African American Children's Literature Research Articles

Teachers' and Black students' views on the incorporation of African American children's literature in an after‐school book club: collaborative and culturally based learning

AbstractIt has been suggested that culturally relevant literature can be beneficial to elementary school students' learning. Yet, less research has focused on African American students' perspectives of that literature, including aspects of that engagement that may benefit their learning. Therefore, the main goal centred on US elementary school students' perspectives of African American children's literature in an after‐school book club. There were 15 second‐ and third‐grade African American students from a low‐income area who participated in the 6‐week book club. The book club sessions were recorded, student artefacts were collected and a focus group was held with students. Following the book club, there were two classroom teachers interviewed along with an after‐school teacher facilitator. Based on the analysis, four themes were found. These focused on increased reading motivation, the role of cultural and personal associations with literature for comprehending, engagement in communal learning and improved access to culturally relevant texts. The results extend previous research on the importance of social collaboration and culturally relevant books to promote motivation and reading comprehension among learners and highlight the value of collaborative and culturally based learning for Black children in the American context.

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West The Great Tales Never End: Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien. Edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine. Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022. As J. R. R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien completed and brought into print many of his father's unfinished manuscripts. The contributors to this collection examine Christopher Tolkien's work as an editor, scholar, and writer in his own right. The book also includes many photographs, drawings, and reproductions of manuscript pages. This collection should appeal to anyone who is interested in the field of Tolkien studies. Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America. By Korey Garibaldi. Princeton University Press, 2023. Korey Garibaldi, an American Studies professor at the University of Notre Dame, examines the history of interracial publishing in the United States from the 1910s to the 1960s. For readers interested in the history of African American children's literature, Garibaldi's third chapter, titled "Challenging Little Black Sambo," is especially pertinent. Perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Folktales. Edited by Allyssa Mc-Cabe and Minjeong Kim. Lexington Books, 2022. This volume is part of a series titled Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities. The contributors to this volume examine folktales from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China, Japan, and Korea. The essays are organized into the following sections: "Folkloristic Perspective," "Cultural Perspective," "Psychological Perspective," and "Educational Perspective." The three essays in the "Educational Perspective" section are especially relevant for readers interested in how these folktales relate to children's literature and culture. The Quentin Blake Book. By Jenny Uglow. Thames & Hudson, 2022. Jenny Uglow provides readers with a fully illustrated overview of Quentin Blake's career as an artist and illustrator of children's books. She focuses much of the book on Blake's relationships with the various authors with whom he collaborated, such as Roald Dahl, Russell Hoban, and John Yeoman. [End Page 417] Copyright © 2023 Children's Literature Association

The brownies’ book: du bois e a construção de uma referência literária para identidade negra infanto-juvenil

In the period from January 1920 to December 1921 a cooperation between Jessie Fauset, Augustus Dill and W.E.B. Du Bois resulted in the publication of a periodical called “The Brownies’ Book” (TBB) the first publication for North American black, and not white (colored people) children and young people. The creation of “The Brownies' Book” (TBB) was a pioneering event in African American literature in general and, more specifically, in the field of African American children's literature, as it was the first periodical composed and published by African Americans for black children who, until then, searched in vain for material that included a perspective on their experience and history. This article argues that the TBBs were one of the harbingers of the movement called the Harlem Renaissance, constituting a children's literary materialization of the path towards the emergence of what the philosopher Alain Locke called the New Negro. What was being formulated was both the deconstruction of stereotypes associated with blacks and the active projection/creation of a positive identification with their local and ancestral community. This paper seeks to identify the post-WWI discursive strategies and practices of de-racialization proposed for “the children of the sun”, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, in order to stop seeing themselves “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1903).

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900

Who Writes for Black Children? is a compelling collection of scholarly essays and primary material that will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of childhood—or in book history, reading and reception history, materiality, ephemera, or interpretation. Examining poetry, fiction, biography, illustrations, periodicals, friendship albums, pamphlets, marginalia, and more, the collection analyzes the goals and rhetorical strategies of diverse genres published for African American children and (perhaps) read by them. Beyond offering a wealth of detail about the production and reception of numerous texts, Who Writes for Black Children? provides sophisticated approaches to thorny problems of evidence and conceptualization. Some essays reconstruct the target audience of a poem or story; others attempt to establish who read it, and how. Engaging influential accounts of childhood, the book complicates both Anna Mae Duane's emphasis on the image of the vulnerable black child confined to a future of victimization and Robin Bernstein's claim that African American children were denied the experience of innocence—a concept that became intimately bound up with whiteness in the course of the nineteenth century. The volume argues that neglected antebellum texts challenged such widely circulating assumptions about black children by attempting to inspire young readers to believe in their own capacity—for virtue, literacy, agency, citizenship, and political action.

