to an infant. Later research confirmed that infants form attachment bonds, and derive a sense of security, from a variety of humans in their lives— fathers, older siblings, child-care providers, and others. Currently, psychology recognizes that attachment bonds are activated and needed throughout the lifespan, although the quality of a human’s initial bonds, formed during infancy and early childhood, exert enduring influence. Over the years, attachment theory has steadily expanded the range of humans who might be attachment figures, yet has not considered non-­ human entities, such as animals. Social role theory also has a long history in both psychology and sociology. In its classic formulation by Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (1951), social role theory described the intersection between self and society. In enacting multiple social roles—each defined as a comprehensive pattern of behaviors and attitudes—each individual both responds to cultural demands and, at the same time, shapes their roles themselves. Like ecological systems theory, role theory underscores contextual influences, in the form of culturally shaped social expectations into which children, as they develop, are socialized. Like attachment theory, role theory recognizes an interactional pattern whereby roles dynamically change, both

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from environmental cues and also from the shape that individuals give to roles as they enact them. As with ecological theory and attachment theory, role theory explores the various roles that children and adults enact vis-à-­ vis one another. Only recently have some scholars within HAI, among them Clifford Sanders (1995) and Christina Risley-Curtiss (2013), applied role theory to suggest that humans have developed complex and dynamically changing roles in relation to animals. Scholars including James Serpell (2009) assert that, across cultures, animals provide food, clothing, and other products, serve as workers, research subjects, companions, and loved ones for humans, and appear as symbols and talismans in human mythologies. This list is not exhaustive and implies the intricate network of communication among humans and non-humans.1 All three theories emphasize relationships and recognize both environmental influences and individual variation based on genetic characteristics and predispositions. In this way, all three theories, particularly when considered together, encompass the complexities of any relationship, including that between a child and a non-human animal. In turn, using these theoretical frameworks, I consider what we know about animals as influences on children’s cognitive, social, emotional, and moral development. While these four domains of development are inter-related, each represents a distinct and developmentally important pathway.

Domains of Development The domain of cognitive development focuses on children’s thinking, attention, language, memory, reasoning, and planning. Since animals are important beings in a child’s world, we might ask how children think about animals, and more broadly, how children develop ideas and tell stories about the biological world of which they themselves are a part. More specifically, we might ask questions like: Do children pay selective attention to animals as significant stimuli in their environment? What role do animal symbols and metaphors play in children’s thinking and expression? How do children perceive the imaginary or actual animals described in the narratives they hear, read, and invent? How do children’s symbolic, artificial, or highly mediated experiences with animals influence their indirect and direct contact with animals? A second way of focusing on the domain of cognitive development is to realize that thinking about animals is embedded in a network of thoughts, symbols, and feelings about other humans, imaginary creatures, the built

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environment, and much else. Therefore, we might ask how children’s thinking about animals is related to their thinking about other things. For example, do children generalize their ideas about people to non-human animals or vice versa? (Perhaps there is no relation; instead, thinking about animals may occupy an independent sphere of thought.) Similarly, we might ask whether thinking about animals influences other, non-cognitive aspects of development. For example, are children who have more accurate knowledge about animals more concerned about animal welfare, or more attuned to human or non-human comfort or distress? Scholars of “naïve biology,” or folk beliefs about biological processes, have focused on the developmental trajectory from such beliefs to scientifically based concepts. How advancing knowledge about biological processes might impact social-emotional attitudes and behaviors toward animals receives scant attention. However, seminal work by the Japanese researchers, Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki (1993), shows that experiences with animals, such as caring for pets, contributes to cognitive understanding of biological processes and that, in turn, deepens connections with animals. Thus, we consider animals and children’s cognitive development from two perspectives: (1) animals as the content or “stuff” of this domain; and (2) animals as influencing other aspects of the child’s thinking and reasoning. We will apply this dual focus to other domains of development. Social development centers on how children acquire, maintain, and disrupt ties with others. While historically the study of children’s social development has centered on family and peers, studies in HAI have demonstrated that children form social ties with animals, particularly their pets. In fact, many children consider a pet to be a “best friend.” As with cognitive development, we might ask about the qualities of these social bonds, not only with pets, but also with animal analogues such as robotic pets, virtual pets, and animal cartoon characters. Drawing on the second perspective we described above, we might ask: How are social bonds with animals related to other social ties? Perhaps children who are lonely or have difficulty making friends bond with pets as compensatory ties. On the other hand, perhaps socially skilled children apply those skills to bonding with both human and non-human others. Recent research increasingly places children’s bonds with pets in the context of the web of social relationships. One study found that children ages 9 to 11 who felt closely attached to their dogs were also more securely attached to their mothers and fathers and reported better ties with friends (Kerns et al. 2017). Another interview-based study of adult dog owners

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showed that the supportive function of dogs made a unique contribution to well-being, even after controlling for other sources of support (McConnell et  al. 2011). While McConnell’s study of long-term well-­ being has not been replicated with children, the results add complexity to our understanding of how social ties with pets function in concert with human bonds. Emotional development deals with how children recognize, express, and control key emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. The study of emotional development increasingly recognizes the importance of self-regulation, the ability of children to modulate and control emotional states in an adaptive manner. Children’s encounters with animals are notably emotion-laden. Children ooh and aah and gasp at the wonders of wild animals, such as seeing an eagle in flight. Children report a wide range of deep emotions in their relationships with their pets. As with other domains of development, we can explore the emotional terrain of children’s connections with animals, as well as the links, if any, between a child’s emotional life with animals and their emotions toward other humans. For example, one might ask: What is the relation between a child’s experience with his or her pet and empathy toward others? Are children with pets or access to other animals more or less inclined to exhibit empathy toward humans and toward animals alike? One should note that empathy itself is a complex construct, with both cognitive and emotional components. Scholarly discussion of empathy in relation to animals has not as yet addressed this complexity. In addition to empathy, a wide range of emotions, both positive and negative, are engaged when children relate to animals. As Brenda Bryant (1990) documented, children may worry about their pets’ well-being, be distressed at pet injury or loss, or even become preoccupied with their pet to the detriment of their own functioning in other areas. Studies of adult pet owners, applying attachment theory, indicate that some people become anxiously attached to their pets and experience pet loss with extreme distress, preoccupation, and unresolved grief (Zilcha-Mano et al. 2011). Finally, moral development focuses on how children gradually understand the “oughts” of life—that is, how one ought to treat others, what rights and obligations one ought to have toward others, and generally, what one ought to do (prescriptive morality) and ought not to do (proscriptive morality). The study of moral cognition—that is, the reasoning about such “oughts”—has historically focused only on relations between human beings. Recently, spurred by interest in HAI, scholars are

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recognizing that children are reasoning morally about animals and about the natural world as well. Peter Kahn and I, together with other colleagues, have explored how children reason about the moral claims (or lack thereof) of living and robotic animals (Melson 2013b). This issue is particularly important since many public policy issues, such as habitat protection, species extinction, animal welfare, and animal testing, involve moral stances toward animals. While moral reasoning about animals competes with other concerns, such as economic development, children’s moral thinking about relations with the natural world may lay the foundation for their later functioning as citizens influencing public and private environmental policy. As with other domains of development, we can consider moral development and animals from two perspectives. First, we can examine how children “moralize” or reason and act morally with respect to animals, both in particular (e.g., with certain individual animals) and in general (e.g., expressing attitudes toward certain favorite or disliked species or practices). Second, we can investigate how moral reasoning about animals relates to moral reasoning about other humans and even, more broadly, about other aspects of the child’s development. Surveying the terrain of a relatively new field of inquiry such as HAI, one inevitably encounters gaps and shortcomings in knowledge. A major task is to create a “roadmap” for future studies, and another is to generate ideas with inter-disciplinary “legs,” because these ideas generate fruitful inquiry in other fields. We test this by considering insights from the social science of HAI for children’s literature and media, which is replete with animal characters and imagery.

The Pervasiveness of Animals and Nature in Children’s Lives In recent decades, scientific study has caught up with the nearly universal understanding of children and adults: we all grow up and live in a world “peopled” not just by humans, but also by other non-human living beings, both animals and plants. No matter how urban and industrialized our environment might be, we still share a living world with a multitude of creatures. In general, demographic trends across the industrialized world toward lower birth rates and smaller families mean that increasingly, households are more likely to have resident non-human animals than

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children. In the United States, an estimated 62 percent (Humane Society of the United States 2012) to 68 percent (American Pet Products Association 2014) of all households have at least one pet. Rates of pet ownership are similar in other industrialized countries. For example, in Australia, 66 percent of all households have pets, while 64 percent have children under 18. Although pet ownership is high across all household types, those with minor children are most likely also to have pets. In non-agricultural societies, pets or companion animals are the types of animals most likely to share the intimate environment, the home, of children and their families. The majority of children in the United States, Eurozone, and other industrialized nations are growing up alongside pets, with estimates ranging from two-thirds to 75 percent. Moreover, wild animal encounters are part of children’s daily lives as well, from wild birds at a bird feeder to squirrels in a park, to ducks by a stream (Melson 2013c). Zoo and aquarium attendance comes disproportionately from families with children. Animals in Children’s Media Direct encounters with living animals, whether wild or domestic, comprise only a portion of children’s “animal life.” Children read about and look at stories, games, toys and other artifacts about wild and domestic animals with surprisingly high frequency. As of 1998, seven of the top ten all-time best-selling children's books in the United States were about animals, both in terms of pets (e.g., Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrator Gustaf Tenggren’s 1942 Little Golden Book, The Poky Little Puppy) and wild animals (e.g., Beatrix Potter’s 1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit) (Melson 2001). In Mary Lystad’s survey of American books for children from 1776 to 1976, three-quarters had animal characters. In a content analysis I conducted of randomly selected stories in fourth-grade US school readers published from 1900 to 1970, nearly one-third had animal characters, half of which were the main protagonists (Melson 2001). Moreover, children often prefer stories and other materials about animals to those about peers or other humans. In one mid-twentieth-century study (Boyd and Mandler 1955), when third-­ graders heard stories with animal characters and identical stories with human characters, 75 percent of the children preferred the animal stories. The ubiquity of animal-centric children’s lit may be changing in the twenty-first century. The New York Times Best Seller List of top ten children’s books (circa August 2017) contained only one with animals as the

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main, indeed only, characters. Animal entries swell to three, but only if a reader includes two other books on dragons. More books on this list (and others, e.g., at www.topvaluereviews.net) directly address behavioral issues (What If Everybody Did That?; My Mouth Is a Volcano), self-acceptance, and diversity (Spaghetti in a Hot Dog Bun; Having the Courage to Be Who You Are; Wonder). The newest iteration of animal-saturated media comes from digital technology. Virtual pets, robotic pets, pet analogues such as Tamagotchi, and animal-focused video games have proliferated. The well-known appeal of animal characters in media is not lost on advertising. Frazier (2014) notes that out of 1151 characters used to sell products, over half are animals. Increasingly, children’s contact with animals, especially wild ones, comes in mediated form through media experiences. More than 25 years ago, Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble (1994), in interviews with 8- to 14-year-olds in rural Arizona near national parks, found that 60 percent saw more animals on television and in the movies than in the wild. This trend, toward contact with animals “at a remove” and in symbolic form, only continues to accelerate. What are the theoretical implications of this pervasiveness of both real and symbolic animals in children’s lives? For ecological systems theory, this means that any study of a child’s environment must include those non-human components that so often are an important part. For attachment theory, it means that one must consider at least the potential of an animal to serve as an attachment figure. And for role theory, the pervasiveness of animals means that one must explain the varied roles they play as well as the roles that children adopt in relation to an individual animal, or animals in general. In sum, for theoretical perspectives that hitherto had only been applied to human relationships, the door is opened wide to accommodate human-animal relationships as well. Given the pervasiveness of child-animal relationships, their influence on the domains of cognitive, social, emotional, and moral development should not be surprising.

Animals and Cognitive Development Underlying learning, thinking, and other cognitive processes are two necessary but not sufficient conditions—attention and interest. This is related to the Orienting Response, whereby an organism selectively attends to, or orients toward, a particular object. If animals fail to capture the attention of children, those children are unlikely to be affected by the animal world,

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despite its pervasiveness. Here, one must introduce yet another theory— the biophilia hypothesis—advanced by Edward O.  Wilson (1984), to argue that because humans evolved in a context of animals and other living things, humans are genetically predisposed to notice animals. Wilson argues that we are all born with an innate attunement to the animal world and to nature more generally. When living organisms are present in our environment, we instinctively orient toward them. This attunement does not mean “love of animals” despite, in my view, the misleading term “biophilia.” Rather, it simply means selective attention, a predisposition that experience and culture can mold in positive or negative directions. Consistent with the biophilia hypothesis is evidence that from a very early age, children are indeed more interested in animals, especially living animals, than in other stimuli, such as attractive toys or similar stuffed animals. This selective attention toward animals has been found in children as young as six months of age, in a late-twentieth-century study (Kidd and Kidd 1987). More recently, Vanessa LoBue and her colleagues (2014) observed children from 11 months to 3 years of age in a play session where attractive toys such as balls, dolls, small firetrucks, and a small airplane were available, as well as a live fish (in a bowl) and a live hamster (in a cage). The living animals drew much more attention from the children, prompting more talk about them and when their parents were present, more questions about them. (Parents also paid much more attention to the living animals.) Moreover, when children attend to animals, they do so in a particular way. Even very young children approach living animals, whether pets or wild, as if they are encountering another subject, another being with intentions, emotions, agency, and autonomy, in contrast to another object, such as a rock, which lacks life. This presumption of subjectivity may underlie the ease with which animals are anthropomorphized in stories and other media, as well as the human propensity to adopt animal symbols for everything from totem and talismans to sports teams. Part of children’s (and adults’) fascination with animals is in encountering different species’ ways of moving and acting. When one encounters another being, there is inherent unpredictability and variation, itself a source of interest. This recognition by even very young children of the distinctiveness of animals was well documented in Gene Myers’ year-long observational study of preschoolers who had numerous opportunities to interact with a variety of animal species (1998). This study is an excellent example of long-term ethological research, involving detailed observation

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of both children’s and various animals’ behaviors. Unfortunately, such an approach continues to be rare. Replication of this work is needed. In the context of twenty-first-century exposure to technological animals, would children’s behaviors and ideas upon encountering both pet and wild animals—snakes, monkeys, hamsters—differ? Living animals present a rich multi-sensory experience, with distinct appearance, sound, movement, smell, and feel to the touch. This sensory complexity may provide children with rich input for learning, not only about this particular animal at one particular moment, but more broadly. While the full range of cognitive learning derived from animal contact is still unclear, research of the late twentieth century began to uncover some areas in which children’s experiences with animals generalize to broader learning. For example, engaging with living animals may help children refine their concepts of biology. This was demonstrated in a Japanese study (Hatano and Inagaki 1993) of 5-year-olds who had been helping to care for goldfish at home for about a year. Compared to their classmates without goldfish experience, these children knew more about the hidden (from view) biology of these animals. For example, the children who had cared for the goldfish could more accurately answer: “Does a goldfish have a heart?” They also better understood or deduced biological processes in other animals, ones they had had no experience with. For example, reasoning from their experience with the goldfish, children understood that baby frogs will grow larger as they develop into adulthood. Thus, involvement with living animals such as pets or local species, especially over a long period of time, has been shown to help children better understand and generalize basic biological processes across species, such as birth, growth, development, reproduction, and death. Interest in animals as a stimulus to learning has been especially strong among practitioners who work with special needs children, such as those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), learning disabilities, or Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD). This has resulted in recent publications of guidelines and handbooks (Gee et al. 2017). Attachment theory suggests a broader way in which engagement with animals, especially pets, might be linked to cognitive development. Considerable evidence shows that when children feel secure in their human attachment relationships, their learning, exploration, and cognitive development flourish. For example, when young children feel their caregiver is providing a “secure base” (i.e., providing the child with a sense of safety and security), the child is more likely to explore an unfamiliar

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environment. Analogously, the emotional benefits of a relationship with a pet (to which we turn next) are likely to be linked to cognitive outcomes. This is an area in need of research attention.

