Sophisticated Children

Abstract

Chapter 1 draws together cross-written short stories and poems by Rabindranath Tagore and Langston Hughes. Produced around the first few decades of the twentieth century, these texts do important antiracist and anticolonialist work, operating from an intersectional vantagepoint that accounts for accompanying issues of class and gender and that locates their common roots in globally interlinked systems of oppression. Tagore’s and Hughes’s cross-writing construes their younger characters and readers as sophisticated children: as more than capable of confronting and disrupting these systems. The thematic and aesthetic echoes that reverberate across Tagore’s and Hughes’s work “for children” and “for adults,” irrespective of these expected categories of audience, speak to our need for more fluid and nuanced ways of understanding what children’s literature is and who it is for. Working from these textual examples, this first chapter also gestures toward the larger transnational aims of this book.