Redefining African American Children's Literature before 1900

Redefining African American Children's Literature before 1900

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane Crystal Lynn Webster Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900. Edited by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. xvi + 384 pp. Cloth $120, paper $30. The burgeoning attention paid to African American children in the field of childhood studies has enriched critical approaches to both African American history and literature. This emerging focus has been marked by formal symposia, informal academic conversations, and new publications on topics in black childhood, a trend that represents a significant scholarly moment in childhood studies. Who Writes for Black Children? capitalizes upon this momentum and provides a valuable reflection on and contribution to each of these spaces of scholarly inquiry. The volume contains twelve essays and is divided into five sections. The final section offers a rich collection of literature for African American children authored and edited by both white and black writers. The twelve essays as a whole explore the formation of African American children's literature and readership by deploying new and innovative analytical lenses. In doing so, the collection produces both commentary on, and reproduction of, nineteenth-century literature that is an essential resource for scholars and students of African American and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane pose generative inquiries in their introduction to the collection by identifying methodological entanglements inherent within locating nineteenth-century black child-readers and literature. These include social trends that dictated who could claim the category of "child" and infantilized African Americans. Capshaw and Duane argue that uncovering black literature and child-readers destabilizes conventional interpretations of childhood, authorship, and audience, a task the contributors enthusiastically embrace. As such, their definition of African American children's literature is intentionally [End Page 468] capacious, including literature and writings authored by adults and children, African Americans and whites, and texts that African American children may or may not have directly engaged. The first section uncovers black child-readers through an engagement of African American poets whose contributions to the field of African American children's literature have gone largely unrecognized, including Lucy Skipwith, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Harper. Each of these essays employs "conjuring," a groundbreaking conceptual framework introduced by Angela Sorby, as a way to identify eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors' attention to black child-readers. In the process of conjuring real and imagined black children, Sorby aptly argues these authors "make literate agency possible" (6). Conjuring, then, becomes an especially useful framework to locate both black readership and historical black children. The volume's second section on schooling practices and instructional texts provides salient archival representations of both of these topics, with especially illuminating examples of African American children's voices in the historical archive. Mary Niall Mitchell's exploration of the letters written by black children who attended New Orleans's Couvent School powerfully demonstrates the political agency of nineteenth-century African American children in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of children, African Americans, and emergent black political thought. In part 3, the contributors examine literature authored mainly by whites that directly addressed and represented African American children. As such, each of these essays challenges the exclusion of such texts from the genre of African American children's literature, as well as the assumptions of presumed readers of white texts and their significance for African American children. Here, Brigitte Fielder provides a model for examining white-authored children's literature by analyzing African American children's interpretations of nineteenth-century narratives of human-animal relations, thereby challenging readings of this literature as a reproduction of racist values. The bibliographic essays of the fourth section summarize sites of African American children's literature and provide an overview of works published in the Christian Recorder. The final section includes primary sources—poems, essays, and excerpts—many of which are addressed by the contributors. This collection of texts lays the groundwork for the development of a distinct genre of African American children's literature. As is stated in the volume's introduction, most of the essays are concerned with...

Back to the Cabin: Race, Space, and Girlhood in Mary White Ovington's Hazel

Hazel (1913), by NAACP co-founder Mary White Ovington, was one of the first novels specifically written for black children in the United States. By examining the novel's spatial concerns, this article argues that Hazel was an important transitional text in the development of African American children's literature. As a transitional novel, Hazel reproduces the spatial layouts and protocols of antebellum plantations for two competing purposes: to reinforce enslaved experiences and to critique racial inequality in the Jim Crow South. Ovington, therefore, constructs Southern black girlhood in both discriminatory and empowering ways.

Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young

Reviewed by: Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young Courtney Weikle-Mills Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature. Edited by Timothy Young. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 280 pp. Paper $30. The subject of this volume, published by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, is the wealth of American storybooks and manuscript materials for children housed in the library's Betsy Beinecke Shirley [End Page 126] collection. Fitting to its title, the sumptuous book, which features fifteen essays and seventy-one images from published and unpublished children's works, is a truly delightful "story time" in itself. Its pages contain tales of dueling librarians and authors; collaborations between writers not best known for children's literature (namely Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps); immigrants becoming illustrators; and even "wayward animals," llamas who intrude into Karl Marx's famous analysis of Robinson Crusoe via an illustrated adaptation (79). Underneath these stories are implicit ones—about the importance of one dedicated collector, Shirley, and about the thrill of discovery in the archives (this reader would have loved to have been with Jill Campbell when she discovered the source of those llamas!). Unsurprisingly, the pieces, all written by contributors who spent time at the Beinecke, are impeccably researched. Several bring to light unstudied items, demonstrating their connection to key developments in American children's literature. For instance, Elizabeth Frengel suggests that the artist's dummies for Ludwig Bemelmans' Castle No. 9 (1936) display an early use of the concept Maurice Sendak would later call "counterpoint," the technique recognized by scholars as the hallmark of the modern picture book (49). Laura Wasowicz, curator of children's literature at the American Antiquarian Society, mines Shirley's "significant cache of picture book artwork" from the behemoth nineteenth-century publisher, the McLoughlin Brothers, to uncover some of the earliest American illustrators to be credited for their work (173). A running theme in essays by JoAnn Conrad, Pádraic Whyte, and Brian Alderson is the seminal work done by immigrants in the development of American publishing and especially illustration, which, as these scholars point out, built upon the taste of powerful Brooklyn librarian Anne Carroll Moore and Horn Book creator Bertha E. Mahony for fantastical stories. The essays attend to milestones so thoroughly that the collection could be used to support a survey for undergraduates. Essays cover a historical range from Puritan "joyful death stories" (Timothy Young) to classic picture books like Blueberries for Sal (Katie Trumpener) and Mo Willems's satires of modern parenting (Heather Klemann). Martin's essay on Hughes and Bontemps outlines the emergence of modern African American children's literature through the making of one book, Popo and Fifina (1932), with robust attention to context. I can also see the volume being well suited for graduate students, in that it models strong research and writing. Though Young's introduction does not assert a unifying intellectual contribution for the volume, choosing rather to emphasize the productivity of the essays' multiple approaches, the pieces taken together make a compelling statement about how children's literature involves a host of collaborators, including authors, illustrators, publishers, educators, librarians, and, of course, collectors. [End Page 127] The volume also makes an implicit case that children's literature scholarship is, at its best, an interdisciplinary endeavor, including archivists and authors, as well as scholars. Four of the essays are by curators at the Beinecke and elsewhere, and the contributors also include author Gregory Maguire and writer/publisher Patrick Kiley. This implicit endorsement of interdisciplinarity is significant because, as Beverly Lyon Clark (whose essay in this volume traces the illustrations of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women) has argued in Kiddie Lit, children's literature scholarship has sometimes divorced itself from the work of librarians and authors in order to make the case for its objectivity as a field. Yet the interrelationships that shape the world of children's literature are now emerging as an exciting focus of scholarship. Leonard S. Marcus's piece stands out in this regard, outlining how Bank Street educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, publisher...

Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem

Reviewed by: Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem Naomi Lesley (bio) Frontiers in Children's Literature. Edited by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem. Foreword by Kenneth Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. This collection of essays grew out of a project by scholars in the Children's Literature Society of the American Literature Association to investigate the concept of the frontier in children's literature. Between 2009 and 2013, panels at the annual conference each addressed a different aspect of the frontier, with the resulting papers compiled into this volume. Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem, together with the contributors, define the frontier broadly and creatively, including such topics as negotiations with unfamiliar, traumatic, or potentially threatening historical knowledge; student resistance to uncomfortable texts; boundaries between humans and nonhumans; and explorations of new techniques in illustration, archiving, and genre. Scholars in a variety of areas will find individual essays or sections of interest; intersecting fields include trauma studies, posthumanism, fandom studies, illustration, and Native American and African American literature. Clark and Salem's thoughtful introduction offers a reflection on the many potential meanings of the frontier. They begin with the premise that "childhood [is] itself a kind of frontier" (1), necessitating exploration and encounters with the unfamiliar. Thus they focus less on how children's literature addresses the experiences of children situated at literal borders [End Page 214] between regions or nations and more on the metaphorical resonances of frontiers and borders—how Romantic models of childhood push up against conceptions of childhood that acknowledge trauma and harsh realities, how children's literature faces the new "territory" of digitized media, and how children's literature criticism continues to stretch boundaries by incorporating new methods of scholarship. In the remainder of the essay, Clark and Salem seek to provide readers with a guide through this wide-ranging volume by identifying three themes shared by essayists across the five sections. The first is a concern with moral vision and hope, in which narrative traditions carry readers across "boundaries of silence" or historical amnesia (3). The second is a shared conception of the experience of liminality as a border region of its own, one that can alter or transform existing hierarchies and realities. Finally, they point to frontiers as sites of trauma and suggest that the shattering encounter with trauma provides a kind of frontier as it edges readers into new ways of seeing. Part 1, "Frontiers in History, Immigration, Trauma, and Resilience," includes a trio of essays. Anastasia Ulanowicz writes about paratext and visual rhetoric in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and her essay offers a particularly interesting discussion of how state-sponsored nationalism depends upon citizens' "remember[ing] to forget" historical conflicts in the name of national unity (15). Oona Hatton's "Defying Definition" provides a timely and nuanced discussion of the contested nature of national borders and identities in the young adult play The Highest Heaven, which takes place during the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s; her essay is a beautiful contribution to scholarship about border control. Melanie Koss and Nance Wilson outline patterns of emotional survival in young adult literature as exemplified by Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Ellen Hopkins's Identical. Part 2, "Frontiers in African American Children's Literature," contains essays by Raphael Rogers, April Logan, Katharine Capshaw, and Kathleen Nigro. Rogers's and Nigro's essays address issues of representation in books about slavery and the Civil War, including questions of how to represent and acknowledge brutal violence without making spectacles of black bodies. Logan provides a fascinating interpretation of an 1890 novel by Mrs. A. E. Johnson that argues for linguistic diversity and African American signifying practices as a type of border zone in which skilled practitioners of more than one dialect can navigate between dominant and subordinate literacy practices. Capshaw's essay is another highlight of the collection, bringing attention to three plays from the 1930s and '40s about female heroes of the Haitian revolution. She points out how the plays ask readers not only to stretch the boundaries of gender, but also to consider the transnational frontiers of the long Civil Rights movement, as Haiti meant...

Join the Club: African American Children's Literature, Social Change, and the Chicago Defender Junior

Join the Club: African American Children's Literature, Social Change, and the Chicago Defender Junior