Animals and Emotional Development Strong evidence exists that children are emotionally involved with animals, not only with pets but with wild and symbolic animals as well. Pets share most children’s homes as “family members,” although one should be cautious about imputing the same meaning of this term when applied to non-­ humans. Millions of pets, most viewed as family members, continue to be relinquished to shelters. Notwithstanding this caveat, most pet-owning children report strong emotional bonds (Hall et al. 2016). In addition, children often feel a tie toward other people’s pets as well. In a neighborhood study of 10- and 14-year-olds, Brenda Bryant (1985) asked these children to name “special friends,” and neighborhood pets appeared on the list as at least one of the “ten most important ties.” Wild and domestic animals engage children’s emotions as well. Animals viewed as “cute,” phylogenetically or behaviorally similar to humans, or benefiting humans are more likely to engage children’s positive emotions, while other animals—spiders, scorpions, and snakes, for example—often inspire fear or disgust (Borgi and Cirulli 2015). Thus, a wide emotional range is activated when animals are considered. Even pets can evoke negative emotions, as many children report at times feeling sadness, worry, and fear over concerns about their pets’ well-being (Melson 2001). While it is possible that some of these negative feelings may be displaced from other concerns and relationships, there is evidence that both children and adults form complex attachment bonds with pets. As part of this complexity, individuals may develop insecure attachments, with elements of anxiety and ambivalence, quite comparable to the attachment styles that humans form with one another (Jalonga 2015). In times of stress, children report turning to their pets for emotional support, talking to them, telling them secrets, and, as a result, feeling reassured. For example, 72 percent of German fourth graders in one interview study reported that, when they are sad, they turned to their pets for reassurance (Rost and Hartmann 1994). In another study, 75 percent of Michigan 10- to 14-year-olds interviewed said that when upset, they turned to their pets (Covert et al. 1985). My colleague Rona Schwarz and I interviewed 56 5-year-olds (with pets at home) about three months

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before each child was to begin kindergarten, an important and potentially stressful transition. Almost half the children (42 percent) spontaneously mentioned their pet when asked to whom they turned when feeling the emotions of anger, sadness, fear, happiness, or the need to tell a secret (Melson 2001). At the same time, even preschoolers are perfectly aware that their dogs, cats, and other pets cannot literally understand human language. Yet the supportive function remains. In studies that place emotional attachment to pets in the context of other ties to humans, pets continue to be important. For example, 6- to 10-year-olds were asked to rank relationships on multiple dimensions. Pets were ranked as “more important” than ties with friends or parents as a relationship “most likely to last no matter what” and “even if you get mad at each other.” (Furman 1989). In another interview study of 10-year-­ olds, children’s attachment to their dogs was not strongly linked to attachment to parents, suggesting that each type of tie serves different functions (Hall et al. 2016). Drawing emotional support from pets, like emotional support from other humans, has been associated with better coping with stress. In the Melson and Schwarz study cited above, after preschoolers made the transition to kindergarten, their parents (who were unaware of the children’s responses) reported less anxiety and better positive adjustment for those children who had previously reported emotional support coming from their pets (Melson 2001). Animal-assisted therapy and intervention programs with traumatized or at-risk children are based on the premise that contact with a friendly animal is stress-reducing. As a result, such programs have proliferated, buoyed by practitioner and client testimonials, rather than scientific evidence. The most famous and influential of these programs, perhaps, is Green Chimneys Children’s Services in Brewster, NY, a pioneering residential treatment center for children with severe emotional disturbance. Green Chimneys, as it is known, integrates animal and nature therapies into a farm-like therapeutic milieu. It has served as a model for similar programs throughout North America and other continents. This evidence of pets’ providing emotional support, particularly in times of stress, suggests that pets do serve as attachment figures, at least potentially. According to attachment theory, the hallmark of an attachment figure is its ability to reduce stress and provide reassurance when the “attachment system” is activated, that is, when the child senses insecurity and lack of safety. Recent research (Hall et al. 2016) finds that children

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who regularly spend time taking care of their dog (feeding, walking, or grooming) are more strongly attached, their dogs are more responsive, and in turn, the children derive more emotional support from the dog. Thus, as in other human-human attachment relationships, there is a dynamic interplay between two mutually attached individuals. While most research has focused on pets as attachment and support figures, role theory encourages us to consider other roles relevant to emotional development. For example, dominant-submissive roles or power relationships may be relevant. Children may well experience dominant roles (commanding them, teaching them tricks) in relation to pets, especially dogs, who are adapted to live in dominance hierarchies. Perhaps children have opportunities to learn about exerting and modulating power in their interactions with their dogs. Children can be influenced to engage in animal mistreatment, given an atmosphere that models and encourages such deviant behavior. Animal abuse literature documents how such learning can be negative and destructive, depending on the family and cultural context. Animal cruelty tends to occur in family contexts where other forms of abuse—partner abuse, child abuse—are ongoing (McPhedran 2009). A history of frequent bullying, as well as victimization by bullies, is linked to multiple acts of animal abuse and to tolerance of animal mistreatment (Henry and Sanders 2007). Another important role is that of caregiver or nurturer. We (Melson and Fogel 1989, 1996) have found that children do not perceive caring for pets as “gendered” (i.e., a feminine, but not masculine role). By contrast, by age 5, children have been shown to view caring for human babies as a component of a feminine role (Melson et al. 1986). Hence, boys show less interest in nurture directed to other humans (including elderly) than do girls. This sex difference disappears when the object of nurture is an animal. An important implication of this line of research is that animal care may provide one of the few available “training grounds” for boys to engage in nurture of dependent others. These studies need replication in the twenty-first century when public attention to issues of gender, including gender non-conformity, has increased. At the same time, there has been little change in young children’s exposure to males as nurturers in professions such as day care aide, early childhood educator, or child care provider. Children still experience a highly gendered world in which nurturing (including care for the elderly and disabled) is predominantly carried out by women.

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A third role to consider is that of play companion. For many children, unstructured, face-to-face play time with peers is diminishing, despite ample evidence of its developmental importance. Parent surveys and child reports (Melson 1988) confirm that children spend significant time playing with their pets, sometimes more than with their young siblings (if they have them). This time, by its nature, is unstructured, somewhat unpredictable, and “in the present.” Links to Other Developmental Outcomes Do the emotional bonds that children form with pets affect other aspects of child development? One area of research interest is empathy. Engagement with animals, including observing wild animals, may stimulate perspective-taking, the ability to put oneself in the shoes (or in this case, “paws”) of another unlike oneself. Such perspective-taking is linked to, indeed may be a necessary condition for, empathy. Animals may be particularly good candidates for teaching perspective-taking, since they present distinctly different (from humans) ways of moving, sensing, feeling, and being. On the other hand, the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals, a tendency amplified by culture directed at children, may work against perspective-taking. Geerdts (2016) has documented how frequently children are targeted for anthropomorphic animal depictions. When one anthropomorphizes, one distorts the perspective of the animal by superimposing that of the human. There is evidence, based on interviews with adults, that individuals prone to anthropomorphizing animals tend to have less knowledge about and experience with living animals (Bahlig-Pieren and Turner 1999). In sum, the link between perspective-taking and interaction or observation of animals is unclear and merits much more research. Nevertheless, there are some indications of an association (but not a causal connection) between children’s emotional investment in their pets, rather than simply pet ownership, and empathy toward other children as well as animals (Melson et al. 1992). This link is modest in size, not found in all pet-involved children and based on self-report measures, rather than observed behaviors that indicate empathy. Moreover, these correlational findings might indicate that children who already have developed empathic social skills toward humans may be able to extend these skills toward animals as well. Thus, no evidence currently exists to support causation. The links between empathy and involvement with wild animals (such as observing them in zoos or in nature settings) remains unclear. Similarly, possible connections between children’s distal involvement with animals—mediated through symbolic forms such as books, video, and toys—and

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perspective-taking or empathy remain undocumented. Since empathy is an important underpinning for prosocial and moral behaviors (such as helping and protecting others), the need for a research program in this area is evident. Role theory may be helpful in guiding such a research program. This theory suggests that social roles may either stimulate or dampen, even extinguish, perspective-taking and empathy. For example, if a certain species is socially defined as a product for human use and consumption—for example, chickens, pigs, or cattle raised for food—this role discourages an emotional bond, an understanding of their perspective, or empathy for their lived experience. By contrast, a pet dog or cat, inhabiting the social roles of “family member,” “playmate,” and even “love object,” would be more likely to elicit perspective-taking and empathy. Thus, role theory (along with ecological systems theory) directs us to the larger cultural context in which children develop emotional connections to animals.

Animals and Moral Development Empathy is also involved in children’s moral development. As with other domains of development, moral reasoning and behavior have been studied extensively, but almost exclusively, with respect to human-human relationships. With the expansion of HAI as a field of inquiry, interest has grown in whether (and if so, how) children moralize about animals. It turns out children do. Peter Kahn’s studies (1999; Kahn et al. 2008, 2009) across cultures, from urban Houston to the Amazon region of Brazil to Prince William Sound in Alaska, show that children as young as 6 years of age are acutely aware of issues of environmental degradation and its impact on wild animals. Children view such ecological issues as inherently moral, with animals having moral claims to just and fair treatment from humans. (Such a tendency may be linked to biophilia, which posits a human proclivity to attend to and think about other life forms.) Based on these studies, two types of moral stances toward animals and nature have been distinguished: anthropocentric and biocentric. The former justifies proper treatment of animals because of their utility for humans, while the latter, considered a higher form of moral reasoning, sees animals and nature as having inherent, intrinsic value that exists apart from human needs. A good illustration of such moral reasoning comes from a recent study by Jolina H. Ruckert (2016). She interviewed 7- and 10-year-olds living on the Pacific coast of Washington State about gray wolves, an

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endangered species. Although half the children expressed fear of these wild animals, 94 percent of the children nonetheless extended moral claims to them, arguing that the wolves deserved to be undisturbed in their habitat. The majority of children, especially the 10-year-olds, used biocentric reasoning, attributing moral rights to gray wolves, such as the right to food, companionship, reproduction, habitat, play, welfare, and autonomy. The children focused on the animals’ sentiency and ability to feel pain, the ways the wolves were both like and not like humans. This study exemplifies the utility of in-depth probing of children’s moral reasoning and makes clear the sophistication of even young children’s moral thinking about animals. Even when animal analogues, such as robotic pets, are introduced to children, they impute some moral standing to these technological objects. Our research (Melson et al. 2009; Melson 2013a) on the robotic pet dog, AIBO, found that children as young as 7 reasoned that it was “not OK” to harm or fail to help AIBO because the robot had some moral claims to be treated fairly and justly. To be sure, when compared with their reasoning about an unfamiliar friendly living dog (Melson 2013b), children imputed fewer moral claims to the robotic dog and also acknowledged that the robot was a human-made machine. Yet, to the extent that a robotic (or perhaps virtual) pet emulates a living one and encourages the child to make such an association, moral claims appear to follow. Again, role theory may help to clarify these findings. When technology evokes a living organism, such as a dog, with associations to its role as a pet, this encourages children (and adults) to apply these roles. By contrast, consider a highly interactive and responsive technology, such as the iPhone, assigned the role of technological object through its design and marketing. While people often become very attached and even addicted to these devices, one may hypothesize (in the absence of empirical research to date) that they do not impute moral claims to them. However, what happens as interactive technology and artificial intelligence bring us ever more organic-seeming “objects” that blur the lines between artifact and moral agent? Our work with the robotic dog AIBO suggests that children as well as adults do generalize to some degree their moral thinking about living animals to their robotic analogues, but do so mindful of the human-made and machine qualities of the robot. Can children be “fooled” into treating technological artifacts as indistinguishable from their carbon-based counterparts? If so, will that elevate the moral standing of such artifacts or demote living beings as more “machine-like”?

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Links to Other Developmental Outcomes  Is moral reasoning about the rights of animals linked to moral reasoning about human rights? Much of humane education efforts rest on the assumption that embrace of animal welfare and rights would make children kinder and more just, not simply to animals but to humans as well. Limited research exists to test this assumption. One study of first- and fourth-graders after a year-long humane education program found that they expressed more human-­directed empathy than did their peers who did not have the program (Ascione 1992). This finding is intriguing, raising many questions that should stimulate a research agenda. Does thinking about issues of animal welfare and rights, outside of a structured educational program, lead to similar reasoning about humans? Would this connection hold for younger and older children (than those studied by Frank R.  Ascione)? What role might parents or peers play in shaping children’s moral reasoning? Attachment theory holds that a secure attachment relationship with a parent sets the foundation for children to be responsive to parental messages about the treatment of others. Ecological systems theory stresses how differing contexts—family, peer group—shape children’s behavior and reasoning. Given the technological changes already noted, would moral reasoning about animals change in the twenty-first century? Precise answers await replication of studies such as Ascione’s. However, more recent work suggests that there is more continuity than change in children’s thinking about the welfare of animals. For example, Janine C.  Muldoon, Joanne M. Williams, and Alistair Lawrence (2016) in interviews with UK children ages 7 to 13, found that the children accurately recognized the welfare needs of pet animals, much in the same way that earlier twentieth-century surveys found. A further set of questions addresses the links, if any, between moral reasoning and moral behavior. In general, psychological examination of this issue (in human-human relationships) finds considerable complexity. As with adults, children may not act on their morally reasoned conclusions for many reasons, among them: (1) perceived constraints; (2) feelings of incompetence or lack of expertise; (3) failure to recognize the relevance of a moral principle to a particular situation; and (4) prioritizing other concerns. These same factors are relevant to any discussion of the link between moral reasoning about animals and moral behaviors toward them or toward other humans. This link is particularly complex since animals play such a variety of social roles, only some of which make them eligible as candidates for moral regard. The terrain of animal rights and animal welfare remains hotly contested.

