American Children's Literature Research Articles

Introduction: Latin American Children's Literature and Culture

Introduction: Latin American Children's Literature and Culture

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.

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray (review)

Reviewed by: Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray George Bodmer (bio) Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age, by Paige Gray. State U of New York P, 2019. Paige Gray's Cub Reporters makes the comparison between American children's literature and journalism beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, both in defining childhood and America's growing place and prestige in the world. It is Gray's thesis that these two genres fed on one another to create realities and new models for viewing the world through artifice. This discussion falls at a particularly appropriate period in our history—her second chapter is titled "Making News and Faking Truth: Richard Harding Davis the Reporter, and the American Youth." Each chapter focuses on an exchange between journalism and children's literature: Horatio Alger, Jr., on newsboys; Richard Harding Davis, as a newspaperman who turns to writing fiction for the young; L. Frank Baum's series Aunt Jane's Nieces (1906), which deals with female journalists; the Chicago Defender Junior, which published poetry and submissions by African American children; and, finally, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1992). It is especially appropriate to begin with Alger, who had a close relationship with the newsboys of New York City, in life and as subject matter for his rags-to-riches stories. Gray here makes the claim that as newsboys on the street made loud and exaggerated claims to sell their papers, they represented "journalists" at the lowest rung (and certainly we see a comparable focus on that lowest rung, the worst paid, on which industries depend, as we emerge from pandemic times). Significant to the writer's thesis here is the focus on "those young people who inspired and were inspired by the Golden Age of American children's literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years between the Civil War and World War I also approximate a 'golden age' of the newspaper" (xv). One frequently hears "golden age" used to refer to these times, but a greater justification of this term is needed. For example, the author cites the success of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, Louisa May Alcott, and A. A. Milne (xviii); few of these authors are American. Certainly, works for children during these times enjoyed greater success and allowed greater leeway in what could be presented (as likewise occurred post-World War II in American picture books), but a more precise definition is needed to [End Page 196] apply this to American literature for the young; likewise, the case must be made more clearly that this was a transitional stage for American journalism. This slight volume—there are approximately 125 pages of text—in five chapters, discusses five cases describing young characters who are actively redefining their world. The first, Alger, and his series of rags-to-riches stories are especially appropriate here because Alger portrays young people largely on their own, as bootblacks, messenger boys, and newsboys of the streets, the last helping to make the crossover to the journalism theme. The author next discusses Davis, who published Gallegher and Other Stories (1891), portraying a newspaper office boy who steadfastly tries to make sense of his world. Much is made of Davis's leap from journalist to novelist, but it's not uncommon for newspapermen to turn to fiction (e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Robert Cormier). The following typifies the thesis here: "Through his 'cub reporter'-type characters, Davis invites young readers to participate in the process of artifice, one that includes empirical investigation as well as innovative storytelling. Both undermining and commending American journalism, Davis's characters show the artifice of the newspaper, and in doing so, show youth's ability to unsettle and reconfigure the news literally and figuratively" (18). It is an inevitable part of narrative to shape events into story, whether for a newspaper, a novel, a movie, a drama; it is why we write and why we read. Gray's third chapter concerns Baum—not The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but the...

Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz (review)

Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz Dainy Bernstein (bio) Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, by Golan Moskowitz. Stanford UP, 2021. In Wild Visionary, Golan Moskowitz reads Maurice Sendak's works through the Jewish and queer identities of the celebrated children's [End Page 224] author, making a convincing argument for these identities as essential to understanding Sendak's body of work. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. Each chapter provides a comprehensive overview of one stage of Sendak's life, drawing from a variety of sources to piece together the narrative of the author's life. Since Sendak ordered all his papers destroyed upon his death, Moskowitz relies on newspaper and magazine profiles, published interviews, letters from Sendak surviving in the collections of those he wrote to, and interviews with those who knew Sendak. In addition to Sendak's personal life, each chapter delves into the social and cultural landscapes of the era, providing rich context within which Sendak's work can be understood. Throughout the book, Moskowitz traces queer history, American Jewish history, and the development of American children's literature. The first chapter, narrating Sendak's parents' histories as well as his own childhood, analyzes the effects of growing up in interwar Jewish Brooklyn on the author and artist's work. The chapter discusses the shifting models of childhood in early-twentieth-century America, as well as the shifting models of childhood in European Jewish culture, both of which provided the context for Sendak's upbringing as the child of European Jewish immigrants. The structure of the family and the child's sense of home and safety were affected as the American government and culture attempted to "loosen parent-child bonds in order to cultivate pliable citizens and consumers" (28), and Sendak's parents, like many immigrants, put their hopes for American success on their children. At the same time, relatives newly immigrating to America arrived and kept "Old World" Jewish sensibilities alive in the Sendak household. Moskowitz traces the effects of all these factors on Sendak's work, particularly his grappling with parental figures. The second chapter opens with Sendak's bar mitzvah at age thirteen against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Europe and his parents' worry over relatives and old friends as news of deaths came through via Jewish organizations. In many American Jewish homes, the specter of dead relatives affected the way family was perceived, and children were often viewed as both the continuation of a lost line and a reminder of all those children who did not survive. Moskowitz describes Sendak's tumultuous adolescence and his reconceptualization of the family unit. As his parents mourned dead relatives, their children were put into the position of comforting them, and Sendak's relationship with his brother and sister deepened to near-inappropriate levels. With his queerness becoming undeniable during this same period, Sendak's [End Page 225] ability to understand himself, platonic affection, and romantic affection became troubled. Later in life, Sendak would apologize "for his inability to understand boundaries between himself and those with whom he formed close relationships" (91). Moskowitz draws connections between this period of Sendak's life and his portrayal of sexualized parent-child and sibling relationships. The third chapter follows Sendak from Brooklyn to Manhattan as he begins his adult life and his career as an illustrator. Moskowitz begins with a deep dive into the postwar explosion of American children's literature and the vibrant culture of Jewish children's periodicals, contexts which shaped Sendak's early interaction with the world of publishing, especially as a Jewish artist illustrating Jewish children's books. Sendak became part of the queer Manhattan community, and his sphere grew to include both Jewish and queer friends and mentors who encouraged him to be more confident and embrace his own voice. Layering onto the previous chapters' discussions of Sendak's views of childhood emotion and parent-child relationships, Moskowitz argues here that "[t]hrough a focus on early childhood and his own coming of age, Sendak's creative vision increasingly blared and demanded dignity for queer truths that he could not always speak...

BILIJ: A Children's Literature Interactive Space from the Global South

BILIJ:A Children's Literature Interactive Space from the Global South María José Dulcic (bio), Valentina Rivera (bio), and Constanza Mekis (bio) The Interactive Latin American Library for Children and Youth (hereafter BILIJ, the acronym for its Spanish name, Biblioteca Interactiva Latinoamericana Infantil y Juvenil) opened its doors for the first time on January 8, 2022, in Santiago, Chile. This space was born out of a collective dream that began four years ago in Chile, where Latin American children's literature was at the heart of the discussion. A vast and diverse territory comprising twenty countries with their own heritage and cultural richness, Latin America is often talked about as one homogenous region. Naturally, this misrepresentation makes its way into literary discussions, where distinguishing Latin American identities can become troublesome and their depictions can appear as deficient or incomplete. Luckily, writers, illustrators, and publishers of children's literature have skillfully made efforts to put at the center of their works topics that affect Latin American childhood and have offered creative means to do so, achieving aesthetically and thematically engaging books. Although it is impossible to portray—or even discuss—Latin America as one uniform, unvaried region, it is still possible to find the common threads weaving this extensive identity while giving visibility to each territory. Furthermore, the mostly white and anglophonic exposure within children's literature in the area for many decades has resulted in a lack of mirrors (using Rudine Sims Bishop's useful analogy) and a lack of openings to understand their experiences and to be seen. Needless to say, this affects not only Latin American children, but also all the minority groups outside dominant social groups. All of those experiences, feelings, cultural differences, and knowledges that were, for the most part, suppressed or ignored in children's traditional literature have made their way into a recent trend in publishing and research, where efforts are being made to stray away from ethnocentric ways to read the world through children's books. This challenge instills the urgency for a regional library that could bring together the work of creators of the region and strengthen the sense of belonging to a common culture and identity. It started with the creation of Fundación Palabra, a nonprofit reading-promotion organization aiming to reinforce the bond between young people and reading, culture, science, and art through dialogue and enjoyment with books and cultural objects from Latin America and the world. Within four years, the foundation started BILIJ—a lively space driven by interactivity and the Latin American spirit. The interactivity is fostered through engagement [End Page 69] with different expressions, allowing readers active participation in their reading. Through this interdisciplinary reading space, readers can freely and autonomously explore reading as a wider practice. BILIJ also seeks to highlight the Latin American spirit by means of catalog, artifacts, and encounters with music, art, dance, storytelling, and creative writing. To date, BILIJ has registered 776 members and 5,204 book loans within its first year of operation. Latin America: Its (In)visibility within Children's Books As challenging as it might be, our committed work in and toward BILIJ has led us to identify some commonalities in current Latin American's children's literature, topics and issues that go beyond the mythification and exotification of the territory, which for so long have resulted in reducing Latin American culture to ancestral Indigenousness. In turn, recent publications have brought attention to trends and matters concerned with what Latin America actually faces in the current time. More representation has been given to migration, relationships with the environment and nature, scarcity of resources, and local flora and fauna, and has even delved into political and social crises, present and past. In order to show a wide picture of its state of art, we deem it important to highlight some authors and illustrators, considering the positive reaction from our young readers and their families, along with their ability to portray different current issues. Intra-regional migration and commercial and cultural exchanges have shaped Latin America's characteristics for most of its history. Recent political and social crises have contributed to more significant migration waves, as displacement, labor and...