From the Editors

Dear Readers of The Reading Teacher, We have big news for you: The International Reading Association (IRA) is now the International Literacy Association (ILA). We are excited about the changes for our organization and especially the specific changes in The Reading Teacher. Starting with this issue, you can see ILA's new name in print and the new look for the journal. You may be thinking, So, what is so different in changing just one word? Is that all there is to this big change, a new name and a new logo? Actually, these changes are just the obvious ones, the visible changes we see. Underneath the surface, that one word, literacy, represents a transformation for our Association. This transformation—or change, alteration, conversion, renovation, makeover, and/or revolution—is the result of our organization's huge rebranding effort. The rebranding process began in March 2014. This was no overnight project; it required thoughtful reflection before any action occurred. The primary focus of the rebranding effort was to consider 60 years of IRA goals and activities to determine key elements and how to leverage them more effectively for the future. This whole process of rebranding has been a carefully constructed and thoughtful endeavor. As part of the process, there were surveys of members and nonmembers and intense research that considered every aspect of IRA. We were thrilled that the research confirmed the Association's credibility as the premier source about literacy, premised as it has always been on rigorous research. We learned that our content, including our journals, books, magazine, online offerings, and conference programs, is widely sought and in strong demand. For instance, The Reading Teacher had a million downloads of articles last year alone. We were acknowledged for having partnered with and enriching the professional lives of hundreds of thousands of teachers and, through them, enhanced the literacy learning of millions of students. It was consistently revealed that the Association's reach is global. In this transformation, ILA will work toward advancing our cause of ending illiteracy in the world—an audacious goal, for sure, but one that ILA will strive to achieve through the important work carried on by its members. To reach this goal, ILA will support members with resources and journals that we know are valued. You will soon see us reaching out to new audiences to build on our core work with teachers, researchers, and teacher educators. ILA's goal is to bring the transforming power of literacy to all teachers, students, and schools. We want to collaborate with those for whom economic and social distress present formidable obstacles to teacher and student learning. We hope to develop solutions to many of the issues that surround literacy so the number of illiterate individuals is vastly reduced from the 800 million in today's world. We need you, our readers, to join us in becoming brand ambassadors for ILA, helping us to advance this important work in a needful world. You can share our positive new spirit through your teaching, conversations, and collaboration. Our mission, in which we hope you will join with us, is to empower educators, inspire students, and encourage leaders with the resources they need to make literacy accessible for all. As journal editors, we work to advance the mission of making literacy accessible for all by publishing peer-reviewed, cutting-edge practitioner pieces. In addition, beginning in this issue, we will prepare a brief From the Editors note that highlights crosscutting, key ideas within each issue. We view this brief overview as a means to opening a dialogue that connects you to the content in the journal and helps make the content relevant to your teaching circumstances. We hope that you will engage in this conversation and let us, and others, know how you used the content in your work with students. In thinking about all of the pieces in this issue, one idea that really stuck with us was empowerment. That is, we noticed that the authors in this issue share their work in ways that inspire practitioners. From pieces on engagement to collaboration, the authors provide meaningful practices in ways that value teachers as thoughtful and knowledgeable professionals. common themes across the books that speak in poignant and powerful ways to issues of identity, meaning, and agency in the lives of young Black boys. In doing so, I hope to inspire teachers with a vision of the rich and transformative potential of African American children's literature to make a difference for children in their own classrooms. complexity is not a matter of simply increasing the length of the books we ask students to read; it is about engaging students in deeper conversations, reading more complex narratives, and considering both the textual and visual aspects of contemporary picturebooks. Their column is filled with examples of challenging picturebooks, along with ideas for how to assist students in engaging with and through texts. A second strand of articles in this issue that empowers teachers is focused on collaboration in professional development. Kay Stahl writes on this topic in the opening piece of this issue, which is also a part of The Inside Track for volume 68: “Literacy Research and Classroom Instruction.” Stahl describes a successful approach for professional development (i.e., professional learning communities) designed to improve instruction in comprehension. In emphasizing the importance of collaboration, she suggests that “developing professional bonds with our peers as we increase our instructional effectiveness helps eliminate the isolation that is often an unexpected aspect of being a teacher.” technology should not drive the curriculum nor determine content; rather, technology should be ubiquitously integrated at every available opportunity based on the increased opportunities for expanded depth and breadth of student learning as identified by TPACK knowledge domains and overlap. From community to collaboration and from engagement to empowerment, we hope that as you read the pieces in this issue, you will feel the same excitement and inspiration that we did.

Black Male Literary Scholarship and African American Children's Literature: An Interview with Dr. Neal A. Lester of Arizona State University

Black Male Literary Scholarship and African American Children’s Literature:An Interview with Dr. Neal A. Lester of Arizona State University Joseph Kitchen In this issue’s multimedia feature, a scholar foregrounds his work in English and literature, reflecting on what it means to be a Black man in the academy and his experience navigating his identity in terms of research, service, and teaching in his fields of expertise. Dr. Neal A. Lester is Professor of English and Director of Project Humanities at Arizona State University. An acclaimed Black male scholar, his work centers identity, gender, sexuality, and race, exploring the roles and portrayal of African Americans and Black masculinity across a range of media, including topics such as African American children’s literature, Black folklore, and Black images in American motion pictures. The video interview features Lester discussing his personal discovery of his passion for African American literature as well as the intricacies of navigating his identity as a scholar who is both Black and male in areas of scholarship typically led by Black women. Lester delves deeply into the emergence (and absence) of African Americans in children’s literature; how the values, beliefs, and norms of adults are reflected in children’s literature and illustrations; and the impact of Black children’s literature on identity development for Black boys and girls. The video can be viewed on our Vimeo channel at http://go.osu.edu/SpectrumMultimedia. [End Page 129] Copyright © 2014 Trustees of Indiana University and the Ohio State University