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Conclusion Three converging theoretical lenses—ecological systems theory, attachment theory, and role theory—support the contention that animals are important influences on children’s development. Animals are part of the contextual landscape of childhood. They are attachment figures. They occupy a range of important social roles. Children think about animals, feel strong emotions toward them, view them as social actors in relationships, and apply moral reasoning to them. In all these ways, animals figure as content for cognitive, emotional, social and moral development. More than this, involvement with animals has implications for other aspects of development. While this assertion needs more empirical support, there are ample indications that engagement with animals may stimulate thinking about biology, provide emotional support (and hence, improve adaptation to stress), evoke empathy and caring toward others, and prod moral reasoning. However, like other aspects of child development, the impact of animals is complex. Children are grappling with multiple, contradictory social and cultural roles for animals. As sociologists put it, there are multiple “dominant discourses” about human relationships with animals (Cole and Stewart 2014). James Serpell notes that animals occupy a gray area between being human and being a “thing.” This gray area “confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human” and leads to “extraordinary inconsistencies in attitudes and behaviors toward animals” (Serpell 2009, 633). This very complexity may be consequential for children’s development, as it provides a unique arena for grappling with such questions. Moreover, human-animal relations cannot be considered in isolation. As ecological systems theory emphasizes, these relations are embedded in systems with parents, teachers, peers, cultural figures, and others, who interpret and structure encounters with animals and ideas about them. The literature on animal abuse powerfully and disturbingly illustrates this. So does work linking animals as emotional and social supports with human social networks. Similarly, as we have noted, attachment styles evident in close human relationships may be linked to those that develop with pets. Research is still untangling how differing forms of involvement with animals shape the child’s development. As we’ve noted, increasingly children are encountering animal analogues and symbols. This has always been true when it comes to children’s literature, cinema, and television, but now, joining Curious George, Nemo the clownfish, and Dory the blue

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tang are virtual animals, robotic pets, animal avatars, and virtual reality apps. High resolution cameras bring wild animal life up close in sharp focus. Interactive technologies give the illusion of a communicative relationship with wild animals, such as tigers and rhinos. Robots that “learn” and “adapt” to the child over time impart the feeling of a real, bi-­directional relationship. Some researchers decry these trends as objectifying animals and deceiving children (Turkle 2011). Others counter that bringing the wild and exotic onto screens and mobile devices is the best way to encourage conservation and protection of endangered species. Children growing up in a technologically mediated world may be changing in fundamental ways. Our research program on children and robotic pets, for example, found that technologies stimulate new modes of thought in children. We are developing new ontological categories, beings that are neither wholly alive nor completely machine. Interactive technologies become for children, a “third way” of being (Melson et al. 2009), and technological change and diffusion outpace scholarly inquiry. What is lost (and perhaps, what is gained) when children’s animal world is technologically mediated? What happens when the rich diversity of living wildlife is disappearing? This may be the central question for HAI research in the twenty-first century. Understanding children’s relationships with animals and with the natural world more broadly is a social and political imperative, not just an intriguing research question. Children, after all, are the future stewards of the planet. As adults, they will be decision-makers when it comes to issues of animal welfare, agricultural practices, habitat protection, climate change, and endangered species. These issues will only become more pressing for future generations. Research has yet to fully clarify how childhood experiences with animals will shape those later adult practices. However, those who care for children (and care about them) cannot afford to wait for scholarly consensus. We can act to provide children with rich, diverse, and positive experiences with animals of many kinds, while encouraging an ethic of care.

Note 1. Akira Mizuta Lippit (2008) and Donna Haraway (2003) are among those who challenge the cultural constructions of human-animal boundaries. Human-animal interaction (HAI) research and theory have helped erode simplistic binary conceptions of human connections to other animals. In addition, technologies are blurring boundaries between organic, sentient living beings and non-carbon emulations of them.

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References Ainsworth, Mary D.  Salter, Mary C.  Blehar, Everett Waters, and Sally N.  Wall. Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978. American Pet Products Association, 2014. APPA Survey 2014. Ascione, Frank R. “Enhancing Children’s Attitudes about the Humane Treatment of Animals: Generalization to Human-Directed Empathy.” Anthrozoös, vol. 5, 1992, pp. 176–191. Bahlig-Pieren, Zana, and Dennis C.  Turner. “Anthropomorphic Interpretations and Ethological Descriptions of Dog and Cat Behavior by Lay People.” Anthrozoös, vol. 12, 1999, pp. 205–210. Biddle, B. J. “Recent Developments in Role Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 12, 1986, pp. 67–92. Borgi, Marta, and Francesca Cirulli. “Attitudes toward Animals among Kindergarten Children: Species Preferences.” Anthrozoös, vol. 28, 2015, pp. 45–59. Boyd, Nancy A., and George Mandler. “Children’s Responses to Human and Animal Stories and Pictures.” Journal of Consulting Psychology, vol. 19, 1955, pp. 367–371. Bowlby, John. Attachment. NY: Basic Books, 1969. Bronfenbrenner, Urie. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Bryant, Brenda K. “The Neighborhood Walk: Sources of Support in Middle Childhood.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 50, 1985, pp. 1–114. Bryant, Brenda K. “The Richness of the Child-Pet Relationship: A Consideration of Both Benefits and Costs of Pets to Children.” Anthrozoös, vol. 3, 1990, pp. 253–261. Cole, Matthew, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Covert, Anita Miller, Alice Phipps Whiren, Joanne Keith, and Christine Nelson. “Pets, Early Adolescents and Families.” Marriage and Family Review, vol. 8, 1985, pp. 95–108. Donovan, Josephine. “Provincial Life with Animals.” Society and Animals, vol. 21, 2013, pp. 17–33. Fox, Rebekah. “Animal Behaviours, Post-Human Lives: Everyday Negotiation of the Animal-Human Divide in Pet-Keeping.” Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 7, 2006, pp. 525–537. Frazier, Mya. “Should the Polar Bear Still Sell Coca-Cola?” The New  Yorker, 6 November 2014. Web. www.newyorker.com/business/currency/polar-bearstill-sell-coca-cola

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Examining Animal Bodies in War-Related Media for Children Amy Ratelle

Man becomes human by conquering animals and the world, by making his mark on it. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human

Introduction Introduced at the edge of Hyde Park in London in 2004 for the ninetieth anniversary of the start of World War I, artist David Backhouse’s Animals in War memorial is comprised of four freestanding statues—one horse, one dog, and two mules—and a bas-relief background wall featuring additional animals such as elephants, camels, goats, and birds. It represents and pays tribute to “all the animals that suffered and died alongside British, Commonwealth and Allied forces in the wars and conflicts of the twentieth century” (animalsinwar.org.uk). In a similar spirit, the Australian War Memorial in 2010 curated A Is for Animals, an exhibit of imagery

A. Ratelle (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_11

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celebrating animals as transport, messengers, and even mascots in World War I, a consistent use of military animals since domestication; an illustrated book for young readers, M Is for Mates: Animals in Wartime from Ajax to Zep, was produced for the exhibition by the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs. This renewed twenty-first-century interest in WWI and the role of animals in warfare may also be seen in the commercial success of War Horse, a 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo that was adapted for stage (2007) and screen (2011). By 2011, War Horse could serve as a familiar historical example in the British Imperial War Museum’s Once Upon a Wartime: Classic War Stories for Children exhibit. Concurrently, we have seen a growing interest in children’s own experiences of war, making historical conflicts relevant to contemporary children. In particular, the Imperial War Museum’s 2005 exhibition, The Children’s War: The Second World War through the Eyes of the Children of Britain, highlighted the experiences of young people, from Boy and Girl Scouts organizing civil defense duties to child evacuees who left London for rural areas. Yet, strangely, the co-evolved interests in non-combatant experiences or observations of armed conflict have no apparent overlap, apart from the inclusion of War Horse in the “Once Upon a Wartime” exhibit. While the edited collection Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex (Nocella et al. 2014) addresses oversights in contemporary animality studies and military history, little has been written about the intersections of armed conflict and animal bodies in media for children. Moreover, exhibits such as those recently organized by the International War Museum are largely exempt from ongoing cultural debates around violence and violent imagery for children. This is a curious omission, considering that such artifacts are predicated on the “oppositional discourses of trauma and entertainment” (Kofterou 60). Museum exhibits and other educational programming elicit concerns not about whether or not children should be exposed to real-world violence on a mass scale, but instead focus on the appropriateness of that representation: How should war be represented to children when so much of the rhetoric around war, most notably in North America, still emphasizes the ideals of freedom to the point that violence can be implicitly justified in order to achieve it? Violence toward animals and animal suffering has been, since the nineteenth century, a major catalyst for reshaping human/animal relationships, most notably in terms of the animal rights movement, and was

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largely advanced through children’s literature. Novels such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877)—arguably the most famous entry in the animal autobiography genre—did not shy away from depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals from the animal’s point of view, with the goal of making animal suffering both legible and morally relevant to its readership. The animal’s eye view highlights multiple points of kinship shared by humans and animals, undermining straightforward anthropocentric assumptions of human superiority over animals by questioning the process by which children are encultured to be human, through works of literature and other media. Current posthumanist scholarship similarly re-­ envisions the human-animal relationship, undermining the anthropocentric assumption of human superiority (see, e.g., Derrida, Haraway, Jaques, Ratelle, Shukin, and Wolfe). This chapter extends this scholarship to examine the role that animals have played, and continue to play, in war-related or combat-themed media for children. Historically, animal bodies have carried multiple and often contradictory meanings, from comrades to symbolic representations of national identity. Contemporary media using animals as mediators to depict conflict, combat, or other disputes carry similarly ambivalent meanings. The multiplatform Pokémon, for example, depicts the child-animal relationship as based in mutual affection, yet is underwritten by violence, with creatures trained to battle other creatures on behalf of their humans, to increase those humans’ expertise and prestige as trainers. Other texts configure humans and animals in direct conflict due to human encroachment on the animals’ habitats, such as Princess Mononoke (1997), Over the Hedge (2006), and Open Season (2006). These texts foreground the boundary dispute to attempt to justify the animals’ positions in resorting to violence and declaring war on humans to retain their homes. Other texts forward an explicitly anti-war stance. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992), for example, the pilot protagonist transforms himself from a human man into a pig to draw attention to the dehumanizing aspects of war. By examining the framework around the inclusion of animals in war-­ related media, this chapter forwards a means by which to move beyond the constraints of anthropomorphic assumptions about the nature of human/animal relationships, the civilizing process children undergo, and the nature of warfare itself.

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A History of Animals in Warfare The popularity of art exhibitions and war-themed educational exhibits clearly indicates that the use of animals in war can serve to illustrate human reliance on nonhuman animals. As Ryan Hediger notes, the history of animals in war “reveals a great deal about the nature of human relationships with other animals and about the nature of war” (2). Hediger speculates that the interdependence of humans and animals has long been derived from shared needs and vulnerabilities (2), and that “powerful sympathies” have flourished under the conditions of mutual survival (3). Using animals in combat of course necessitates domestication, and scholars generally agree that the earliest domesticated dogs would likely have played a defensive or guarding role, along with assisting with hunting. The fundamental human/canine relationship goes back much further than previously assumed, to as early as 125,000 years ago. Yet, for all our co-evolution as species, dogs (and later horses) have certainly received the short end of the stick in many respects. Thus, the origin of including animals in combat has been foundational, and this early co-evolution makes the issue particularly complex. Donna Haraway argues that between prehistoric dogs and humans, a mutually beneficial relationship would have arisen, albeit one deeply complicated by the points at which human and animal were both cooperative, and by the points at which humans began to exploit “companion species” for their own ends (Haraway 2003). In this context, Hediger notes further that dogs, while having a profound impact on human domestic life, the domestication of horses changed the face of warfare entirely. According to David Anthony, the increased ability to herd more livestock “would have caused a general renegotiation of tribal frontiers, a series of boundary conflicts” (Anthony 222, qtd. in Hediger 5). Moreover, horses would have encouraged longer-distance raids and trading disputes resolved with violence. As Louis DiMarco puts it, “war horse and rider was a viable military weapons system for more than 3000 years, far longer than any other military system” (DiMarco ix, qtd. in Hediger 6). At any rate, the domestication of animals and the change in local warfare developed in tandem, an evolution in which animal bodies are closely implicated.

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Militarizing Childhood Although perhaps not dating back to the beginnings of domestication, there is nonetheless a long history of “militarizing” childhood as well, and a contemporary questioning of the value of including violent history as part of present-day educational curricula. Moreover, violence is part and parcel with children’s media dating back to the earliest oral folklore and nursery rhymes (Cech 137), and the earliest military-themed toy—the ubiquitous toy soldier—dates back to 1578, when miniature soldiers began to be produced for children’s play specifically, and not as curios or figurines for adult collections. Lori Crowe argues that the marketing of war-themed toys and media constitute part of the process of militarization, which involves “cultural, institutional, ideological, and economic transformations through which militaristic needs, presumptions, and ideas come to influence a person or thing” (112). According to Crowe, images and discourses play a crucial role as “vehicles for the transmission of ideas that legitimize militaries, reproduce binaries of masculinity and femininity, and reinforce national boundaries” (112). While Crowe’s argument in particular focuses on the figure of the superhero in contemporary popular culture, her central ideas are particularly useful as a means by which to address and unpack the close ties between the entertainment industry and the military-industrial complex. Yet, when representing actual war to children through stories, media, and educational programming, the issue becomes less straightforward, bound to adult anxieties about the “rightness” of the type of militarizing rhetoric found in fictional narratives. Mitzi Myers argues that the current proliferation in war writing for the young coincides with accelerating late-twentieth century violence and reflects adult preoccupations with human evil: all forms of moral, psychological, and material destruction; past and present genocides, from the Holocaust to more recent “ethnic cleansings”; the ever-present possibility of nuclear disaster. Adult social history, cultural studies, and postmodern/postcolonial literary theory—all much concerned with redefining what counts as “war” and with exploring how conflicts escalate and how war is represented in history, memory, and words—filter into the expanding and impressive volume of war stories for the young. (Myers 328)

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Myers’s assertions, particularly with regard to youth media that often get dismissed as trivial, point to a means by which to better understand how shifting the species emphasis from humans onto animals in popular contemporary media serves to both militarize children’s everyday lives and reconceptualize their relationships with animals.

