PLENARY SPEAKERS

Mexican Children’s Literature: Borderlands and Bridges

Evelyn Arizpe
University of Glasgow

Although there exists a large historical corpus of children’s literature published in Mexico before the end of the 20th century, the 1980s marks the beginning of a new era in which text production, institutional projects and children’s literature scholarship take a more confident step that breaks away from the territory of pedagogy and didacticism. These last 40-50 years have witnessed the foundation of the Mexican section of IBBY; the establishment of one of the largest children’s book fairs in the world; the emergence of prize-winning authors and illustrators as well as of editors who encouraged the publication of both international translations and national talent, including indigenous creators. Over the decades, interest in the field has increased, as evidenced by the development of practical and theoretical courses and workshops in universities, cultural and government organisations, leading to scholarly publications and postgraduate thesis as well as journals and blogs. The momentum led to the hosting, in 2014, of the international IBBY congress by IBBY Mexico, which gathered 971 participants from 66 different countries. However, a decade later, this momentum seems to have been halted by barriers raised by escalating costs and clashing ideologies. Struggles to keep moving forward have become mired in economic, educational and cultural policies as well as more general issues around precarity, violence and migration. And yet, despite these barriers, the work of individuals and groups deeply invested in both scholarship and praxis around children’s literature, pushes ahead – the latter often within communities experiencing these challenges. This talk will present a case study that has both national and transnational implications for the development of the field of children’s literature more widely, as it proposes procreative and collaborative ways of surmounting barriers and crossing borders. It is based on the perspectives of experts involved in the field and a personal journey of scholarship from Mexico to the United Kingdom throughout which one of the aims has been to build bridges, not only between these two countries, but also more widely between Latin American and a wider international community.

Creative Counterventions: Liminality, Positionality, and Activism in Dutch-Language
Children’s Literature (Studies)
Sara Van den Bossche

Trigger warning: This talk will address derogatory, racist, and dehumanising world views.

In Dutch and Flemish children’s culture, early December is a highlight for many, due to the tradition of Saint Nicholas, who rewards obedient children with presents and sweets. This lore has proven highly controversial, though, because of the traditional depiction of Saint Nicholas’ sidekick, Pete, as a Black servant. As it reproduces a racist, colonial, and exclusionary understanding of the world, this tradition has been protested vehemently.

One form of dissent is the figure of Queen Nikkolah, created and portrayed by activist Laura Nsengiyumva. Queen Nikkolah is a Black woman dressed in red and donning a mitre-shaped hairdo, echoing Saint Nicholas’ attire. Since 2017, she has organised a celebration for all children. She also features as the protagonist of a picturebook written by Black author Zarissa Windzak (2024). This case exemplifies how debates surrounding racism, colonialism, and inclusion present in the Dutch-language field of children’s literature and culture.

This character and her story also illustrate a recent trend of “counternarratives” (Smith 2006; Thomas 2019) emerging in the Dutch-language children’s literary landscape, which is predominantly White (De Bruijn et al. 2021). As I have shown (2023), lately, several authors and illustrators of colour have intervened in that landscape creatively, with imaginative counterstories – hence the phrase “creative counterventions”.

The positionalities of these authors and illustrators are particularly relevant against the backdrop of White prevalence in literature and the strong pull to the right in politics; their counterventions are coming from within communities of colour. In my work as a White scholar investigating diversity and inclusion in children’s literature and culture, positionality, too, becomes pertinent. Therefore, identity is one of the main topics I tease out in this talk. I start by addressing my own positionality and how that influences my interpretations. I unpack some of the cultural narratives about people of colour that permeated my childhood and subsequently flesh out the non-normative counterdimensions to my identity.

The second, main part centres on the aforementioned counterventions. First, I discuss the context in which they have arisen. Second, I argue that these counterventions are highly liminal in nature. These authors and illustrators of colour cast young Black protagonists as superheroes in visual narratives of a speculative kind. Their stories engage with the liminal by granting the characters superhuman status and by interspersing magical, supernatural elements in an otherwise realistic setting. In creating alternative narrative universes governed by powerful Black characters, the lecture demonstrates, these counterventions “center the margin” (Martin and Washington 2018: 85) and thereby create a “counter-reality” (Delgado in Sands-O’Connor 2018: 55).

