Introduction: How to Make a Map

Abstract

IntroductionHow to Make a Map Sara K. Day My finger travels the course marked in red Sharpie,the paper crisp beneath my finger. Sani pulls up a list of touristy things on his phone. It's not a road trip if we don't explore;Backtrack and get a little lost. —Amber McBride, Me (Moth) In her verse novel Me (Moth), Amber McBride follows the title character and her traveling companion Sani as they undertake a pivotal road trip from Virginia to New Mexico. Along the way, the pair stops at several historical landmarks, natural wonders, and manmade oddities, though the greatest emphasis is placed not on the places themselves but how Moth and Sani occupy these spaces with an awareness of their rootedness in the past, both personal and political. Throughout their trip, they are mapping their world—these physical locations and the roads and borders between them, as well as their understanding of where they belong. Along the way, they also come to the realization that there's not always a road to follow or a clear sense of how to get where you're going, even if you know where you want to be. Recognizing the value in exploration, Moth thinks, "Each pit stop [is] a treasure on the map." Like many road trip novels, Me (Moth) is about directions and destinations, but it is also about rethinking how lines have been drawn and by whom. What connects one place to another? What connects us to places? What connects us to each other? The difficulty Moth and Sani face in answering these questions is brought into relief by their awareness of the struggles adults in the novel face as they attempt to navigate their own lives. At the same time, the teens grapple with the ways in which those who have gone before may still shape our paths. Of course, these concerns are hardly unique to young readers; they're also crucial to the work we do in reading, analyzing, and teaching texts for children and young adults. The questions that launch a fictional road trip also resonate [End Page 247] with us as scholars looking across the landscape of texts for and about young people, thinking about connections, locating ourselves in relationship to what has come before, setting out to find something and help others who will come after. The four articles in this issue offer us especially useful examples of how to make maps, identify directions forward, mark paths to follow in our approaches to children's and young adult literature. In "Planted in the Shadows: Centering Sexual Violence in Prairie Lotus, Little House on the Prairie, and Oliver Optic's Hope and Have," Abigail S. Woodward reflects on the ways in which lessons from the past may help us approach current and future texts more intentionally. As Woodward notes, upon its release in 2020, Linda Sue Park's Prairie Lotus immediately generated critical response that focuses—in some cases, almost exclusively—on its role as a corrective to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. This article complicates that one-to-one comparison by revisiting the now largely forgotten work of Oliver Optic both to highlight the role of sexual violence across these texts and to urge children's literature scholars and reviewers to resist readings that ultimately flatten Park's work. In the process, Woodward follows a map set out by Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck that works to problematize the "reproduction or resistance" dichotomy that often informs approaches to social injustice and inequality. Wesley Jacques's article "Toward a Minor Lit: Reading Power in Douglass, Caulfield, and Breedlove" explores the powerful disruption made possible by thinking about children's and young adult literature as a minor lit. By taking up and refreshing Deleuze and Guattari's ideas about minor literatures in conversation with children's literature scholarship about power, Jacques demonstrates that "a minor lit speaks to the collective literary value of minor subjects, the many evocations of childhood and adolescence in literature as an assemblage of meaning that resists traditional interpretation." Moreover, by performing close readings that engage and destabilize familiar takes on works by Frederick Douglass, J. D. Salinger, and...