“Fit for Anything”: War Horse In 2014, the aptly named war horse “Warrior” was posthumously awarded a Dickin Medal on behalf of all the horses who served on the front lines in WWI.  The Dickin Medal, often described as the Victoria Cross for animals, has been awarded by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) for “gallantry and devotion to duty” since 1943 (see pdsa.org). Yet Warrior himself, who was returned to his birthplace on the Isle of Wight after the war and lived until 1941, was not memorialized with a medal at his preordained death, but instead dispatched as meat (Sorenson 33). News of Warrior’s death was reported in the Evening Standard in April 1941, yet the news of his passing was euphemistic; the Daily Mail reports that Warrior’s owner, Gen. Jack Seely, “felt that the extra corn rations needed to keep the 33-year-old hero going could not be justified in wartime” (Reilly 2012). Warrior’s grisly fate and belated posthumous honor is illustrative of a central tension when animals are co-opted into human war. On one level, they are beloved comrades-in-arms; on the other, they are considered equipment, not unlike a tent, and can be disposed of accordingly. Indeed, the ending of Morpurgo’s original version of War Horse directly addresses the army’s slippery definition of animal service, and its effect on the soldiers with whom the horses have served. One sergeant asks the major whether or not the horses will be coming home on the same ship, or whether they will be transported separately, later on, as many of them have been sick or injured, and need continual treatment. Major Martin shifted his feet and looked down at this boots. He spoke softly as if he did not want to be heard. “No, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m afraid the horses won’t be coming with us at all.” There was an audible muttering of protest from the parading soldiers. […] “You’ll not like what I have to tell you,” he said. “I’m afraid a decision has been made to sell off many of the army’s horses here in France. All the horses we have are sick or have been sick. It’s not considered worthwhile to transport them back home. My orders are to hold a horse sale here in this court-yard tomorrow morning.” […]

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“But you know what they’ll go for,” said Sergeant Thunder, barely disguising the disgust in his voice. “There’s thousands of our horses out ’ere in France, sir. War veterans, they are. D’you mean to say that after all they’ve been through […] that they’re to end up like that?” (Morpurgo 165)

Sergeant Thunder is well aware that the horses will not be purchased for transport or farm work, but will end up as food. As John Sorenson notes, many horses “who survived the war, especially those who were in poor health, were shot. Others were sold to slaughterhouses in Europe” (30). The Sergeant’s classification of the horses as “war veterans” is significant for two reasons—the first is that the soldiers who worked directly with their equine counterparts see minimal difference between themselves and the horses, whom they characterize as “heroes” (Morpurgo 71), even hanging an Iron Cross awarded to a human soldier for valor in battle on Joey’s stable door in recognition of his role in battle (76). The second is that, after the war, human combatants had great difficulty transitioning back into civilian life, disavowed by their own governments (Canadian War Museum n.p.), having been drawn into and tainted by what Colin Salter calls the “military-animal industrial complex” (3). This term highlights the exploitation of human and nonhuman alike, as a “key feature of war” (Salter 6). Situated in modernity’s conditions of alienated and mechanized labor and institutionalized speciesism, the military-animal industrial complex is predicated on the distinction philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes between zoe (or “bare life”; that is, the embodied state of being alive) and bios (or laws and other structures developed by humans in order to enact their own subjectivity and to establish tangible evidence of civilization) (Ratelle 107). As Paola Cavalieri puts it, animals are “trapped within a juridical apparatus which includes their exclusion by ratifying harms that can be inflicted upon them” (n.p.). Humans use laws to demarcate the boundary between animal and human to such a degree as to deny their own zoe completely. The central irony of course is that warfare itself constitutes a rupture between zoe and bios, with each side denying the bios of the other, struggling to reduce them to bare life (both literally and metaphorically) in order to dehumanize them and facilitate the killing fellow humans in combat more easily. As I have argued elsewhere, Western philosophy’s long tradition of undermining any semblance of animal subjectivity in order to thwart the extension of the Biblical prohibition “thou shalt not kill” to

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animals as well as humans (Ratelle 78). More simply, when the human/ animal hierarchy is maintained, then it becomes both easy and necessary to dehumanize the opposing side in order to justify state-sanctioned murder. Most analyses of Morpurgo’s work focus on his “disillusionment [with war] and aversion to killing” (Šubrtovà 4), focusing on episodes in the text wherein the horse, named Joey, observes moments of compassion between combatants. One such moment, for example, occurs after an injured Joey wanders into no-man’s land and is claimed by both British and German soldiers. Instead of resorting to violence, the soldiers settle the ownership dispute by coin toss, which the British win. The Germans concede possession of Joey with good grace, and the peaceful interlude passes with some regret for the tremendous cost of the war. The German soldier remarks as his troop departs for their own side of the trenches, “We have shown them, haven’t we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between people if they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?” (Morpurgo 132). While Morpurgo’s intent is to criticize the arbitrary and oftentimes meaningless nature of war, this brief interlude of “civilized” behavior between the opposing sides also serves to reaffirm the soldiers’ mutual sense of humanity, a gesture that takes on greater significance in the presence of an actual animal. As David L. Clark notes, if “humans are capable of treating each other like animals, it may also be true that animals are capable of treating others like humans” (167, emphasis in original), which is why it is significant for Joey to be both participant in (as prize) and witness to this encounter. The human soldiers see little difference between their own side and the other, in much the same way as they see the horses serving alongside them as more than mere equipment. In the bestial conditions of trench warfare, all combatants are equal under the conditions of the military-animal industrial complex.

“Gotta catch ’em all!”: The Animal Avatar in Pokémon The close conflation of human and animal identity in battle similarly drives the cultural juggernaut Pokémon. Its most recent incarnation, Pokémon GO, is a location-based augmented-reality video game for smartphones and other mobile devices, and quickly became the top-grossing app in the Apple Store during 2017. The game, which is based on prior Pokémon franchise properties (from the original video games for Nintendo’s

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portable Game Boy platform, to multiple films and television series), encourages the players to explore their natural environment to collect (digital) Pokémon characters who then “live” in Pokéball containers. Most media coverage of this massive phenomenon focuses either on the health aspects of increased physical activity, the mishaps players encounter while engrossed in the game, or issues arising from trespassing on private property, national monuments, and memorial sites. Very little attention has been paid to the battle aspect of the game—to advance in the game or “level up,” the player/trainer must battle their Pokémon against those of other players in specially designated arenas, called gyms. While the battles between Pokémon are non-lethal, disguising the battles as sport both erases the non-voluntary aspect of the creature’s service to its human owner, and reframes combat as play. As Yi-Fu Tuan argues, play activities of this nature reify species boundaries and hierarchy. Tuan contends, “children learn to master a world [through play] […] A child gains confidence and a sense of power as he manipulates the things around him” (163–64). In this framework, play and the dominance of humans over animals become intertwined, to the detriment of the animal. Significantly, in Pokémon television programs and films, the child trainers develop close bonds of affection with their Pokémon, creating, maintaining, and entrenching the power differential described by Tuan. Moreover, the bonds of affection between human and captive animal constitute what Jane Desmond calls “the fantasy of species boundary crossing” (265), wherein the mastery of the animal that Tuan describes is reimagined as a voluntary engagement on the animal’s part, as visible evidence of his or her affection toward the human owner/trainer, and thus does not appear to be exploited. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA), however, has called out the Pokémon franchise repeatedly for disguising the instantiation of animal cruelty. According to PeTA, the amount of time that Pokémon spend stuffed in pokéballs is akin to how elephants are chained up in train carts, waiting to be let out to “perform” in circuses. But the difference between real life and this fictional world full of organized animal fighting is that Pokémon games paint rosy pictures of things that are actually horrible. If PeTA existed in Unova [the fictional Pokémon world], our motto would be: Pokémon are not ours to use and abuse. They exist for their own reasons. We believe that this is the message that should be sent to children. (n.p.)

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In order to make this message more legible to children, PeTA also created the Pokémon: Black and Blue online video game, wherein the Pokémon battle their former owners/captors for freedom. Foregrounding the issues of manipulation that Tuan describes, the game’s opening screen overtly acknowledges that “as battling Pokémon grew in popularity, generations of children […] learned about dominance instead of compassion” (PeTA, n.p.). This explicit reference to the imbalanced power differentials between human and animal opens a space in which anthropocentric assumptions regarding animal captivity and service can be challenged as the player assists the Pokémon in their struggle for liberation.

“Of Course You Realize, This Means War”: Human/ Animal Boundary Disputes Similarly challenging anthropocentric assumptions of human dominance and superiority, wily rabbit Bugs Bunny, usually minding his own business, is encroached upon by a human “invader”—Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, or even a noisy opera singer—and tries to assert his autonomy peacefully. When pushed too far, however, Bugs must retaliate and declare “war,” with disastrous results for the offending human. Bugs will only be satisfied with total annihilation of the human’s property and more importantly, dignity. Albeit played for comedy, these short animated films nonetheless speak to the need to reconsider the impact of prioritizing human needs and agency over that of animals. Other animated animals similarly take matters into their own hands. Hayao Miyazaki’s internationally successful anime, Princess Mononoke (1997), directly addresses the politics of human encroachment on animal subjectivity. The young protagonist, Ashitaka (Billy Crudup) is driven from his own village due to a curse. As he travels, he becomes embroiled in the turf dispute between Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver)—a fierce entrepreneur who established a foundry known as Iron Town—and a population of oversize animal forest gods, who control the lands from which Lady Eboshi needs to extract raw ore and timber to maintain her foundry and produce her weapons and bullets. The animal gods resort to violence against the humans’ encroachment on their territory and way of life. Significantly, the latter is the most meaningful to them. They acutely feel their bios being eroded, and their despair serves to problematize the

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historical view of domestication as straightforward and beneficial to animals in particular. Because the animals are gods in their own right, they can neither be dismissed as mere beasts, nor can they be incorporated into human society via the long process of domestication. Additionally, Ashitaka is uncertain whose side he is on—human or nonhuman—once he meets San (Claire Danes), an orphan girl adopted by the wolf gods. San aligns herself with the animals’ cause, even though she is both human and mortal. While the animals do not specifically defeat their human adversaries, neither do the humans defeat the animals. Instead, the desecration of a gentle Forest Spirit complicates a straightforward reading of victory on either side, as the price for a chance to compromise and move forward together has been too high. Nevertheless, the war itself reveals the regenerative power of the natural environment, as the Forest Spirit’s essence is not truly destroyed but becomes enmeshed with and embedded into the land. San herself is left in a similarly liminal state, albeit one that does not accommodate the species transformation that she desires. She cannot be integrated into what remains of the animal civilization, nor will she join the human settlement. She drifts against the margins and is caught between, in Agamben’s terms, zoe and bios. Only Ashitaka’s affinity toward San provides a chance to rebuild in the spirit of compromise. Ashitaka offers to mediate between Iron Town and San, who represents the interests of the natural environment, and his diplomacy destabilizes the notions of conflict as inevitable and war as a straightforward, unstoppable endeavor. Compromise, however, is not often forwarded as a workable solution to boundary conflicts, as evidenced in the animated films Over the Hedge (directed by Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick, 2006) and Open Season (directed by Roger Allers, Jill Culton, and Anthony Stacchi, 2006). While neither film explicitly involves war, both make use of military metaphors and weaponry in ways that are presented as largely unproblematic. In Open Season, a captive bear named Boog (Martin Lawrence) assists a deer named Elliott (Ashton Kutcher) in an escape from a hunting-obsessed human man called Shaw (Gary Sinise). Hunting, as Linda Kalof notes, historically provided “opportunities for military exercise and training,” and in times of peace served as a surrogate activity for war (Kalof, 83–84). Open Season depicts Shaw’s overzealous hunting as unhealthy at best, yet the centrality of weapons-based violence to the slapstick narrative undermines a straightforward condemnation of hunting and militaristic behavior. Moreover, Shaw’s own gun is anthropomorphized. He has named the

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high-powered assault rifle “Lorraine,” and the inanimate object clearly has more subjectivity to Shaw than the sentient deer. After being outwitted by Boog and Elliott, Shaw promises Lorraine that he will “take back what is [his],” emphasizing that he views Elliott as both property and possession, to be defeated in acts of war. Shaw of course loses his “war”; ironically, Boog restrains him with his own gun, bending the metal into the form of a rope. Boog’s gesture is significant not because he co-opts human weaponry, but because he quite literally re-shapes the nature of that weaponry, refusing to engage with Shaw on his own violent terms. Despite being actually human, by virtue of his violent nature Shaw is depicted as being more animalistic than the peace-loving bear, who has been raised in an urban setting and problematizes clear distinctions both between wild and domestic, and human and animal. Shaw cannot remain in Timberline, and over the end credits, he has been tarred and feathered—imagery reminiscent of the fate of traitors in the American Revolution. Elliott had been strapped to the hood of Shaw’s vehicle at the beginning of the film, and the conclusion finds Shaw bound and captured by hunters who have mistaken him for Bigfoot, a liminal animal/human figure. Over the Hedge opens with a conflict among animals: RJ the raccoon (Bruce Willis) attempts to scavenge human food from the cave of Vincent the bear (Nick Nolte) and Vincent gives RJ one week to replace it or be killed. Desperate, RJ tricks a group of foraging forest animals into tasting junk food (which is presented as addictive) and helping him raid a suburban neighborhood, a denatured development “over the hedge” from their woodland home. Where Open Season portrays the animals’ battle as a matter of survival, because the hunter attacks them first, Over the Hedge represents the animals as in-fighters and as aggressors who steal humans’ groceries. Ultimately, the animals’ clandestine burglaries come to the attention of Gladys Sharp (Allison Janney) the president of the homeowners’ association and an avid hater of wild animals. Sharp enlists the aid of Dwayne “Verminator” LaFontant (Thomas Haden Church) a pest exterminator with military aspirations. Dwayne wears an orange flight-style flak suit, tells Sharp to “stand down” while he investigates her yard, and offers to install an illegal, flesh-and-fur-rending animal trap called the De-Pelter Turbo on her property. “I don’t care if that thing is against the Geneva Convention, I want it!,” Sharp replies, referencing the codes that lay out basic rights for human combatants and non-combatants in wartime, but make no provisions for animals at all. (Moreover, for those knowledgeable

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about military history, it is in fact the Hague Conventions that govern the use of weaponry.) Circumstances lead the animals to escalate their activities and to raid Sharp’s cupboards and refrigerator. In a catastrophic final “battle,” both Sharp and LaFontant end up in the De-Pelter, shorn of their hair and huddled together in fear. The activated trap destroys Sharp’s yard and carves a giant crater reminiscent of the depictions of no-man’s land in War Horse. The injuries, humiliations, and property damage sustained by Over the Hedge’s human characters are presented as acceptable and comical, because thanks to the conflict, RJ the raccoon is rehabilitated from selfish loner into a valuable, contributing member of the foraging animals’ “family.” The grafting of sentimental rhetoric around the importance of family groups and structures sits uneasily alongside the violence necessary to achieve it.

Human-Animal Transformation as Acts of War and of Peace Both Open Season and Over the Hedge set up slippages between human and animal that allude to unresolved conflict along the ecotone of the twenty-­ first century. In my final analysis, I wish to contrast two twentieth-century films that, while from two different nations and encompassing different time periods, share more explicit notions of interspecies boundary fluidity and compellingly prefigure contemporary posthumanism. Both The Incredible Mr. Limpet (a combination of live action and animation directed by Arthur Lubin, 1964) and Porco Rosso (a work of anime directed by Hayao Miyazaki, 1992) complicate species differences and hierarchies, in different ways, as they both feature formerly human characters who maintain their state as animals at the end of the narratives, albeit for vastly different rhetorical ends. In Mr. Limpet, set in 1942, the shy and decidedly unathletic Henry Limpet (Don Knotts) is rejected by the US Navy as being unsuitable to serve in the war. Depressed, he wanders down to the Coney Island waterfront and accidentally falls off a pier. He is magically (and somewhat randomly) transformed into a fish, with the newfound ability to locate German U-boats with the power of his “thrum,” an embodied version of sonar. Useful in his new capacity, Limpet assists the Allies in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. After this decisive victory, Limpet remains a fish and,

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in the epilogue (set in 1964), he is offered a Navy commission to work with dolphins. Limpet’s existence is improved by his piscine transformation, allowing him to occupy the gap between zoe and bios. While he retains extensive human privilege, he simultaneously functions to highlight the subjectivity of his underwater colleagues, including a hermit crab named Crusty and a “romantic” interest called Ladyfish (Elizabeth MacRae). As a human, Limpet is literally alive, yet he is prohibited from participating in US military action; in the 1942 context, national service means a life well lived. Given that the film was produced in 1964, however, anti-Vietnam War sentiment leavened its patriotism. At the film’s release, more than one-third of the American population was against US involvement in Vietnam. In the nostalgic film, Limpet’s unquestioning acceptance of his new species becomes a coded means by which to imply that the sacrifices of war bring their own benefits for combatants, no matter how drastically the shape of their lives may change. Porco Rosso similarly is set in the past, but by contrast does not idealize wartime. Where Mr. Limpet’s transformation is imposed upon him (although he certainly makes the best of it), Porco Rosso’s title aviator (Michael Keaton) has cast a spell to transform himself into a pig. The audience learns that Porco has been traumatized by the guilt of being unable to save his friend and fellow pilot in an air raid over the Adriatic Sea. Porco’s self-transformation is a public display of pain and guilt, and a visible statement foregrounding the dehumanizing nature of war. While Porco still fights after the war’s end against Sky Pirates, he does so on his own terms, refusing to participate in any additional bloodshed. As Daisuke Akimoto notes, the “Japanese people tend to regard pigs as uglier than any other animal, but ironically, Miyazaki […] strongly suggests that humans sometimes can be uglier than pigs” (n.p.). In light of some veterans’ difficulty in rejoining civilian life, as I argue above, Porco’s human-to-­ animal transformation becomes an effective visual metaphor for the kind of alienation, pain, and anger that Mr. Limpet, for example, utterly disavows.