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden Age by Paige Gray

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).

Exploring Wordsworth’s Romantic Image of Childhood in the Early 19th Century American Children’s Literature with Respect to Wordsworth’s Major Poems

This study investigates three short stories which demonstrate the extent to which children's literature was influenced by romantic thoughts. Additionally, this article reflects on Wordsworth's image of childhood in the light of a state of an innocent mind. In fact, the main concern of the discussion focuses on the promotion of the Romantic image of childhood with respect to Wordsworth as a representative of the Romantic Movement who emphasizes the importance of the aesthetic and delightful aspects of children's education. Therefore, special attention is given to the Romantic image of childhood in order to provide a context for a better understanding of Romantic traces in American Children's Literature.

Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley

Reviewed by: Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley Andrea Y. Adomako Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education. By Naomi Lesley. New York: Routledge, 2017. viii + 191 pp. Paper $49.95. In recent years, children's and young adult literature has reemerged as a powerful genre that allows scholars to reexamine historical periods and racial formation in local and global contexts. Lesley's Fictions of Integration continues this conversation through investigating children's literature as a gateway into the cultural memory of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. Lesley examines how these stories function within the history of race within the United States. Through her interdisciplinary archival endeavor, Lesley presents a volume that centers questions of racial representation as well as pedagogy. She argues that "the school setting operates within children's books much as it does in real life" and links novels for youth to questions of representation, citizenship, and the nation-state (6). Lesley shows through the genres of school stories, historical fiction, and contemporary realism that literature for children offers both a practical and rhetorical (re)framing of desegregation, educational reform, and broader issues of race. She poses the extremely relevant question: "what [are] students in the post-Brown era told about the racial dynamics of their own classrooms through the books aimed specifically at them?" (156) To represent the coexisting, contradictory, and complicated issue of school desegregation, Lesley takes an unconventional, broad approach throughout the book. She focuses not only on children's novels that explicitly address Brown, but also on those influenced by the Brown decision. Her titles include books by African American and non–African American authors, and her chapters are not organized chronologically but are instead grouped according to the texts' lens on desegregation. Chapter 1 reflects on the direct aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the experiences of the first Black students to enter predominately white schools. These stories tended to promote a utopian education through a [End Page 125] "successful" and "hopeful" school year. Chapter 2 moves beyond these optimistic narratives to discuss desegregation novels that emphasize discontent with desegregation as expressed in several Black communities. As a part of the backlash, chapter 3 critically engagees with the use of disability diagnosis as a means to sort and segregate students post-Brown. This form of re-segregation is depicted in a small handful of texts aimed at addressing both race and disability. Chapter 4 analyzes those novels that do not directly engage or cite Brown but are clearly impacted by Brown's unfinished goals in the neoliberal moment. All of the chapters attempt to underscore the dynamics of control and resistance that the selected authors account for in their narrations of ideological shifts within the schools' system. The chosen novels and lenses range widely, but collectively provide nuance and balance as each chapter beautifully addresses one element of the Brown v. Board of Education legacy. Despite the array of texts, Fictions of Integration isolates desegregation from other important civil rights issues, a critique Lesley addresses. She is aware that her "narrow approach" may leave room to explore school integration over time but forecloses discussions that link desegregation to the plethora of other civil rights issues represented for young readers, including but not limited to gentrification, children's participations in protests, and interracial dating (14). However, Lesley does present an opening for scholars and authors to explore schools as indoctrinating and homogenizing institutions post-Brown and how this relates to others facets of the civil rights movement. In a moment where lists of anti-racist children's books are being circulated on social media and children's literature is being elevated and understood as an inherently political category—thanks to the work of scholars such as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Katherine Capshaw, Philip Nel—Fictions of Integration helps to contextualize the need to historicize and critically engage with literature for children, especially regarding education. As Lesley writes, "given the troubled history of school desegregation, we should reflect on the value of continued, persistent failure—on why continuing...