References:

• • De Bruijn, Ymke, Rosanneke A.G. Emmen & Judi Mesman, “Ethnic Diversity in Children’s Books in the Netherlands”, Early Childhood Education Journal 49, 2021: 413-423.
  • Martin, Michelle H., & Rachelle D. Washington, “Kitchens and Edges: The Politics of Hair in African American Children’s Picturebooks”, in R. Harde, & L. Kokkola (eds), The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 83-94.
  • Sands-O’Connor, Karen, “Learning Not to Hate What We Are: Black Power, Literature, and the Black Child”, in R. Harde, & L. Kokkola (eds), The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture, Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 43-56.
  • Smith, Angela, “Paddington Bear: A Case Study of Immigration and Otherness”, in: Children’s Literature in Education 37:1, 2006: 35-50.
  • Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, New York: NYU Press, 2019.
  • Van den Bossche, Sara, “Authors of Color Reclaiming Black Bodies in Dutch Children’s Literature: A Culturally-Critical Analysis”, in S. Austin, & T. Nathanael (eds), Global Children’s Literature in the College Classroom, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, pp. 191-215.
  • Windzak, Zarissa & Julie van Hove (ill.), Queen Nikkolah viert feest, De Eenhoorn, 2024.

What Can Liminality Do? Exploring Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Children’s
Literature and Cultures Research.

Macarena García-González

In this talk, I explore the evolving landscape of children’s literature studies through the lens of
liminality—a concept that evokes spaces of transition, uncertainty, and transformation. Drawing
on the work of Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner (1969), who developed van Gennep’s
(1909) idea of liminality to describe rites of passage and social transformations that occur at
thresholds between stages of identity, I examine how liminality offers a framework for
rethinking the agency of children’s literature studies.

While critically engaging with Turner’s framework and its limitations, I argue that liminality and
its notion of ‘communitas’ —the collective experience of in-betweenness that fosters solidarity—
help us to understand cross-disciplinary research practices. I relate liminality to the
Deleuzeguattarian ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), escape routes from established
systems and structures. Both concepts engage with ways of breaking free from hierarchies and
traditional ways of thinking and can be thought of as entanglements of aesthetics and ethics. In
dialogue with new materialist theory, which highlights dynamic and open processes of
materialization as agentic, I explore how liminality can guide our attention to and with children’s
and YA literary texts.

The talk engages with Mieke Bal’s (2002) celebration of those “travelling concepts” that gain
agency through their movement across disciplines. I deploy liminality to think with children’s
literature and children’s cultures research. I focus the talk on two promising dimensions of
research in our field. First, the research related to media affordances and related to literary
cultures in increasingly digitalised contexts. Second, the inquiries that deal with epistemic
injustices (Fricker 2007) and adult-centric orders. I revise these two interlocking dimensions
in which inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches are particularly vivid, to open some
questions about our ‘communitas’ of children’s literature and culture scholars.

References:

• • Bal, Mieke. Travelling concepts in the humanities: A rough guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
  • Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.
    Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
  • Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford
    University Press, 2007.
  • Turner, Victor. The ritual process: Structure and anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
  • Van Gennep A (1960 [1909]) The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Seeking Adeela

Anita Nair
My presentation will be divided into three parts:

Part 1
The journey from writer of literary fiction to a writer of children’s literature. Some very
important learnings and pertinent challenges.

Part 2
My engagement with UNHCR and understanding of the refugee crisis. Two pivotal
points: The Burmese edition of Muezza and Baby Jaan for Rohingya children;
Scripting a video about Adeela, a fictitious Afghan refugee girl for UNHCR on World
Refugee Day

Part 3
Why I decided to write a full length children’s novel about Adeela. And how I went
about it.

Gender and Migration. A Multimodal Analysis of Social Issues in Children’s Picture Books

A. Jesús Moya Guijarro
University of Castilla-La Mancha

Children’s Picture books are multimodal artefacts in which text and illustrations interplay to construct meaning (Nodelman 1998, Moya-Guijarro 2014, Unsworth 2023. Among the many different topics picture books deal with are those related to social and controversial issues such as migration and gender in today’s world (Hope 2008, Evans 2015, Arizpe 2019) where the number of migrant populations is increasing and, contrary to our expectations, there are still gender stereotypes. Evidence of this is the campaign against gender stereotypes, NOMOREGRINGE, a project supported by the European Union and United Nations Population Fund, which was launched on TikTok in Ukraine on April 16 th 2021. Its hashtag gained almost 2 million views in less than three days. Regarding migration, in September 2023, for example, after crossing the Mediterranean, thousands of migrants arrived in European countries, (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 

Picture books dedicated to gender issues and migration have increased in recent decades (Hope 2008, Sunderland and McGlashan 2012, Moya-Guijarro and Ventola 2022), probably with the aim of presenting the child reader with diverse perspectives on migration and gender.  However, despite the large number these books on the market, they have been analyzed mainly through content and pedagogical lenses (Darvin and Norton 2015), or they offer stereotyped visions on migration (Gu and Catalano 2022), but have not been approached, despite their multimodal nature, from a semiotic
and multimodal perspective.