Conclusion While representative of only a small sample of children’s media addressing war and combat, these texts suggest that, consistent with children’s literature in general, there is a deep ambivalence toward species hierarchy, as it is often simultaneously subverted and upheld to suit the needs of war.

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Because War Horse depicts historically-situated events, Morpurgo is free to valorize and memorialize animal combatants. While he clearly forwards an anti-war stance, Morpurgo does not push further to question why animals need to be “drafted” into the army at all. The Pokémon franchise similarly naturalizes the work animals perform for humans, mapped onto a context of performance and violence. In the case of Princess Mononoke, an active deprioritization of human superiority over animals creates a means by which to question the limits of justifying violence as a solution to boundary disputes, an echo of which is also seen in Open Season, which both espouses and disarms the weapons of war. However, this more moderate stance is undermined by Over the Hedge and The Incredible Mr. Limpet, which imply that fighting fire with fire, so to speak, is justifiable so long as the main hero achieves some kind of personal redemption. Porco Rosso, in turn, problematizes the very notion of redemption, as the cost of war on a personal level becomes too high. Taken collectively, this sampling of texts forms an inroad into acknowledging the slippages and limitations of how war reconfigures both the bare life of animal existence and the trappings of civilization. These texts suggest a framework of animal citizenship that can address species difference without hierarchy, enable children’s media to acknowledge anthropocentric approaches to animal-human interrelations, and challenge the institutionalized speciesism of the military-animal industrial complex.

References Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Akimoto, Daisuke. “A Pig, the State, and War: Porco Rosso.” Animation Studies, vol. 9, 2014. Web. journal.animationstudies.org/daisuke-akimoto-a-pig-thestate-and-war-porco-rosso/ Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Riders: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Australian War Memorial. A Is for Animals: An A to Z of Animals in War. Exhibition catalog. Campbell, Australia: Australian War Memorial, 2009. Backhouse, David. Animals in War (memorial), 2004. Hyde Park, London. Cavalieri, Paola. “Cetaceans: From Bare Life to Nonhuman Others.” Logos, vol. 10, no. 1, 2011, www.logosjournal.com/cetaceans-bare-life-nonhuman-others.php#_edn9/

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Cech, John. “The Violent Shadows of Children’s Culture.” Handbook of Children, Culture, and Violence. Eds. Nancy E.  Dowd, Dorothy G.  Singer, and Robin Fretwell Wilson. Thousand Oaks/London/New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2006, pp. 135-148. Clark, David L. “On Being the ‘Last Kantian in Nazi Germany’: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas.” Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject. Eds. Barbara Gabriel and Suzan Ilcan. Montreal & Kingston/London/Ithaca: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2004, pp. 41-74. Crowe, Lori. “Militarism, Security, and War: The Politics of Contemporary Hollywood Superheroes.” Dissertation, York University, 2018. Department of Veterans’ Affairs (Australia). M Is for Mates: Animals in Wartime from Ajax to Zep. Campbell, Australia: Australian War Memorial, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Desmond, Jane. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. DiMarco, Louis A. War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider. Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Hediger, Ryan, ed. Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2013. Imperial War Museum. Once Upon a Wartime: Classic War Stories for Children. Exhibition. 2011. Imperial War Museum. The Children’s War: The Second World War through the Eyes of the Children of Britain. Exhibition. 2005. The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Directed by Arthur Lubin, Warner Bros., 1964. Jaques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. New York/Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014. Kalof, Linda. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. Kofterou, Frosoulla. “Mickey Mouse Gas Masks and Wonderlands: Constructing Ideas of Trauma within Exhibitions about Children and War.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 60-79. Morpurgo, Michael. War Horse. 1982. New York: Scholastic, 2010. Myers, Mitzi. “Storying War: A Capsule Overview.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 24, no. 3, September 2000, pp. 327-336. Nocella, Anthony J., II, Colin Salter, and Judy K.C. Bentley, eds. Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2014.

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Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Open Season. Directed by Roger Allers, Jill Culton, and Anthony Stacchi, Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation, 2006. Over the Hedge. Directed by Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick, DreamWorks Animation, 2006. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA). Pokémon: Black & Blue  – Gotta Free ’Em All! Computer software, n.d., features.peta.org/ pokemon-black-and-white-parody/ People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA). Dickin Medal, n.d., www.pdsa.org. uk/what-we-do/animal-awards-programme/pdsa-dickin-medal Pokémon GO. Computer software. Apple App Store, 2017. Porco Rosso. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 1992. Princess Mononoke. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 1997. Ratelle, Amy. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Reilly, Jill. “The Real War Horse: How Warrior braved bullets, barbed wire and shell fire of World War I.” DailyMail.com, 2 January 2012, www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-2080962/Warrior-REAL-War-Horse-braved-bulletsbarbed-wire-shell-World-War-I.html Salter, Colin. “Introducing the Military-Animal Industrial Complex.” Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, et al. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 1-17. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Sorensen, John. “Animals as Vehicles of War.” Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex. Eds. A.  Nocella et  al. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 19-35. Stafford, Nick. War Horse. Adapted for the stage; premiered at the National Theatre, London. Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Šubrtovà, Milena. “When Children Die in War: Death in War Literature for Children and Youth.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, October 2009, pp. 1-8. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. War Horse. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, DreamWorks Pictures, 2011. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthuman Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

The Power and Potential: An Ecocritical Reading of Twenty-First-Century Childhood Alice Curry

It has often been noted that children’s literature is inextricably bound up with notions of power. Where the self-determining child has long been a favorite of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century authors—a child whose romantic bravery in the face of regulation delights the reader with the possibility of rebellion—such self-determination rarely topples the actual seat of power: those adults and their institutions under whose aegis children’s lives are minutely controlled and supervised. In a world in which the authority of the child is generally accepted as contingent upon, and subsumed beneath, such regulation by the adult, a child’s capacity to effect change on any lasting scale—the scale of change needed, for instance, to tackle something as large and as terrifying as climate change—must surely be brought into question. Where rebellion is perceived to be limited and transformation only ever conditional, and where children, to use Maria Nikolajeva’s phrase, will simply “grow up and become oppressors themselves,” children’s literature seems an unlikely vessel in which to

A. Curry (*) Lantana Publishing, Oxford, England e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_12

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nurture our hopes for the transformative planet-saving action of future generations (2010: 9). However, if the scenario looks bleak—why, after all, provide children with a blueprint for self-determination yet ultimately deny them the possibility of radical change?—it is only so if we accept this underlying premise that power always plays itself out in favor of the adult. Clémentine Beauvais’ recent call for us to examine more closely the idea of monolithic adult power over the child subject—something Nikolajeva terms “aetonormativity”—has produced interesting questions for ecocriticism in the ecocritical assumption that analysing literature from an environmental perspective can result in some level of transformative change (Beauvais 2015; Nikolajeva 2010). Ecocriticism is a critical practice concerned with examining humanity’s relationship with our planet—a dynamic that hinges on just such a perceived unequal distribution of power, in this case in favor of humanity. Ecocriticism can benefit, I believe, from a more nuanced reading of child agency and self-determination in order to complicate and interrogate, if not strengthen, that central tenet of ecocriticism: that we all have a responsibility to our planet. At the same time, any re-consideration of the power wielded by and against the twenty-­ first-­century child cannot fail to take into account that child’s time-bound enmeshment in an environment that is increasingly, and rapidly, being pushed towards a crisis point. Where ecocriticism can benefit from a re-­ examination of the adult-child power dynamic, so too, then, can children’s literature criticism gain from a reconsideration of the ways in which environmental factors and accelerating climate change are set to impact the scope and extent of any change the twenty-first-century child is ultimately able to make. The future—that as-yet undiscovered temporal space in which any such change is set to occur—is central to an examination of the adult-child power dynamic. Where much power theory in children’s literature criticism has focused on the ways in which “established power structures are interrogated without necessarily being overthrown,” Beauvais instead offers a re-definition of power that problematizes the aetonormative tradition (Nikolajeva 2010: 9): From the Latin root for power, the French language derives two nouns, used equally frequently—le pouvoir (also the infinitive form of the verb “to be able to”) and la puissance, an interesting concept that lies at the intersection of the terms power and potential, and of which acceptable English translations could be “potency” or “might.” Conveniently, both express very

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well the main property of this concept; that is to say, that it is a form of power intrinsically linked to the “possession” of a future. (2013: 81 italics in the original)

Where adults have an authority that comes with age and experience, children, Beauvais contends, “are mighty because their specific form of ‘power’ is dependent on the existence of a future for them in which to act” (2013: 82). This distinction is a useful one for anyone concerned with a child’s capacity to effect change in that future period of adulthood—a concern that we can assume undergirds any children’s book that lays claim to an edifying message. As Beauvais herself suggests, “there can be no rational justification if it is not thought, at least to some degree, that the child figure inside and outside the book can supersede the adult figures in scope and length of transformative action” (2013: 82). Beauvais’ child is a child brimming with potential rather than a child downtrodden by adult regulation; it is a child that, like a seed biding its time in the soil, holds latent possibility. Where the potential of adults to create change decreases in proportion to the time they have left in which to act, children are at their most “mighty”—to use Beauvais’ term—when their futures lie ahead of them.

An Ecocritical Reading of Our (Compromised) Future If Beauvais is correct in her assumption that a child’s potential lies in its capacity to undertake future action, the question must necessarily become: what happens when this future is not secure and when the very concept of a child’s wide open future is thrown into question? If it is the future in which a child’s power or “might” finds meaning, the current climate-­ related insecurities associated with such a future render such power only ever conditional and as potentially limited to factors beyond the child’s control as the power associated with that temporary rebellion against adult regulation so often found in children’s books. Thus, while Beauvais is successful in interrogating the aetonormative tradition, I would argue that an ecocritical reading of the adult-child power hierarchy reveals that the potential of the child to effect future change is essentially conditional on a power greater than any wielded by individual child or adult: that of a collective future compromised by worsening environmental crisis. It is a power over which adults (in the collective) have undoubted influence, yet

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a power that is impossible to tackle solely on the individual scale, thus taking it outside our current anthropocentric systems of regulation and outside the frameworks for individual self-determination most commonly offered in children’s books. A re-envisaged child-adult power dichotomy is nonetheless a useful lens through which to read two universal declarations issued by multilateral organizations aiming to set standards for safeguarding the health and welfare of both children and the environment: the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC 1989) and the Paris Agreement (aka the Paris Climate Accord, 2015). In the former, the preamble that “childhood is entitled to special care and assistance” posits childhood as a period of growth and maturation. The child’s “physical and mental immaturity” denotes a being in formation whose “evolving capabilities” will eventually enable it to “fully assume its responsibilities within the community” (Article 5; Preamble). In the Paris Agreement, by contrast, the environment is invested with a maturity comparable with Beauvais’ delineation of adult authority. In stating that biodiversity is “recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth,” the preamble directly posits the Earth as mother figure, due the level of respect accorded to a person of age and experience in a context in which time is not unlimited but conversely running out. Implicit in the CRC in one of the few direct acknowledgements of a child’s ecological embeddedness—“Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to […] the development of respect for the natural environment”—is thus a recognition of an adult-child power hierarchy that demands the respect reserved for a parent figure even whilst acknowledging the child as capable of effecting environmental change on a scale the child’s adult guardians have failed to achieve in their lifetimes (Article 29(e)). Environmental humanities professor Timothy Clark contemplates the impact of scale on our understanding of individual environmental responsibility: [I]f it were just a matter of my own emissions the very concept of a carbon footprint would be otiose. The carbon footprint of my life, or any source, matters in relation to scale effects—that is, the uncertain effect of there being so many billions of other footprints over an uncertain timescale, including multiple, often badly understood human and nonhuman factors each with uncertain thresholds of impact. (2015: 15)

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Uncertainty—here repeated three times in relation to effect, timescale, and threshold of impact—is a word frequently used in environmental projections and often treated as interchangeable with “unpredictability.” As Neil Levy warns, “we are not in control of the nonhuman world, because we are unable to predict with any accuracy the effects of our actions upon it” (1999: 210). If the openness of the future facilitates a “mighty” child, such openness also signals a changing climate, unpredictable weather patterns, and a lack of control over the impact such changes will have on the lives of those children set to inherit them. We may be tempted to see power in the “unpredictability” of the child’s future, given the immovable nature of the adult’s past and the contrasting openness of the period yet to come—a valuing of “unpredictability” and spontaneity asserts the hidden adult’s longing for, and deference to, an “indeterminate future” that is “both led and symbolized by an ideal child reader”—yet I would contend that this idea becomes problematic when the unpredictability of such a future is bound up with renderings of a climate that is changing on an unprecedented scale and exceeding all current systems of prediction and regulation (Beauvais 2015: 4). Ecocritics and environmental educators use the term “ecophobia” to refer to the fear and anxiety associated with environmental unpredictability—an effect created, for instance, by news reports of extreme weather events that portray Mother Earth as an apocalyptic presence taking vengeance on the humans who have mistreated her (see, for example, Estok 2009; Sobel 1996). In asserting that ecophobia is “a definable and recognisable discourse […] all about power and control,” Simon Estok notes with irony that “the more control we seem to have over the natural environment, the less we actually have”—a loss of power that can lead to feelings of helplessness, contempt, and inertia rather than the empowerment needed to effect change (2009: 204; 208). According to David Sobel, ecophobia is characterized by withdrawal from the natural environment and by the fear that what one loves about the planet will go extinct or be irreparably damaged. Any illusory sense of control felt in response to an unpredictable natural world—like that frequently found in children’s books about a child’s carnivalesque rebellion against adult power—is a feeling bound up with ecophobic renderings of a powerful environment with malicious anthropomorphized intent. The danger of any form of ecopoesis—of speaking for and on behalf of the natural world—is that an agential earth invariably takes on “human” characteristics. As Ulf Olsson notes, “In representing the silent figure,