Suffer the little children: uses of the past in Jewish and African American children's literature

Suffer the little children: uses of the past in Jewish and African American children's literature

Missing Faces, Beautiful Places: The Lack of Diversity in South Carolina Picture Book Award Nominees

Many South Carolina librarians purchase and display the books nominated annually for the South Carolina Picture Book Award. The purpose of this study was to examine the nominee lists for racial and ethnic representation and portrayal using Critical Race Theory and Rudine Sims Bishop's categories for African American children's literature. The results indicated that the lists fail to account for the diversity of South Carolina and the United States. Protagonists of color are rare, as are authors and illustrators of color. Overall, the lists offer children few examples of people of color as important members of contemporary American society.

Reading Ethnicity in Children's Literature

Reading Ethnicity in Children's Literature Karen Chandler (bio) Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children's Literature, edited by Michelle Pagni Stewart and Yvonne Atkinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ethnic Literary Traditions in American Children's Literature brings together criticism, interviews, and personal essays to explore culturally specific themes, subject matter, and forms in Native American, African American, Latina/o, and Asian American children's literature. Because distinct, culturally specific aesthetic traditions often inform this literature, it resonates more fully with adult texts from the same cultural matrix than with Euro-American children's literature. Not recognizing this distinction is common, according to editors Michelle Pagni Stewart and Yvonne Atkinson, resulting in interpretations and evaluations that depend more on Euro-American literary standards than the aesthetic traditions that actually shape many ethnic minority writers' work. Although texts by such writers certainly may bear the influence of Euro-American traditions, ignoring their "ethnic base" can obscure or displace the texts' motifs, themes, situations, and significance (5). This volume provides much-needed critical perspectives through which to apprehend the culturally specific forms, patterns, and themes in individual works of ethnic youth literature, such as Cynthia Leitich Smith's Rain Is Not My Indian Name, Angela Johnson's First Part Last, Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, and Rigoberto González's Antonio's Card / La Tarjeta de Antonio. The editors aim for the collection to serve as a springboard for reading, teaching, and writing about these and many other texts with greater sensitivity and insight. Of course, one could argue that delineating a gestalt or ethnic tradition can be reductive, excluding practices and beliefs that do not fit a conception of ethnic expression on which many scholars and nonprofessional readers agree. The case has been made in African American studies, for instance, that conceptions of African American literature that simply rely on black folk expression or representations of blackness are misleading, because they obscure the importance of other kinds of literature by African American writers (Carby 126-27; Jarrett, Introduction 2). Among these other works are Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, Ann Petry's Country Place, Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph [End Page 289] on the Sewanee, and Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," whose narrative priorities either do not emphasize the experience of black characters or lack clear ties to black folk expression, such as spirituals or the blues. Even with this caveat, however, the fact remains that racial emphasis and a debt to oral culture are identifying qualities of much African American literature. And it may be that these qualities shape African American children's literature more than other black aesthetics do. Certainly, the essays in Ethnic Literary Traditions acknowledge the riches of ethnic writing in general and should inspire more attention to ways in which texts reflect or challenge particular aesthetic traditions. In promoting understanding of the distinct gestalt of each group under consideration, Stewart and Atkinson divide the collection into four sections, each focusing on traditions associated with a broadly defined ethnic group. Each section opens with a celebrated author's aesthetic statement, either in an interview or a personal essay, and proceeds with a critical overview of culturally specific children's and adult literature and criticism attuned to the ethnic nuances of key literary works. The collection closes with a useful bibliography of primary texts from each tradition, as well as literary criticism on ethnicity and literature in general and the four ethnic traditions in particular. Both editors and contributors are aware that in many respects the designations "Latina/o," "Asian American," "African American," and "Native American" are politically convenient ones that do not refer to homogeneous populations. Yet the contributors seek to delve deeply into issues relevant to particular groups (for instance, Chicano or Japanese American) within a larger ethnic category (Latina/o or Asian American). The first section, for instance, concerns literature by and about Native Americans, a group that is admittedly composed of many cultures and linguistic groups. As contributor P. Jane Hafen remarks in "Survival through Stories: An Introduction to Indian Literature," "Within each [of these American Indian cultures there] are complex social structures, adaptive techniques and origin stories which reflect the moral universe...

