From the Editor Amanda Cockrell (bio) In an election year marked by relentless robocalls wanting to know if I would be more or less likely to vote for Candidate X if I learned that he/she ate puppies, I am relieved, not to say delighted, to have ten nice critical articles on children’s literature to contemplate instead. All the news is all around us, all the time, in a constant bombardment, accompanied by varying interpretations and leaving the suspicion of considerable gaps. And as life, art, and scholarship invariably reflect each other, these articles deal in varying ways with just that—with gaps and interpretations, with the unsaid, the unacknowledged, the liminal, the impossible to know, and occasionally the outright fabrication. In “Imaginary Conquest and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Adventure Literature: Africa in Jules Verne, Burmann, May, and Twain,” Florian Krobb looks at the “stories of daring and adventure in challenging circumstances, which still purported to inform comprehensively about the visited places, [and] were designed to enable young readers to understand themselves as inhabitants of a globalized world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ into a realm of the familiar and a realm of the strange that awaited ‘familiarization,’” the civilizing of its native inhabitants, and acquisition of its valuable resources, following on the colonial assumption, not entirely vanished today, that what “foreign” cultures really want and need is to be more like us. In “Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Closure in Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the Ears,” Brian Dillon considers the question of creating a voice for someone who has no voice in the historical record—in this case Harriet Hemings, daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings—and the difficulty inherent in judging the authenticity of that voice, an attempt further complicated by questions of historical accuracy. Accuracy refers to facts, including perhaps facts conveniently left out. Authenticity is the ability of the author to fill gaps between the facts with speech and events that are plausible, given those facts. Because Harriet Hemings left no writings behind, and because Jefferson “chose silence rather than any acknowledgement of his Hemings children,” the reader is left to evaluate the authenticity of the speculation with which Rinaldi has filled those gaps, and finds [End Page vii] it a slippery business, since even historical “facts” have been told to us in ways influenced by who did the telling. The essay following, “Coming of Age in a Divided City: Cultural Hybridity and Ethnic Injustice in Sandra Cisneros and Veronica Roth” by Suzanne Roszak, examines The House on Mango Street and Divergent for their depictions of social injustice and segregation and the pressure to forsake hybrid identities that shape the characters’ coming-of-age process. Roszak explores the lack of a direct voice in the pattern of “echoing without naming” prevalent in dystopian young adult fiction, and argues that because dystopias reflect our own society, but only at a slant, while they may “indirectly draw attention to and attempt to help eradicate the racial injustice that they do not acknowledge directly… [a]t the same time, such novels do not fully capitalize on the potential of young adult dystopian literature … because they do not overtly name and give real weight to issues of race and ethnicity,” using the example of the factions in Divergent, which are separated by social values, and not by race (their ethnicities are not given), and thus provide an incomplete parallel. A sometimes problematic view of modern Africa, and a less than complete examination of environmental crisis is the subject of Clare Echterling’s “Individualism, Environmentalisms, and the Pastoral in the Picture Book Biographies of Wangari Maathai.” Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, worked to help women reverse the deforestation that had caused streams to dry up and food supplies to dwindle, and forced women to walk long distances to collect firewood. The movement has since grown into an international organization and Maathai has become the subject of five picture books for children. Assessing what has been left out, Echterling notes how these books often focus so closely on Maathai...
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Jan 1, 2017
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