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literature must represent and perhaps itself even perform a linguistic violence directed at that same figure in order to make it speak” (2013: 2). Thus, where the Paris Agreement uses the term “Mother Earth” in service of a positive discourse of agency and personhood that demands of humanity the same level of respect towards the environment that society demands of a child towards its parents, feminist ecocritics have successfully argued that such a discourse can never be fully wrested away from a hierarchy of power and control over an oppressed and feminized environment (see, for instance, Seager 1993). Donna Haraway, more recently, proposes resisting such hierarchies by “staying with the trouble” and “making kin” of disparate species on an anthropogenically damaged Earth (Haraway 2016). Taken under this aegis, the notion that children hold “a form of power intrinsically linked to the ‘possession’ of a future” is both illuminating and problematic. Humanity’s “possession” of the Earth—leading to an assumption of human dominance over non-human animals and plant life—is denounced by ecocritics as damaging to their campaign for a more balanced and equitable human-earth relationship (see in particular postcolonial ecocritical examinations of entitlement in Huggan and Tiffin 2015). Possession signifies ownership and proprietorship. It is a tone very much in evidence in the Stockholm Declaration of 1972—the world’s first multilateral environmental declaration—in which non-human life is termed a “living resource” and where humanity’s “solemn responsibility to protect and improve the environment” is for the sole sake of “present and future generations” rather than in recognition of any intrinsic value on the part of the environment itself (Principles 7 & 1). Despite contemporary recognition of the dangers associated with appropriative language—dangers helpfully brought to light largely through postcolonial scholarship—and despite this being a tone far less evident in subsequent environmental declarations, if a child is to “possess” the future according to the same conceptual schemata through which humanity has historically “possessed” the earth, this power-laden assumption does little to weigh the scales against a perpetuation of the systems of adult oppression and regulation that have led to the increasingly unsustainable environmental practices that we see in evidence today. By contrast, while possession of an object to which one feels entitled signals a complete assumption of power over that object, being possessed by someone or something is an act that involves an almost complete

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capitulation of power and authority to another. This latter form of possession—most frequently encountered in religious and spiritual discourses— is one that calls to mind the peculiarly spectral nature of the threat that hangs over the twenty-first-century child: that of being haunted by the actions of generations past, with consequences that will bear out into the future. Spectrality, as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren remind us, can be used “as a conceptual metaphor to effect revisions of history and/ or re-­imaginations of the future in order to expose and address the way certain subjectivities have been marginalised and disavowed in order to establish and uphold a particular norm” (2013: 309). Such subjectivities, they contend, “can never be completely erased but insist on reappearing to trouble the norm” (2013: 310). Like Estok’s ecophobic renderings of an agential environment lashing out against mistreatment, the troubling instantiations of escalating crisis—seen most clearly in weather events like tsunamis and hurricanes but also recognizable in rising sea levels and melting ice caps—are indicative of our past marginalization of sustainable practices and reliance on ecologically abusive anthropocentric systems. One might say, then, that the twenty-first-century child is haunted by visions of anthropocentric excess. Beauvais argues that the openness of the child’s future triggers a similar haunting, but this time of the adult who is troubled by “the haunting presence of loss, lack and limitations at the core of lived experience” (2015: 4). While this form of haunting may be envisaged as a deeply internal rather than external phenomenon, such a haunting presence is not incomparable to the threat of escalating climate change, given the similarly intangible nature of its referent and the impossibility of grasping the full extent of its workings on either the individual or the collective. Environmental crisis is set to produce “loss, lack and limitations” in the widest sense; loss of habitats and loss of species, lack of basic amenities, clean water and adequate healthcare, and a severely limited quality of life. As Timothy Clark wryly suggests, “It is as if critics were still writing on a flat and passive earth of indefinite extension, not a round, active one whose furthest distance comes from behind to tap you uncomfortably on the shoulder” (2012: n.p.). Possessor, then, yet also possessed: the twenty-first-century child is both powerful and powerless, entitled to a future that is simultaneously wide-open and fast closing shut. So where does this leave us?

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Looking to the Future: Child Power in an Age of Crisis The Convention on the Rights of the Child, as referred to throughout this chapter, is a declaration designed to confer power upon the vulnerable child in a manner that is compatible with Beauvais’ notion of child “might.” It is a form of power that rests in “the individual’s occupation of the linguistic subject position,” as argued by Roberta Seelinger Trites, and that is clearly signposted by feminist ecocritic Greta Gaard in the first of the “three important questions” she asks of children’s books in their potential to promote ecoliteracy: “how does the text address the ontological question, ‘who am I?’?” (Seelinger Trites 2000: 5; Gaard 2009: 327). Any such declaration relies at least in part on the belief in a child’s capacity for self-determination. The CRC indicates—especially in Articles 12 and 13  in their allocation of voice, subjectivity, and agency to the child— “Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child.” Article 17 of the CRC infers a further belief in the power of children’s books to model positive child development: “Parties shall […] encourage the production and dissemination of children’s books.” Both statements are consistent with Judith Butler’s contention that “power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being” (Butler 1997: 13). Children’s books can on some level hold power to enact the environmentally conscious and conscientious child into being. Children’s books may well be perceived as a vessel in which to nurture our hopes for the transformative planet-saving action of future generations. The contradiction, then, concerns competing instantiations of child power: on the one hand, children have the power and potential to effect change in that future period of adulthood, and on the other, children have only a temporary reprieve from adult power before perpetuating adult systems of oppression and regulation. Kimberley Reynolds hopefully asserts that radical children’s books are “capable of filling the minds of generations of young readers with experiences, emotions, and the mental furniture and tools necessary for thinking about themselves and the world they inhabit,” among which is the need to develop “individual potential suited to a future in which societies could be different in some significant ways” (2007: 1; 2). If we can assume that future global societies will indeed “be different” in some significant ways owing to worsening environmental factors, a useful first step for an ecocritical reading of child

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agency and self-determination would be to question the “individual potential” noted by Reynolds and the child “might” delineated by Beauvais. Might either theory help us tackle the enormity of climate change or outweigh the strictures of that illusory framework for self-­ determination that so often fails to unseat the adult power structures at its center? Children, David Rudd argues, “can be constructed as the powerless objects of adult discourse,” yet can also “have subject positions available to them that resist such a move” (2005: 25; 17). I consider Rudd’s designation of today’s “constructed and constructive child” as a “hybrid border country” a useful analogy for the compromised environmental future the twenty-first century child is likely to inherit. In this temporal space, Rudd theorizes, the child is neither free from the failed regulation of the past nor able to escape the unpredictability of the future (2005: 25). Children’s books will need to explore new subject positions and look to new environmental subjectivities cognizant of the problems today’s children have inherited and deeply aware of the challenges that lie ahead. The “hybrid border country” of the child’s compromised future is a distinctly uncomfortable space—one that will force young people from an early age to confront and readjust their most foundational relationships with the world around them. As Blanka Grzegorczyk suggests, “The suitably postmodern emphasis in recent children’s fiction…is on the marginal, the liminal and the unhomely, to the exclusion of a fixed, homogenous identity as it is imposed on the subject by the dominant culture” (2015: 1). Whenever any such fixed identity is brought into question—in this case, an identity based on the hitherto secure power hierarchy between humanity and its environment—so too are some of our most cherished beliefs about childhood. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis’ concerns regarding “our social order’s sense of unease with the knowingness of children” could be extended to the knowingness of the twenty-first century child, haunted by the dismantling of such securities and the concomitant uncertainty associated with its future (2008: 8). On the cusp of the millennium, looking ahead to the twenty-first century, the philosopher J. A. Hoyt cautioned that: [P]eople are often heard to say they are concerned about the kind of world we will leave to our grandchildren, but equally critical is the kind of grandchildren we shall leave to the earth. The values and attitudes imparted to the children and youth of today are crucial in building the political will for sustainable societies in the next century. (1996: 8)

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Hoyt flips our usual narrative, where we fear for what we have left to children, and helps us understand that our grandchildren might well embrace apocalypse out of their own apathy or ecophobia. Thus when Nikolajeva asks the question: “[w]hat happens if literary texts substitute child normativity for adult normativity?,” one might look to the alternative world-making in children’s books to provide models that resist this subject-positioning for the child. In texts for young readers, imagined and often dystopian futures can constitute an attempt to look ahead and to provide readers with the “values and attitudes,” if not the “political will,” necessary for dismantling unsustainable adult systems and ushering in environmental change (Nikolajeva 2010: 9). Dystopian or post-­ apocalyptic futures, in fact, have something in common with the Gothic in its capacity to elicit a useful type of “shock,” as delineated by  Roderick McGillis when he ponders that: [H]umans have always feared the rough beast and always lived in a scary world, but at certain times things get just a bit scarier: at the end of centuries, in times of war, in times of revolution, in times of rapid change. […] The Gothic haunts us in order to elicit not only the scream or the gasp— sounds that signal a closing of reflection in the instant of fear—but also to elicit the shock that prompts desire for change. (2008: 229–230)

Dystopian worlds set at apocalyptic junctures provide one set of “mental furniture and tools” for contemporary authors to shock child readers into such a desire for change and a barrier against the “closing of reflection” that would signal inertia in place of empowerment (Reynolds 2007: 1). Authors’ attempts to map out the hybrid border country of the future can only ever be drawn with a broad brush, given the unpredictability of our ecological future and the “differential responsibilities and respective capabilities” of children living in diverse national contexts and with widely varying socioeconomic means, as noted in the Paris Agreement (Article 2). Yet these attempts are indicative of the same faith in a child’s capacity for self-determination that we can recognize in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, predicated on a will towards attitudinal change. The question to ask of these texts is whether the blueprints for self-­ determination they offer the twenty-first-century child can guide the child as adult of the future to develop models for sustainable societies; necessarily, these models would need to envision principles and practices that supersede those of the regulatory systems established by the adults of today.

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Can the (knowing) child succeed where its parents have failed, despite the dangers of ecophobic rhetoric, the uncertainty of escalating crisis, and the widespread limitations predicted to affect its life and those of its descendants well into the future? Given that such texts are written within a cultural and historical framework of unsustainable principles and practices, they may well fail to supersede their contextual limitations. However, perhaps it is the case that answers to these questions hold less importance than the message these texts successfully communicate: that “the rules imposed on the child by adults are in fact arbitrary” (Nikolajeva 2010: 10). Thus even if we agree that children’s literature “considerably more often” confirms rather than interrogates “adult normativity,” the very fact that such literature can and does create an alternative space may be enough to prompt the acknowledgement in child readers that adult systems are adaptable and amenable to change (Nikolajeva 2010: 10). While I would argue, then, that child power is only ever limited and transformation only ever conditional, what children’s books can do is demonstrate to young readers that adult power is also only ever conditional. Future generations have good reason to reflect on the paucity of “mental furniture and tools” with which adults have supplied them to tackle our unpredictable future, and young activists like climate-change protester Greta Thunberg (and the countless environmental heroes and heroines she is spawning in children’s literature) may indicate a turning point in the narrative agency accorded young readers. As such, this reflection, while it may not provide a blueprint for radical environmental change, may be the first step towards legitimizing a child’s right to interrogate the unsustainable adult systems it will inherit in adulthood. Thus, for ecocriticism to benefit from a more nuanced reading of child agency and self-­determination, I would argue that any positive change in humanenvironment relations will come not through the adult “submitting to a specific form of power belonging to the child” but rather through the child empowering itself through acknowledgement of the adult’s incapacity to deal with change on the scale at which such change is needed (Beauvais 2013: 82). Child self-determination cannot be considered in isolation of the child’s ecological embeddedness or without appreciating the child’s contextual positioning within the “hybrid border country” of its unpredictable future. As such, I hope that ecocriticism and children’s literature can enrich each other in service of finding answers to what is fast becoming one of the biggest and most urgent questions facing the twenty-­ first century child.

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References Beauvais, Clémentine. The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press, 2015. —, “The Problem of ‘Power’: Metacritical Implications of Aetonormativity for Children’s Literature Research.” Children’s Literature in Education 44 (2013): 74–86. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Clark, Timothy. “Derangements of Scale.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change Vol. 1. Ed. T.  Cohen. Michigan: Open Humanities, 2012. N. pag. Clarke, Michael Tavel, Faye Halpern, & Timothy Clark. “Climate Change, Scale, and Literary Criticism: A Conversation.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 46.3 (2015): 1–22. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. http://www. ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/crc.pdf. Estok, Simon C. “Theorising in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2 (2009): 203-225. Gaard, Greta. “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy.” Neohelicon 36 (2009): 321-334. Grzegorczyk, Blanka. Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Hoyt, John A. “Politics for a humane, sustainable future.” Earth Ethics: Evolving Values for an Earth Community, Center for Respect of Life and Environment (CRLE, Washington, DC), Fall 1996, n.p., www.crle.org/pub_eeindex_ fall96.asp. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin, eds. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. Levy, Neil. “Foucault’s Unnatural Ecology.” Discourses of the Environment. Ed. Eric Darier. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 202–16. McGillis, Roderick. “The Night Side of Nature: Gothic Spaces, Fearful Times.” The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Eds. A.  Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. 227-241. Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. London/New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Olsson, Ulf. Silence and Subject in Modern Literature: Spoken Violence. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Paris Agreement. 2015. http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/ application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf. Pilar Blanco, María del, and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007. Rudd, David. “Theorising and theories: how does children’s literature exist?” Understanding Children’s Literature. Ed. Peter Hunt. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 15-29. Seager, Joni. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Sobel, David. Beyond Ecophobia. Great Barrington, MA: Orion Society, 1996. Stockholm Declaration. 1972. http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/ Default.asp?DocumentID=97&ArticleID=1503. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

Index

A Aboriginal, 5, 11 Abouraya, Karen Leggett, 33, 35 Abramchik, Lois, 115 Activism, 12, 31, 32, 42, 47, 48, 54, 96, 100, 111, 116 Addams, Jane (Jane Addams Peace Prize), 59 Advertisements, 10, 14, 143, 150, 153 Aetonormativity, 16, 254, 255 Agamben, Giorgio, 241, 245 Agassi, Louis, 4 Age, 1, 2, 6–9, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 86, 100, 114, 120, 124, 131, 141, 143, 145, 159, 165, 219, 223, 225, 255, 256, 260–263 Agency, 9, 12, 15–17, 19, 25, 26, 28, 32, 42, 57, 70, 75, 100, 121, 127, 143, 146, 153, 179, 219, 244, 253, 254, 256–263 subjective, 187 Aguiar, Jacqueline, 187 Ainsworth, Mary, 212 Aleixo, Ricardo, 188

Alyson Books, 110, 113–115, 119, 120, 127, 130 Amar Chitra Katha, 164, 165, 167, 168 American Indian Library Association (AILA), 89 American Library Association (ALA), 89, 93, 95, 97, 101, 110, 130 Amin, Rania, 53 Amnesty International, 36, 43 Ana Masry, 43 Andersen, Hans Christian, ix, xii, 150 Anderson, M. T., 10 Animal-assisted education (AAE), 209 Animal-assisted interventions (AAI), 209 Animal-assisted therapies (AAT), 209 Animals, xi, 16, 69, 151, 155, 195, 209–229, 235–238, 240–247, 249, 258 Animation, xi, xiii, 164, 165, 167–169, 179, 247 Anthony, David, 238 Anthropocentrism, 16, 209, 225, 237, 244, 249, 256, 259

© The Author(s) 2020 N. op de Beeck (ed.), Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8

