Caribbean Children's LIterature, Volume 2

Abstract

This volume, part of a two-volume anthology, offers a range of critical approaches for analyzing children’s literature written by writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. The opening chapter provides the first ever comprehensive coverage of picture books written or translated into English by authors from the region. Additionally, the volume includes analyses of young adult books by well established authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, and Rabindranath Maharaj, and emerging voices such as Ibi Zoboi and Imam Baksh. The works of Francophone writers such as Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau also receive coverage. Theoretical models for analyzing such texts—ecopedagogy, historical and discourse analysis, comic book studies, and disaster theory—open up rich paths for understanding such texts. Teachers at elementary, secondary, and university levels, librarians seeking to build representative collections, or scholars in the field of Caribbean or world literatures can benefit from such a collection of essays. Teachers and administrators of teacher preparatory programs within the region may find especially useful chapters on ecopedagogy and disaster narratives of the Anglophone Caribbean. Such narratives can offer children of the region ways to process and respond to disasters (such as hurricanes and floods), understand global systems of environmental change, and explore the mythological stories that inform environmental literacy. The authors within this volume have created a platform for understanding and disseminating information about the richness of Caribbean children’s that belong in the hands of children, both in the region and abroad.