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Moving toward a balance of stories, embracing the discourse of difference & emancipating the imagination (long)
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From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas <ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu>
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 18:28:25 -0500
Dear colleagues,
I have many, many thoughts but limited time to contribute substantively. I'm writing and publishing for my professional life, and have so many irons in the fire baking that I barely know my own name some days. Nonetheless, I try to Tweet, have just captured the URL for a new blog, and have begun to reblog on Tumblr whenever I can. Please forgive any lapses in spelling, grammar, etc. -- I'm typing fast between projects.
I thank CCBC, Lee & Low Publishers, First Book, and many, many other organizations and committed individuals who have moved this topic out of our wonderful (but very close-knit) field and into social media. These conversations need to continue in and beyond the interdisciplinary enterprise of children's literature, with the understanding that while we generally have the best of intentions (hey, we're kid and teen people), the ultimate measure will be the effect of what we're publishing on future generations of children.
As a Harry Potter fandom friend once told me nearly a decade ago when I was angrily indignant by how an action of mine was interpreted: "Ebony, your good intentions are beside the point if others are harmed by your actions." I took that advice to heart. I believe the least we can do is listen to critiques that we aren't adequately attending to concerns of diversity -- without defensiveness -- and attempt to move toward risky, yet courageous conversations about how we continue to press forward in a commodified, late stage capitalist, increasingly virtual/digital world. I have come to the conclusion that sometimes listening is the most important work that we can do to heal discourse in our hyperfragmented society.
This conversation calls upon all of my past and present selves -- young urban reader of color, Detroit public school teacher, fangirl (first in Potterdom, then in many other fandoms where I wisely assumed pseudonyms), graduate student trying to articulate why I cared so much about children's lit, unpublished novelist , sometimes critic, and ultimately, as faculty overseeing a children's literature program. I believe that this is not only one of the most pressing issues in children's and young adult literature today, but also in reader response theory, literacy, education, and cultural studies if we wish to remain relevant. Ultimately, what we choose to become will shape the kind of world that exists 50 years from now.
This includes, and goes far beyond, issues of visible diversity and difference that give majorities "fatigue." Something is happening as modernity recedes and we move toward whatever comes next. I am trying hard to encourage my students to honor what we have received from the legacies of the past, but to also push beyond the siloed ways that we have been thinking about these issues for my entire lifetime. Frankly, the children and teens of today do not live in our silos. They are far beyond where we are already.
One of the first pieces of children's literary criticism that I ever read was Shaobo Xie's "Rethinking the Identity of Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as Unfinished Project" in Roderick McGillis' Voices of the Other. It moved me from despair and defeatism as I increasingly felt marginalized and excluded from the children's lit world, and pointed toward possibilities of hope. For nearly a decade and a half, this article has deeply shaped my thinking about the larger stakes of how I've participated across, shaped, and was shaped by spaces around the children's and young adult literary world -- fandom, education, academic. I have quoted Xie in my admissions essay for my Michigan PhD program, in my faculty job letters, and will quote him in my reappointment narrative later this spring, etc. Thinking about how we might transform our 20th century inheritance of multiculturalism into an messy, unfinished discourse of difference is starting to shape the thinking of my students at Penn, who tend to be middle to upper middle class and cosmopolitan compared to the general public, no matter what their race, ethnicity, orientation, gender, religion, citizenship status, etc. Xie makes sense for the webs of meaning they're constructing for the world they live in, no matter what their differences are.
What helps me "sell" the project of difference is the use of metaphors to characterize the landscape of the children's literature that we have… and the children's literature of the future. It was not effective for me as a young African American professor with no Ivy training and a Black, urban Midwestern accent to tell my current students they needed to diversify their texts or they were not serving students well. This fall, when I overhauled the course, they responded to Chimamanda Adichie's call for "a balance of stories," (played on the first day of class), Elliott's essay about decolonizing the imagination (which I sell to my students as emancipating the imagination -- a concept that I am theorizing in my first critical monograph on the dark fantastic), and end with an invitation to join Xie's unfinished project. Now, some of them are identify aspects of the literature that I am missing… for instance, I attended to race, gender, orientation, and nation last term, but failed to provide much in the way of disability or special needs.