Classic African American Children's Literature

The purpose of this article is to assert that there are classic African American children's books and to identify a sampling of them. The author presents multiple definitions of the term classic based on the responses of children's literature experts and relevant scholarship. Next, the manner in which data were collected and analyzed in regard to classic African American children's books is explained. Then, three categories are elaborated—universal experiences from an African American perspective, breakthrough books, and literary innovations—in which the African American children's books identified as classics were placed. The article concludes with pedagogical implications and conclusions.

From the Editors

From the Editors Julie Pfeiffer (bio) I spent last summer traveling with a group of graduate students in England. Our focus was "The Landscape of British Children's Literature" and our discussions ranged from thinking about how our physical presence in the landscape changes the imaginative landscape we inhabit while reading to investigating how particular aspects of landscape—shores, islands, gardens, underground railways, etc.—act symbolically in texts. It is perhaps not surprising that I now read the essays gathered in this volume with issues of place and space very much on my mind and with an old saying of my mother's, "where you sit defines the view," on my tongue. These essays lead me to reflect on the ways our interpretations are shaped by where we sit: both our physical location and the beliefs to which we lay claim. Like the well-known image of the old hag who is also a beautiful lady, these essays reveal that what we see first isn't all there is to see; shifting our focus reveals double images of character, theory, or genre. The nine articles and Varia piece gathered in Children's Literature, 38 are a tribute to the flexibility of vision of their authors. I'm delighted to imagine the many readers of this volume—each sitting in a different place around the world—joined for the moment in the act of expanding their view of children's literature and the world it inhabits. The volume opens with Andrew Loman's essay, "The Sea Cook's Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island," and his claim that, read in historical context, this novel "dissolv[es] meaningful moral distinctions between pirate and good British sailor." Loman's carefully crafted analysis of the historical context of Treasure Island identifies two divergent readings of the novel. From one perspective, it is an imperial romance, with an adventure plot that obscures the origins of the treasure and avoids "the moral stringency of realism." However, the novel's references to the slave trade shine a spotlight on the human cost of the treasure hoard. Treasure Island must thus also be read as "anti-imperial critique." John Hutton begins his essay with the apparent commonplace that words and pictures work together in texts. However, in "Walter Crane and the Decorative Illustration of Books" Hutton helps us to see that this notion does not originate in late twentieth-century literary criticism, [End Page vii] but was usefully explored by Walter Crane in the nineteenth century. Hutton finds that for Crane, "[l]ayout, rather than literary theory, became the organizing principle of his analytical approach," and that Crane's "printer's vocabulary" leads to complex texts that encourage multiple readings. We move next from Britain to the United States, and from discussions of currency and printing presses to the sticky subject of the hungry child. In "Gastronomic Utopias: The Legacy of Political Hunger in African American Lore," Susan Honeyman explicates the dangerous attraction of molasses to draw our attention to the use of food as an oppressive tool. Placed in the context of a variety of gastronomic utopias, Honeyman's discussion of the Brer Rabbit tales shows that "[t]he similarities between the cultures of hunger depicted in African American folklore and children's literature in general are striking, suggesting hunger as a common political theme for marginalized groups." But Brer Rabbit resists oppression even as he helps us identify it; he thus serves as a model of strategies for resisting the pull toward community when that community ignores the needs of its least powerful members. Eric Tribunella takes us from the rural communities of gastronomic utopias to the city. Tribunella begins with Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur and makes the convincing case in "Children's Literature and the Child Flâneur" that child protagonists of urban fiction are usefully understood in light of this tradition. Their critical gaze and sense of wonder allow the adults around them (including the authors and readers of their stories) to better cope with the trials of modernity. While the child flâneur may struggle with exposure (his or her success depends, as Baudelaire says, on "remain[ing] hidden...

Contemporary African American Children's Literature

What is transformed from myth, history, and family narrative in my own fictions is not a play-pretty to be held in the hands of children. My fictions for young people derive from the progress of Bl...