267

268 

INDEX

Anthropomorphism, 132, 219, 224, 237, 245, 257 Apartheid, 5, 32 Apess, William, 83 Arab Penal Reform Organization (APRO), 48, 49 Arab Spring, 51 Aragon, Louis, 65 Arjun, 165 Ascione, Frank R., 227 Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), 89 Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), 89, 92, 93, 95, 101 Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), 89 Asylum seekers, 8, 19 Attachment theory, 211, 212, 215, 218, 222, 228 Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD), 220 Autism Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), 220 Azevedo, Ricardo, 193 B Backhouse, David, 235 Bahgat, 42 Baker, Augusta, 86, 100 Baker, Jennifer, 97, 99 Banfield, Beryle, 87 Barbosa, Geison A., 184 Barthes, Roland, 64, 65, 68, 69 Bauman, Zygmunt, 195 Beauvais, Clémentine, ix, 13, 16, 74, 254–257, 259–261, 263 Bechdel, Alison, 144–146

Beckett, Sandra, 144, 148–150 Bellamy, Carol, 35 Belpré, Pura, 86, 89 Benjamin, Walter, 4 Bernstein, Robin, 6, 124 Best interests, 29, 37 Bhutto, Fatima, 32 Bieber, Justin, 158, 159 Biller, Malin, 144 Biodiversity, 15, 209, 216, 229, 257 Biographeme, 63, 68–69 Biophilia, 16, 219, 225 Bishop, Rudine Sims, 85–88, 96, 102 Bittner, Rob, 124 Blackall, Sophie, 95, 96 Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA), 89 Black Lives Matter, 99 Bland, Sandra, 97–98 Blog, xii, 18, 31, 84, 90, 92, 95–97, 102 Body image, 154 Bologna Children’s Book Fair, 193 Book Expo America, 94, 97 Bookmobile, 86 Bosch, Hieronymus, 151 Bösche, Susanne, 113 Bose, Pradip, 170 Bowlby, John, 211, 212 Boyhood, 15, 167, 172, 173 Bradford, Clare, 6 Bradshaw, Alaiyo, 115 Brantley-Newton, Vanessa, 95 Brexit, 9 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 211, 212 Brown, Gordon, 32 Bruhm, Steven, 121, 122 Bryant, Brenda, 215, 221 Bus, Adriana, 193 Butler, Judith, 117, 260

 INDEX 

C Caldecott Medal, 59, 91, 95 Campbell, Edith, x, 84, 92, 93, 96, 97, 101, 102 Candlewick Press, 10, 110, 125 Canon, literary, 90, 111, 116 Capparelli, Sérgio, 185, 186, 190, 191, 199, 201 Capshaw, Katherine, 6, 85, 88, 101 Cart, Michael, 88 Case of Peter Pan, The, 3 Castile, Philando, 97 Castle, Terry, 112, 120, 129 Cavalieri, Paola, 241 Censorship, 49, 110, 119 Center for American Progress, 95 Century of the child, the, 3, 4, 7, 18 Charlton-Trujillo, e.E., 97 Chatterjee, Partha, 170 Chick, Kay, 115 Chilaka, Rajiv, 164 Child adolescent, 6, 12, 14, 18, 27, 31, 38, 122, 131, 142 baby, 6, 223 fetus, 131 infant, 6, 167, 173, 212 and “new adult,” 6 newborn, 131 preteen/pre-teen, 6, 36 teenager/teen-ager, 6, 7, 9, 10, 131, 141–145, 147 toddler, 6, 66, 174 tween, 6, 14, 141–147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157–159 unborn, 131 and young adulthood, 6, 131, 184 and youth, x, 1–3, 5–8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 31, 32, 49, 54, 83, 88, 94, 98, 99, 111, 117, 131, 164, 176, 240, 261 Child labor, 1, 7, 31, 176

269

Children of the Rainbow curriculum, 110 Children’s and Teen Choice Book Awards, 9 Children’s Book Council, 9, 92 Children’s Book Press, 88 Children’s Hope Scale, 7 Child study, 4 Choctaw, 10 Christensen, Nina, 14, 15, 144, 152 Chute, Hillary, 144 Cinco Puntos Press, 88 Citizenship, 44, 196, 249 Civic engagement, 42–44, 51, 53, 54 Civil rights, 9, 19, 32, 75, 87, 88, 90 Clante, Katrine, 143, 153–157 Clark, David L., 242 Clark, Timothy, 256, 259 Class, socioeconomic, 6, 7, 13–15, 67, 116, 172, 184, 202 and diversity, 147, 179 middle-, 5, 123, 153, 155, 164, 167, 168, 170–179, 194 and privilege, 173, 194 upper-middle-, 5 working-class, 5, 90 Climate change, 16, 229, 253, 254, 259, 261 Clinton, Hillary, 59, 74 Clinton, Katie, 202 Closure, 13, 63, 72, 92, 166 Coats, Karen, 261 Cobb, Michael, 130 Cognition and cognitive development, 213–215, 218–221, 228 Collins, Suzanne Hunger Games trilogy, 187 Colonialism, 5, 170–173, 176 Community, 12, 19, 27, 30, 37, 42, 44, 51, 52, 54, 88, 99, 121, 147, 256

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INDEX

Construction of childhood, 2, 4, 17, 37, 72, 174, 215 Consumerism, 15, 41, 47, 116, 143, 151–153, 157–159, 168, 173, 174, 186–188, 195–197, 200, 202, 225 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 19, 25–30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 43, 48, 142, 256, 260, 262 Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), 13, 18, 83, 84, 90–92, 94, 95, 100 Cope, Bill, 193 Cornell, Laura, 110, 126–128 Correro, Cristina, 193, 202 Corrie, Jalissa, 90 Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), 84, 87, 100 Crowe, Lori, 239 culture, convergence, 15, 97, 184, 186–197, 199–202 digital, 184 participatory, 31, 187, 196 popular, 17, 112, 187, 239 spreadable, 187, 195 Cunningham, Katie, 125 Curry, Alice, x, 16, 17 Cyborg, 2 D Dahlen, Sarah Park, x, 13, 14, 88, 94, 95, 101, 132 Dar al-Fata al-Arabi Publishing House, 42, 43 David B., 144 Death and loss, 16, 31, 59, 66, 72, 94, 98, 110, 121, 148, 215, 220, 240, 259 Declaration of Human Rights (1959), 43

Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 19, 26 Democracy, 4, 5, 12, 26, 30, 43, 50, 200, 216 DePalma, Renée, 123 Derman-Sparks, Louise, 85, 87 Desmond, Jame, 243 Developmental psychology, 18 Dewey, John, 4 Dias, Marley, 85, 100 Dickey, William Hobart, 189 Dickin Medal (WWI), 240 Didactic, 12, 44, 58, 73, 74, 110, 111, 113, 169, 202 Digital literacy, 183–187, 194, 197, 199–202 Dimaline, Cherie, 10 DiMarco, Louis, 238 Direct action, 9 Disability, 53 Disney, 89, 113, 165, 166, 168 Diversity, x, 13, 15, 18, 30, 34, 53, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91–95, 97–99, 101, 102, 125, 131, 132, 218, 229 gender, 85 Latino/Latina/Latinx, 90 people of color, 85, 90, 93, 97, 99 people with disabilities, 85 sociopolitical, 6 white/whiteness, 10, 66, 67, 83–85, 89–100, 116, 123, 124, 130, 149, 152, 155, 191 Diversity Baseline Survey, 89, 93, 95, 98, 99 Dixit, Shubra, 164, 168 Dolls, 15, 152, 196, 212, 219 Domestication, 16, 186, 236, 238, 239, 245 Donner, Henrike, 176–177 Donovan, Josephine, 211

 INDEX 

Doty, Alexander, 112 Douglass, Frederick, 99 Dresang, Eliza, 2 Drills, 8 DuBois, W. E. B., 86 Duggan, Lisa, 115 Duyvis, Corinne, 97 Dwyer, Rachel, 166 E Ecocriticism, 16, 253–263 Ecoliteracy, 260 Ecological systems theory, 211, 212, 218, 225, 228 Ecophobia, 257, 259, 262, 263 Ecopoesis, 257 Edelman, Lee, 117, 121 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), 87 Ellabbad, Moheidin, 42 Elliott, Zetta, 91, 98, 100 Elwin, Rosamund, 115 Empathy, 53, 87, 215, 224, 225, 227, 228 English language, 3, 15, 164, 174, 175, 179, 197 Environment, 27, 34, 44, 54, 87, 89, 142, 185, 187, 190, 192, 202, 212–214, 216–219, 221, 243, 245, 254, 256–259, 261, 263 Environmentalism, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 71, 211–213, 216, 225, 254–258, 260–263 Epstein, B. J., 123 Esposito, Jennifer, 110, 123, 124 Essentialism, 6 Estok, Simon, 257, 259 Etisalat, xii, 44, 53 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, 44 Every Child a Reader, 9

271

F Facebook, 102, 188, 195, 201 Fairy tales, 119, 142, 148, 149, 151, 152 Family, 5, 8, 10–12, 17, 19, 25, 27, 28, 35, 37, 46, 50, 52–54, 109, 114, 116, 117, 120, 123–127, 144, 146, 147, 154, 155, 167, 170, 171, 174, 176–179, 184, 185, 194, 197, 200, 209, 212, 214, 216, 217, 221, 223, 225, 227, 247 Fan fiction, 187 Farah, Amal, 44, 45 Fass, Paula, 7, 18 Fear, 31, 98, 119, 155, 157, 215, 221, 222, 226, 247, 257, 262 Feminism, 35, 158, 258, 260 Fernandez, Joseph, 110 First Nation, 97 Flanagan, Victoria, 119 Flynn, Richard, 19 Ford, Elizabeth A., 115, 118, 119, 128 Fox, Rebekah, 211 Franklin, Benjamin, 59 Freedom of assembly, 27 Freedom of expression, 27, 29, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 121, 150 Friedman, Hannah Ehrlich, 89 Frisch, Aaron, 143, 144, 148, 150, 157–159 Froebel, Friedrich, 4 G Gaard, Greta, 260 Gaiman, Neil, 11, 188 Games, 53, 155, 188, 192, 195–199, 201, 242–244 electronic, 15, 197, 201 video, 188, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 218, 242

272 

INDEX

Ganesha, 15, 165–167, 169, 172–175, 177, 178 Ganeshram, Ramin, 95 Garcia, Álvaro Andrade, 188 García Canclini, Nestor, 196 Garner, Eric, 97 Gender boyhood, 10, 15, 33, 44, 52–54, 85, 100, 113, 114, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 128, 131, 150, 156, 165–179, 185, 194, 223 cisgender, 132 feminine, 15, 118, 131, 223, 239, 258 gay, 14, 111–113, 115–121, 125–127, 130, 131 gender creative, 122, 125, 131, 132 gender-fluid, 132 gender-nonconforming, 131 genderqueer, 132 girlhood, 11, 12, 14, 31, 32, 35, 44, 48, 109, 118, 119, 123, 126, 141–159, 171, 173, 175, 223, 245 lesbian, 14, 110–121, 127–130 LGBTQIA, 85, 89, 90, 94, 116 masculine, 15, 113, 179, 223, 239 masculinity/manhood, 33, 48, 118, 119, 124, 164, 165, 167, 173 Mx., 132 nonconforming, 131 queer, 111 and sex, 113, 116, 117, 123, 124, 131, 142, 223 and sexual orientation, 116 trans/transgender, 111, 131 Genderqueer, 118, 122, 123, 125, 128 Genocide, 5 Genre, xii, 6, 11–13, 15, 36, 48, 57–61, 63, 64, 70, 73, 113, 119, 122, 142–148, 153, 155, 157,

159, 163, 165–167, 169, 186, 188, 189, 201, 213, 239, 247 autobiography, 237 bedtime story, 126, 148 biography, 13, 57–61, 63–75 cartoons, 149, 195, 210 comics, xi, 59, 119, 143–145, 159, 163, 164, 167, 188, 201 digital app, x, 15, 188, 192, 194, 197, 202, 210, 229 documentary, 31, 60, 66, 72, 73, 113 dystopia, 10, 11, 158, 262 fairy tale, 15 film, 188, 198, 210, 218 folktale, 193, 197, 201, 239 gothic, 262 graphic narrative, 14, 143–145, 154, 158, 188 graphic novel, xi, 141, 143–146, 148, 153, 163, 201 juvenile, 58 narrative, 199 new adult, 6 nonfiction, 61, 64, 74, 75, 144 nursery rhyme, 193 photography, 113 picture books/picturebooks, xi, xii, 14, 46, 53, 59, 61, 64–68, 71–75, 87, 91, 96, 109–132, 141, 143–146, 148, 159, 164, 197, 199 poetry, 198 poetry, digital, 194 realism, 113 television/TV shows, 15, 210 tongue twister, 193 video, 71, 179, 197, 210 visual sequence, 144 young adult (YA), xi, 6, 92, 95–98, 100, 119, 164 young readers, 13, 81

 INDEX 

Ghoneim, Hadil, 54 Ghosts, 10, 61, 67, 72, 73, 111, 112, 118, 119, 125, 126, 129 Gibney, Shannon, 98 Girard, Linda, 60 Girlhood, 14, 15, 31–33, 35, 119, 141–143, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 157, 159, 171, 173, 185, 194 Goya, Francisco de, 155, 159 Grandville, Jean, 155, 159 Grassroots, 49, 55, 99, 196, 200, 202 Grier, Catherine, 211 Griffin, Molly Beth, 84 Gruszynski, Ana Cláudia, 185, 186, 190, 191, 199, 201 Grzegorczyk, Blanka, 261 Gubar, Marah, 19, 74, 143, 147, 159 Guernsey, Lisa, 198 Gun policy, 8, 9, 38, 98, 148 H Halko, Gabrielle, x, 94 Hall, G. Stanley, 4, 6, 221, 222 Handford, Martin, 151 Hansen, Andreas, 113 Hanuman, 164, 166, 168, 174 Haraway, Donna, 229, 237, 238, 258 Hatano, Giyoo, 214, 220 Hatfield, Charles, 144 Hauntedness, 11, 14, 111–113, 119, 122, 129, 176, 259, 261, 262 Hayles, Nancy K., 190 Hediger, Ryan, 238 Heeter, Carrie, 198 Heller, Mary, 18, 189 Herzog, Annette, 143, 153–157 Heteronormative, 13, 18, 115, 122, 123 Heterosexual, 112, 117, 118 Higinbotham, Sarah, 7, 26, 34

273

Hijazi, 42 Hindu mythology, 163, 164, 177, 178 HIV/AIDS, 116, 131 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 150 Homonormative, 117–120, 125, 129 Honeyman, Susan, 112 Horning, K. T., 84, 86, 90, 92, 95–97, 100, 101 Horowitz, Alexandra, 211 Hoyt, J. A., 261, 262 Human-animal interaction (HAI), 209, 211, 213–216, 225, 229 Human Rights Council, 19 Hurley, Natasha, 121, 122 Huskey, Melynda, 114, 115, 118, 127 Hussein, Mustafa, 44, 45 Huyck, David, 84, 91 Hybrid, 143, 145, 159, 192, 201, 261–263 I Iconotext, 64, 65, 68, 69, 73 Image body image, self-image, 35, 67, 72, 75, 94, 110, 125–127, 143, 145, 149, 151–153, 155, 158, 159, 174, 179, 195 Immigration, 9 Inagaki, Kayoko, 214, 220 Indigenous, 5, 10, 168 Information technology, 183 Innocence, 8, 10, 117, 121, 124, 151–153, 159, 170 Innocenti, Roberto, 143, 144, 148, 151, 158, 159 Instagram, 142 Interactive, xii, 1, 63, 166, 184, 186–188, 192, 196–201, 210, 219, 226, 229 International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), xii, 87