The classes this year aren't just about making the lists and checking them twice. Instead, we're imagining the readers we're working with, going into schools and learning more about what they want need, want, feel, dream, and imagine. We want to keep young people at the forefront of our consciousness as much as possible. We will fail -- after all, we're grownups! -- but I'm hoping that we try. And when we fail, we'll apologize, make it right… and try again.
I speak passionately about the social justice imperative of children's and young adult literature, media and culture because I perhaps foolishly believe that I am speaking from the inside, not the outside. I use "us" and not "you" intentionally. I was born nearly 25 years after the landmark Brown case was decided. I speak from the center because all of those who came before me, including my elders in this struggle, shed blood, sweat and tears so that I could do so. I am a full generation after Rudine Sims Bishop's landmark scholarship; how could I speak from the same position. Although I am "Othered" at times, I don't consider myself "the Other" and never have. Not in my heart, and not in my head. As I recently said in a fan discussion about the offensive caricaturization of Bonnie Bennett on The Vampire Diaries television show, we don't exist for the consumption of the privileged. We exist for ourselves. We are as human as everyone else. No author is doing us a favor by writing us into fictional existence…. and yet all too often, that is the tone. We should be grateful...
I want to turn this implicit assumption on its head. I say that if our classrooms, libraries, homes, and bookshelves do not reflect who the children and teenagers of 2014 are, then we are pretending as if we are still living in an era that is passing away. We are outdated, outmoded, and soon to be irrelevant, as we decry the fact that despite serialized, formulaic, transmedia cash cows, the reading public in general is shrinking. If you think I am exaggerating, then I invite you to visit the Philadelphia school library where I've been all year. Come talk to some of the kids. Come talk to my undergrads and grads, in their late teens and 20s.
We need to expand the circle of who, and what, is being included as part of our assumed audiences, but I have to say this: the tone can be patronizing. I am so very tired of reductionist labels being tossed around. I refuse to approach this debate as a supplicant who must make my case for existence any longer. Instead, I need to see convincing evidence that the way things are currently is justified.
We need to dream far beyond what we can see. So I say that we continue the conversation about diversity in children's literature, but also actually look at what kids and teens are saying and responding to when adults are not prompting their responses. Thanks to the digital age, we have access to this rich source of information.
Because of this decades-long conversation about social justice in #kidlit and #yalit, I am beginning to see some of the kinds of books that I dreamed of reading, and once upon a time attempted to write, appear on bookshelves. Nothing makes me more excited. I want to know all these authors and their work and put their books into the hands of every kid I know. I nearly cried when Zetta sent me ARC's of Orleans and The Summer Prince, when I realized the power of Nnedi Okorafor's stories, and when I see more and more pioneering creators, authors, writers, actors, artists, and social media creatives reflecting the world of my imagination on my bookshelves and on screens small and large. And it's not enough that kids of color read about kids of color. Or girls read girl books. Or queer teens read queer books. We want every kind of kid to read every kind of book, because when they log online, the world is at their fingertips.
Because of pioneers like Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks, this housekeeper's granddaughter became a professor. Because of pioneers like Zahrah, Bonnie, Nyla, June Costa, Abbie, Gwen, and Fawn, maybe my great-nieces will not only dream of being Laura or Alice or Anne or Hermione or Katniss or Bella or Blair, they'll also see agency, beauty, strength, wisdom, heroism, magical possibilities, and endarkened visions of the future when they look into the mirror.
Just some initial, nebulous thoughts in response to the posts so far. I'm looking forward to lurking and reading the rest.
Thank you, all of you, for everything that you do for children and teens. I have faith that this field will do the right thing as it evolves. For ultimately, we are (and have always been) a field of dreams.
Ebony
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 18:28:25 -0500
Dear colleagues,
I have many, many thoughts but limited time to contribute substantively. I'm writing and publishing for my professional life, and have so many irons in the fire baking that I barely know my own name some days. Nonetheless, I try to Tweet, have just captured the URL for a new blog, and have begun to reblog on Tumblr whenever I can. Please forgive any lapses in spelling, grammar, etc. -- I'm typing fast between projects.