The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter by Leonard Marcus

Reviewed by: The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter by Leonard Marcus Zhang Shengzhen (bio) The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter. By Leonard Marcus. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. A favorite childhood book can leave a lasting impression, but as adults we tend to shelve such memories. For fourteen months beginning in June 2013, more than half a million visitors to the New York Public Library viewed an exhibition about the role that children's books play in world culture and in our lives. After the exhibition closed, attendees clamored for a catalog of The ABC of It as well as for exhibition curator and children's literature historian Leonard Marcus's insightful, wry commentary about the objects on display. Now with this [End Page 296] book, a collaboration between the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Collection and Marcus, the wide-ranging research and underlying vision of that exhibit can be experienced anywhere. With Marcus's rigorous intellectual framework and insightful descriptions, this book explores the impact of children's literature on society over time and across cultures. More than 400 full-color images of original artwork and archival materials illustrate the text, which is divided into four parts: "Visions of Childhood," "Off the Shelf: Giving and Getting Books," "The Art of the Picture Book," and "Coda: From the Kerlan." "Visions of Childhood" considers childhood as a cultural construct that has prompted the creation of not just one children's literature tradition, but many. Marcus argues that "behind every children's book is a vision of childhood: a shared understanding of what growing up is all about" (5). Concepts of childhood vary in fundamental ways from culture to culture and over time. The New-England Primer, first published in Boston around 1690, addressed the spiritual education of the children of the North American colonists who believed in original sin. The notion of the "Rational Child" developed by John Locke was a repudiation of the Puritans' vision. In the writings and artwork, spanning two centuries, of William Blake, Hans Christian Andersen, E. B. White, and Maurice Sendak, the child is a Romantic hero who perceives and at times also reveals the truth of life. The rise of developmental psychology inspired the vision of the "Progressive Child." Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon and Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon put into practice this new psychological understanding of how children experience the world. A discussion of the "Citizen Child" considers the role of children's books as propaganda, nation-building tools, and ultimately as building blocks of cultural identity. Part 2, "Off the Shelf: Giving and Getting Books," focuses on the kinds of books that children have traditionally gained access to via their adult gatekeepers, and certain kinds of reading material children have found on their own. During the nineteenth century, with the emergence in the West of a prosperous middle class, a vibrant market developed for holiday gift books characterized by literary merit and visual splendor. Children's free access to public libraries, which became near-universal in the US after 1900, opened a new chapter in the democratization of reading and literacy; pioneered in America, children's library service has been emulated internationally. Yet some of the most beloved children's books were not those that the librarians and other adult authorities championed. To the amazement—and horror—of the experts, it was Edward Stratemeyer, the turn-of-the-last-century American author and entrepreneur whose army of ghostwriters produced vast quantities of formulaic series fiction, who captured the hearts of America's young readers. In the 1930s, comic books proved to be equally popular and controversial: loved by children but regarded as crude and possibly dangerous by the adults. Considering [End Page 297] the extreme contrasts in the types of reading matter that adults and children have sometimes favored, it is not surprising that censorship, a topic that Marcus discusses in depth, became a persistent factor as American children's literature evolved and flourished. "The Art of the Picture Book" features a selection of memorable illustrations and argues convincingly that underlying the seeming simplicity of picture books is a high degree of...

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden by Paige Gray

Cub Reporters: American Children's Literature and Journalism in the Golden by Paige Gray

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

"What Goes Up Must Come Down": The Twenty-One Balloons and the Politics of Lighter-Than-Air Fantasy

Reading William Pène du Bois's 1947 fantasy adventure The Twenty-One Balloons alongside related texts by R. M. Ballantyne, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jules Verne—works steeped in questions of imperialism and slavery—this article examines the Newbery novel's disingenuous erasure of colonialism. With an empty island ripe for American settlers and high-tech inventions that make work obsolete, the novel reflects the way American children's literature more broadly relies upon the illusion that dispossession, exploitation, and enslavement do not exist. Yet those ills are everywhere beneath the surface of Pène du Bois's happy fantasy: though the novel elides colonialism's implications, it cannot escape them.

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

Postcolonial Approaches To Latin American Children's Literature by Ann B. González

Postcolonial Approaches To Latin American Children's Literature by Ann B. González

Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley

Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley

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...