274 

INDEX

International Youth Library (IYL, aka Internationale Jugendbibliothek), 87 Intersectionality, 2, 17 Islamophobia, 8, 98 J Jackson, Anna, 261 Jagose, Annamarie, 113, 117, 130, 131 Jenkins, Christine, 88 Jenkins, Emily, 95, 96 Jenkins, Henry, 6, 102, 186, 187, 195, 196, 198, 200, 202 Jim Crow, 5 Jones, Jan, 113 Joosen, Vanessa, 142 Jordan, June, 100 Joseph, Chris, 189, 190 Jung, Mike, 94, 99 Jurich, Marilyn, 60, 63, 70 Just Us Books, 88, 92 K Kahn, Peter, 216, 225 Kalantzis, Diana, 193 Kalof, Linda, 245 Keller, Helen, 59, 74 Kennedy, John F., 59 Key, Ellen, 3, 4, 18 Kidd, Kenneth, xi, 6, 8, 116, 118, 122 King, Amy Sarig, 10 King, Coretta Scott, 89, 91 Coretta Scott King Award, 59 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 9, 32, 59, 75 Kingsbury, Dana Lee, 114, 127 Kinney, Jeff, 145 Kinship, 2, 117, 124, 143, 147, 159, 170, 237 Kirchof, Edgar Roberto, x, 15 Knotts, Don, 247

Kokila Kokila (Penguin Young Readers), 89 Krappmann, Lothar, 29 Krishna, 15, 164–167, 169, 172, 174, 176, 177 Kumar, Krishna, 176 Kumar, Nita, 173, 175, 178 Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina, ix, 152, 192 Kwaymullina, Ambelin, 11 L Lamb, Christina, 32, 33, 35, 36 Lambda Literary Awards, 89 Lansdown, Gerison, 34, 37 Larrick, Nancy, 83, 96, 97, 100 Lauretis, Teresa De, 116, 117 Lawrence, Alistair, 227 Lawson, Robert, 113 Leaf, Munro, 113 League of Nations, 19, 43 Lee & Low Books, 84, 88–90, 92, 93, 95, 100 Lee, Philip, 88 Lee, Stacy, 97 Lent, John, 165, 168 Lepman, Jella, 87 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín, 146, 147 Lester, Jasmine Z., 116, 118, 123, 124, 127 Levy, Neil, 257 Lewis, John, 32 Librarians, 44, 86, 95, 96, 100, 119 Library Journal, 97 “Little Red Riding Hood,” 142, 143, 148, 149, 151 LoBue, Vanessa, 219 Locke, John, 112 Low, Jason, 85, 89 Low, Thomas, 88 Lu, Oamul, 193 Lubin, Arthur, 247

 INDEX 

Lundy, Laura, 28 Lupak, Aline, 184 Lystad, Mary, 217 M Maadoul, Fatma el, 46–50 Mabbott, Cass, 99 Madan, Anuja, xi, 15, 165, 166 Magana, Jessie, 65, 71 Mahabharata, The, xi, 163–165, 168 Malik, Farah, 146, 157 Malmberg, Sofia, 144 Malzoni, Isabel, 193 Manovich, Lev, 188–190 March for Our Lives, 9, 38 Marcus, Leonard S., 60, 70, 88, 93 Martin, Michelle, 91 Martin, Trayvon, 97 Masculinity/manhood, 61, 113, 116, 142, 170, 177 Mason, Derritt, xi, 14 Maughan, Shannon, 125 McClelland, Kathryn, 2 McCormick, Patricia, 32, 38 McGillis, Roderick, 261, 262 McGlashan, Mark, 123 McKean, Dave, 11 McKechnie, Lynne, 192, 197, 198 McLellan, Hilary, 189 McWilliams, Jenna, 202 Mediated experience, 171, 183, 200, 210, 213, 218, 224, 229 Melson, Gail F., xi, 16, 209, 217, 221–224, 226, 229 Mendoza, Paola, 9 Meunier, Christophe, 69 Meyer, Stephenie Twilight, 187 Mickenberg, Julia, 6, 61 Migrants, 8, 9, 19 Military industrial complex, 125, 239 and the “military-animal industrial complex,” 16, 241, 242, 249

275

Miller-Lachmann, Lyn, 92 Mintz, Steven, 7, 8 Mirrles, Tanner, 187 Mitchell, Claudia, 142 Mitchell, W. J. T., 143 Miyazaki, Hayao, 237, 244, 247, 248 Mongin, Jean Paul, 65, 71, 72 Montessori, Maria, 4 Morality, 213, 215, 216, 218, 225–229 Morpurgo, Michael, 236, 240–242, 249 Motawy, Yasmine, x, xii, 12 Motherhood, 33, 34, 50, 68, 98, 115, 148, 149, 153, 158, 171, 172, 177, 178, 197, 201, 256 Muldoon, Janine C., 227 Multicultural, 84, 88, 92, 101 Multicultural Review, 92 Multimedia, 12, 14, 17, 185, 188, 190, 199, 200, 210 Münster, Naja, 142 Myers, Christopher, 90 Myers, Gene, 219 Myers, Mitzi, 239, 240 Myers, Walter Dean, 87, 90, 100, 101 N Nabhan, Gary Paul, 218 Naidoo, Jamie Campbell, x, 93 Nandy, Ashis, 170, 172 Nation, 7, 27, 41, 46, 88, 164, 167, 170, 171, 176, 179 National Book Program for Schools (of USAID), 44 National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (Egypt), 43 National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), 209 Native, 5, 10, 18, 83, 87, 90, 92, 97, 99 Natov, Roni, 11 Neeve, Geert De, 177

276 

INDEX

Nel, Philip, ix, 6, 61, 74, 99 Neoliberalism, 43 Neves, Aécio, 187 Newbery Medal, 59, 91, 93 Newman, Lesléa, 14, 110, 113–115, 118–121, 125, 130 New York Times, 31, 90, 95, 217 Nielsen, Anna, 88 Nikolajeva, Maria, ix, 16, 74, 125, 145, 253, 254, 262, 263 Nodelman, Perry, xii, 19, 74, 132 Nonhuman/non-human, 2, 16, 155, 209, 211–214, 216, 218, 238, 241, 245, 256–258 Normativity, 113, 131, 262, 263 Norton, Jody, 123, 128 Nursery rhyme, 239 O Oh, Ellen, 97 Olsson, Ulf, 257 Orphan, 167, 172, 176, 177, 245 Ortiz, Renato, 196 Our Children’s Trust, 9 P Paick, Heawon, 94 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 42 Paola, Tomie de, 113 Parents, 6, 9, 19, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37, 50, 83, 100, 111, 113–116, 119, 120, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 156, 158, 164, 167, 170–172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 211, 219, 222, 227, 228, 256, 258, 263 Paris Agreement (2015), 256, 258, 262 Parsons, Talcott, 212

Participation rights, 25–27, 35–37 Paulse, Michele, 115 Peeren, Esther, 259 Pelayo-Lozada, Kanani‘opua, 95 Pene du Bois, William, 113 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA), 243, 244 People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA), 240 Percept Pictures, 165, 169 Perrault, Charles, 142, 149, 150 Perry, David, 188 Personhood, 26–31, 258 Perspective-taking, 224, 225 Pets, 16, 114, 126, 210, 211, 214, 215, 217–229 Phelan, Beth, 100 Phillips, Adam, 6 Pilar Blanco, María del, 259 Pilkey, Dav, 110, 145 Play, xi, 4, 14, 28, 36, 37, 53, 127–129, 156, 169, 173, 178, 197, 199, 201, 211, 213, 219, 224, 226, 227, 239, 243 Poetry, digital, 185, 186, 188–191, 193, 198, 199, 201 Pokémon, 237, 242–244, 249 Political correctness, 42 Posthuman, 2 Posthumanism, 16, 237 Poverty, 53, 185 Praxis, 17, 158 Pregnancy, 110, 114 Prickett, Matthew B., 38 Privilege, 14, 93, 95, 124, 173, 248 Puberty, 131, 142 Public school, 90, 110, 184, 193 Publishers Weekly, 115, 125, 130 Publishing industry, x, 13, 14, 42, 43, 48, 58, 84, 85, 88, 89, 93–101, 130, 132, 164, 179, 185, 191, 201, 202

 INDEX 

Q Queer, xi, 14, 18, 110–112, 116–131 Queer theory, xi, 111, 116, 121, 122, 125, 130 R Racism, 10, 53, 60, 92, 95, 97, 101 Radical change, 2, 254 Raman, Vasanthi, 173 Ramayana, The, 163, 165, 168, 179 Rappaport, Doreen, 59 Ratelle, Amy, xii, 16, 237, 241, 242 Real, Neus, 193, 202 Reality effect (l’effet de réel), 64 Reese, Debbie, 18, 83, 84, 92, 95, 98–101 REFORMA, 89 Refugees, 8 Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline, 142 Reimer, Mavis, xii, 6 Religion, 2, 6, 15, 30, 41, 42, 46, 47, 66, 85, 86, 166, 167, 176, 177, 179, 259 Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL), 94 Revolution, 2, 4, 16, 42, 49–51, 54, 55, 61, 130, 170, 246, 254, 255, 260, 262, 263 Reynolds, Jason, 101 Reynolds, Kimberley, 38, 61, 93, 260–262 Rhodes, Jewell Parker, 10 Rice, Tamir, 97 Rick Riordan Presents (Disney-­ Hyperion), 89 Rights, xiii, 1, 7, 12–14, 17–19, 25–38, 42–44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 75, 111, 113, 130, 214–216, 226, 227, 229, 236, 246 Risley-Curtiss, Christina, 213 Rizkallah, Adly, 42

277

Robots, 210, 214, 216, 218, 226, 229 AIBO, 226 Rofes, Eric, 117, 118, 121, 123, 128 Rollins, Charlemae Hill, 86, 97, 99 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 59 Rose, Jacqueline, 3, 146, 147 Rosenbauch, A. S. W., 85 Roshan, Hrithik, 174 Rosoff, Meg, 96, 98, 102 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 148 Rousseff, Dilma, 187 Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter, 34, 187 Ruckert, Jolina H., 225 Rudd, David, 74, 261 Ruia, Rajiv S., 165–167, 169, 172–179 S Saguisag, Laura, 38 Salaam Reads (Simon & Schuster), 89 Salter, Colin, 241 Sampath, Vijay, 168, 169 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 37 Sanders, Clifford, 213 Sanders, Joe Sutliff, 64, 70, 74, 75, 223 Sanskrit, 163, 166 Sarecky, Melody, 115 Sargeant, Betty, 188, 189, 192, 193, 199 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 61 Satrapi, Marjane, 144 Schell, Kallie, 101 Schneider Family Book Award, 89 Schook, Tea, 113 Schreurs, Kathleen, 192, 197, 198 Schwartz & Wade, 96 Schwarz, Rona, 87, 221, 222 Schwebel, Sara L., 19 Scott, Carole, 125, 145

278 

INDEX

Scouting organizations, 236 Seely, Jack, 240 Segregation, 5 Sen, Satadru, 170 Serafini, Frank, 193 Serpell, James, 213, 228 Serré, Alain, 43 Seuss, D. (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 38 Severance, Jane, 113, 130 Sewell, Anna, 237 Shaikh, Yusuf, 169 Sharafeddine, Fatima, 41, 51 Sharma, Dinesh, 171 Sharouni, Yacoub El, 51, 52 Shemaroo Entertainment, 165 Shen’s Books, 89 Shils, Edward, 212 Sibling, 114, 211, 212, 224 Sienkiewicz, Bill, 188 Simpsons, The, 110 Smeets, Daisy, 192, 193 Smith, Andrew, 10 Smulders, Sharon, 71, 74 Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk, 87 Sobel, David, 257 Social justice, xii, 5, 9, 12–14, 43, 53 Social media, 2, 10, 50, 92, 94, 97, 99, 100, 142, 145 Social role theory, 211–213, 218, 223, 225, 226, 228 Sony, 168, 198 Souza, Diana, xi, 110, 115, 127, 128, 130 Species, 2, 16, 49, 50, 189, 211, 216, 217, 219, 220, 225, 226, 229, 235, 238, 240, 243, 245, 247–249, 258, 259 Spectres and the spectral, 111–113, 119, 120, 127, 176, 259 Spiegelman, Art, 144 Srivastava, Lara, 191, 192

Stereotypes, 14 Stock, Catherine, 118 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 6, 111, 112, 121, 122, 128 Stonewall Awards, 89 Stout, Katie M., 97 Sunderland, Jane, 123 Sustainability, 12, 17, 259, 261, 262 Svonkin, Craig, 144 T Taher, Walid, 51, 53 Tahrir Square, Cairo, 46, 49 Tamagotchi, 218 Taxel, Joel, 87–89, 93 Taylor, Mildred, 87 Taylor, Nathan, 123, 124 Teachers, 27, 34, 44, 48, 87, 100, 110, 115, 119, 120, 185, 211, 228 Teenager, 187 Terrorism, 8 Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, x, 84, 95, 99, 101 Tingle, Tim, 10 Todres, Jonathan, xiii, 7, 12, 26, 30, 34, 75 Touny, Helmy El, 42 Toys, 65, 114, 128, 149, 195, 217, 219, 224, 239 Transgender, xi, 122–124, 130–132 Trauma, 8, 9, 16, 144, 236 abuse, 5, 8, 143, 149, 223, 228, 243 animal cruelty, 223, 237, 243 bullying, 113, 223 suffering, 236, 237 Trimble, Stephen, 218 Trites, Roberta, 260

 INDEX 

Trumpener, Katie, 111 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 243, 244 Twitter, 84, 94, 95, 97, 98, 188 U Uberoi, Patricia, 171, 173 Uncanny, 150 UNICEF, 35, 43, 48 United Nations, 1, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 43, 48, 142 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 43 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 44, 48 V Valentine, Johnny, 115 VanderHaagen, Sara, 60, 70 Varner, Velma, 93 Vernon, Ursula, 145 Versify (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 89 Vicq de Cumptich, Roberto de, 190 Vigna, Judith, 115 Viking Junior Books, 93 Violence, 8, 10, 16, 18, 19, 148, 149, 153, 185, 236–239, 242, 244, 245, 247, 249, 258 Virtual reality, 210, 229 Vote, 9, 27, 187

279

W Wall, John, 7, 26, 72 Ward, Ian, 27 Warfare, 236–238, 241, 242 Warner Bros., 168, 188 Warrior (war horse), 33, 35, 165, 240 We Need Diverse Books (WNDB), 13, 84, 85, 94–100 Wessel, Margit van, 176 Wheatley, L. C., 33 Wildness, xii, 16, 210, 215, 217–221, 224–226, 229, 246 Willhoite, Michael, 115 Williams, Joanne M., 227 Wilson, Edward O., 219 Woodhouse, Barbara Bennett, 6, 38 Y Yampell, Cat, 115 Yashoda, 178 Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), 89, 93 Yousafzai, Malala, 12, 25–38, 74, 75 YouTube, 142, 168, 169, 188, 190 Z Zanderer, Leo, 60, 61, 71 Zelizer, Viviana, 5 Zolotow, Charlotte, 113 Zoo, 210, 224