I thank CCBC, Lee & Low Publishers, First Book, and many, many other organizations and committed individuals who have moved this topic out of our wonderful (but very close-knit) field and into social media. These conversations need to continue in and beyond the interdisciplinary enterprise of children's literature, with the understanding that while we generally have the best of intentions (hey, we're kid and teen people), the ultimate measure will be the effect of what we're publishing on future generations of children.
As a Harry Potter fandom friend once told me nearly a decade ago when I was angrily indignant by how an action of mine was interpreted: "Ebony, your good intentions are beside the point if others are harmed by your actions." I took that advice to heart. I believe the least we can do is listen to critiques that we aren't adequately attending to concerns of diversity -- without defensiveness -- and attempt to move toward risky, yet courageous conversations about how we continue to press forward in a commodified, late stage capitalist, increasingly virtual/digital world. I have come to the conclusion that sometimes listening is the most important work that we can do to heal discourse in our hyperfragmented society.
This conversation calls upon all of my past and present selves -- young urban reader of color, Detroit public school teacher, fangirl (first in Potterdom, then in many other fandoms where I wisely assumed pseudonyms), graduate student trying to articulate why I cared so much about children's lit, unpublished novelist , sometimes critic, and ultimately, as faculty overseeing a children's literature program. I believe that this is not only one of the most pressing issues in children's and young adult literature today, but also in reader response theory, literacy, education, and cultural studies if we wish to remain relevant. Ultimately, what we choose to become will shape the kind of world that exists 50 years from now.
This includes, and goes far beyond, issues of visible diversity and difference that give majorities "fatigue." Something is happening as modernity recedes and we move toward whatever comes next. I am trying hard to encourage my students to honor what we have received from the legacies of the past, but to also push beyond the siloed ways that we have been thinking about these issues for my entire lifetime. Frankly, the children and teens of today do not live in our silos. They are far beyond where we are already.
One of the first pieces of children's literary criticism that I ever read was Shaobo Xie's "Rethinking the Identity of Otherness: The Discourse of Difference as Unfinished Project" in Roderick McGillis' Voices of the Other. It moved me from despair and defeatism as I increasingly felt marginalized and excluded from the children's lit world, and pointed toward possibilities of hope. For nearly a decade and a half, this article has deeply shaped my thinking about the larger stakes of how I've participated across, shaped, and was shaped by spaces around the children's and young adult literary world -- fandom, education, academic. I have quoted Xie in my admissions essay for my Michigan PhD program, in my faculty job letters, and will quote him in my reappointment narrative later this spring, etc. Thinking about how we might transform our 20th century inheritance of multiculturalism into an messy, unfinished discourse of difference is starting to shape the thinking of my students at Penn, who tend to be middle to upper middle class and cosmopolitan compared to the general public, no matter what their race, ethnicity, orientation, gender, religion, citizenship status, etc. Xie makes sense for the webs of meaning they're constructing for the world they live in, no matter what their differences are.
What helps me "sell" the project of difference is the use of metaphors to characterize the landscape of the children's literature that we have… and the children's literature of the future. It was not effective for me as a young African American professor with no Ivy training and a Black, urban Midwestern accent to tell my current students they needed to diversify their texts or they were not serving students well. This fall, when I overhauled the course, they responded to Chimamanda Adichie's call for "a balance of stories," (played on the first day of class), Elliott's essay about decolonizing the imagination (which I sell to my students as emancipating the imagination -- a concept that I am theorizing in my first critical monograph on the dark fantastic), and end with an invitation to join Xie's unfinished project. Now, some of them are identify aspects of the literature that I am missing… for instance, I attended to race, gender, orientation, and nation last term, but failed to provide much in the way of disability or special needs.
The classes this year aren't just about making the lists and checking them twice. Instead, we're imagining the readers we're working with, going into schools and learning more about what they want need, want, feel, dream, and imagine. We want to keep young people at the forefront of our consciousness as much as possible. We will fail -- after all, we're grownups! -- but I'm hoping that we try. And when we fail, we'll apologize, make it right… and try again.