Adopting a multimodal framework (Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics 2004, Kress & van Leeuwen’s 2006 and Painter, Martin & Unsworth’s Multimodal Social Semiotics 2013), this talk aims to explore the strategies available to writers and illustrators to represent characters and create engagement with the visual reader in picture books that deal with gender and migration. The multimodal analysis carried out reveals that the characters in these stories, sometimes represented by visual metonymies, are actors who take control of their lives to survive in adverse situation. Characters interact with the visual reader mainly via strategies such as frontal, eye-level angles, middle shots, together with a generic drawing style and the use of warm and familiar colors.

References:

• Arzipe, E., (2019) Migrant shoes and forced walking in children’s literature…
• Darvin, R. & B. Norton. (2015) Identity and a model of investment…
• Evans, J. (Ed.) (2015). Challenging and controversial picture books…
• Gu, X & T. Catalano (2022). Representing transition experiences…
• Halliday, M. (2004). An introduction to Functional Grammar…
• Hope, J. (2008). One Day We had to run…
• Kress, G. & T. van Leeuwen’s (2006). Reading images…
• Nodelman, P. (1998). Words about pictures…
• Moya-Guijarro, A.J. & E. Ventola. (2022) A multimodal approach…
• Painter, C. J. Martin & L. Unsworth (2013). Reading visual narratives…
• Sunderland, J. and McGlashan, M. (2012). Stories featuring two-mum and two-dad families…
• Unsworth, L. (2023). Multimodal literacy in a new era of educational technology…

Picture books broaching the emotional trauma of child war refugees: A systemic functional semiotic analysis

Len Unsworth

The many children who are involuntary migrants from the war zones of their home countries suffer extreme emotional trauma due to their experience of the violence of conflict, bereavement and displacement. A plethora of picture books deal with the migration experience of these child war refugees. Many such stories refer directly to horrendous events experienced as these children flee, but authors and illustrators frequently shield readers from the internal, affective responses of the child protagonists to witnessing these events, sometimes to the extent of effacing the experience of emotional trauma. Drawing on systemic functional semiotic approaches to analysing images and language and their interaction in picture books, this chapter discusses how the depiction of child war refugees’ emotional trauma is broached in four Australian-authored picture books about children fleeing different war zones from the Second World War to the tragedies of the more recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

References:

• Caswell, B., & Ottley, M. (2003). Hyram and B. Hodder Headline.
• Do, A., Do, S., & Whatley, B. (2011). The little refugee. Allen & Unwin.
• Economou, D. (2012). Standing out on Critical Issues: Evaluation in Large Verbal-visual Displays in Australian Broadsheets. In W. Bowcher (Ed.), Multimodal Texts from Around the World: Cultural and Linguistic Insights (pp. 246 – 272). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Heffernan, J., & McLean, A. (2001). My dog. Margaret Hamilton Books.
• Martin, J. R. (2008). Intermodal Reconciliation: Mates in Arms. In L. Unsworth (Ed.), New Literacies and the English Curriculum (pp. 112-148). Continuum.
• Martin, J. R., & White, P. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave/Macmillan.
• Painter, C., & Martin, J. R. (2011). Intermodal Complementarity: Modelling affordances across image and verbiage in children’s picture books. In F. Yan (Ed.), Studies in Functional Linguistics and Discourse Analysis (pp. 132-158). Education Press of China.
• Painter, C., Martin, J. R., & Unsworth, L. (2011). Organizing Visual Meaning: Framing and balance in Picture-Book Images. In S. Dreyfus, S. Hood, & M. Stenglin (Eds.), Semiotic Margins: Meaning in Multimodalities (pp. 125-143). Continuum.
• Painter, C., Martin, J. R., & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. Equinox.
• Unsworth, L. (2015). Persuasive narratives: Evaluative images in picture books and animated movies. Visual Communication, 14(1), 73-96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357214541762
• White, P. R. R. (2014). The attitudinal work of news journalism images – a search for visual and verbal analogues. Quaderni del CeSLiC Occasional Papers del CeSLiC, 6-42. http://amsacta.unibo.it/4110/
• Wild, M., & Blackwood, F. (2013). The treasure box. Penguin Books.