I speak passionately about the social justice imperative of children's and young adult literature, media and culture because I perhaps foolishly believe that I am speaking from the inside, not the outside. I use "us" and not "you" intentionally. I was born nearly 25 years after the landmark Brown case was decided. I speak from the center because all of those who came before me, including my elders in this struggle, shed blood, sweat and tears so that I could do so. I am a full generation after Rudine Sims Bishop's landmark scholarship; how could I speak from the same position. Although I am "Othered" at times, I don't consider myself "the Other" and never have. Not in my heart, and not in my head. As I recently said in a fan discussion about the offensive caricaturization of Bonnie Bennett on The Vampire Diaries television show, we don't exist for the consumption of the privileged. We exist for ourselves. We are as human as everyone else. No author is doing us a favor by writing us into fictional existence…. and yet all too often, that is the tone. We should be grateful...
I want to turn this implicit assumption on its head. I say that if our classrooms, libraries, homes, and bookshelves do not reflect who the children and teenagers of 2014 are, then we are pretending as if we are still living in an era that is passing away. We are outdated, outmoded, and soon to be irrelevant, as we decry the fact that despite serialized, formulaic, transmedia cash cows, the reading public in general is shrinking. If you think I am exaggerating, then I invite you to visit the Philadelphia school library where I've been all year. Come talk to some of the kids. Come talk to my undergrads and grads, in their late teens and 20s.
We need to expand the circle of who, and what, is being included as part of our assumed audiences, but I have to say this: the tone can be patronizing. I am so very tired of reductionist labels being tossed around. I refuse to approach this debate as a supplicant who must make my case for existence any longer. Instead, I need to see convincing evidence that the way things are currently is justified.
We need to dream far beyond what we can see. So I say that we continue the conversation about diversity in children's literature, but also actually look at what kids and teens are saying and responding to when adults are not prompting their responses. Thanks to the digital age, we have access to this rich source of information.
Because of this decades-long conversation about social justice in #kidlit and #yalit, I am beginning to see some of the kinds of books that I dreamed of reading, and once upon a time attempted to write, appear on bookshelves. Nothing makes me more excited. I want to know all these authors and their work and put their books into the hands of every kid I know. I nearly cried when Zetta sent me ARC's of Orleans and The Summer Prince, when I realized the power of Nnedi Okorafor's stories, and when I see more and more pioneering creators, authors, writers, actors, artists, and social media creatives reflecting the world of my imagination on my bookshelves and on screens small and large. And it's not enough that kids of color read about kids of color. Or girls read girl books. Or queer teens read queer books. We want every kind of kid to read every kind of book, because when they log online, the world is at their fingertips.
Because of pioneers like Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks, this housekeeper's granddaughter became a professor. Because of pioneers like Zahrah, Bonnie, Nyla, June Costa, Abbie, Gwen, and Fawn, maybe my great-nieces will not only dream of being Laura or Alice or Anne or Hermione or Katniss or Bella or Blair, they'll also see agency, beauty, strength, wisdom, heroism, magical possibilities, and endarkened visions of the future when they look into the mirror.
Just some initial, nebulous thoughts in response to the posts so far. I'm looking forward to lurking and reading the rest.
Thank you, all of you, for everything that you do for children and teens. I have faith that this field will do the right thing as it evolves. For ultimately, we are (and have always been) a field of dreams.
Ebony
-- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Reading/Writing/Literacy Division Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 Office: (215) 898-9309 Fax: (215) 573-2109 Email: ebonyt_at_gse.upenn.edu Website: http://scholar.gse.upenn.edu/thomas Twitter: _at_Ebonyteach Tumblr: ebonyteach "If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love people--I cannot enter into dialogue." --Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed --- You are currently subscribed to ccbc-net as: ccbc-archive_at_post.education.wisc.edu. To post to the list, send message to: ccbc-net_at_lists.wisc.edu To receive messages in digest format, send a message to... ccbc-net-request_at_lists.wisc.edu ...and include only this command in the body of the message: set ccbc-net digest CCBC-Net Archives The CCBC-Net archives are available to all CCBC-Net listserv members. The archives are organized by month and year. A list of discussion topics (including month/year) is available at http://www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/ccbcnet/archives.asp To access the archives, go to: http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/ccbc-net and enter the following: username: ccbc-net password: Look4PostsReceived on Wed 05 Feb 2014 05:28:47 PM CST
