Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Masthead

Lauren Bosc — 2020-02-24

Purple Mountains

Heather Snell — 2020-02-12

Kid President: The Aesthetics of Childhood in Political Cartoons

Tran Nguyen Templeton — 2020-02-12

Since the 2016 US presidential election, a number of political cartoons have been produced that depict Donald Trump as an infant or toddler. He is drawn in diapers and with any number of objects we associate with young children, as well as engaging in behaviours such as crying, whining, and melting down. As a genre, the political cartoon offers complex readings, yet this particular phenomenon, in its repeated renderings, seems to signal just as much, if not more, animosity toward children than toward Trump. The question is, who is the real object of critique in these visual displays? What are the assumptions that cartoonists have about children, and how is the child deployed in and through these images? In this work, we examined thirty political cartoons depicting Trump as an infant or toddler, along with related artifacts, dating from 2015 to 2018. We discuss the ways that the cartoonists rely on stereotyped affects and behaviours of childhood to express purportedly progressive notions of equity. The effect of this growing archive of images, however, may betray those objectives, instead enacting power over the figure of the child.

Only Connect: Children’s Literature and Its Theory in the Extended Present

Madeleine Hunter — 2020-02-12

While an unfolding backlash against globalization has resulted in a tightening of the borders that police our movement through space, the borders that structure our temporal experience have been made newly porous by technologies that alter the terms of our presence in that space. This paper argues that our current condition of ubiquitous connectivity—our constant interconnection and integration into larger flows of information and communication—has brought about a paradoxical anxiety of disconnection that finds expression in the field’s growing “kinship” movement. In the digital age, instantaneous communication butts up against infinite information, giving birth to the extended present—a temporality in which the borders of the now seem to be both ever diminishing and expanding. What does this mean for the temporal alterity that subsists between adult and child as theoretical constructs? What happens to the adult-child relationship in the age of the constant update? This paper examines to what extent the field’s current turn toward models that emphasize similarity—or “kinship”—over difference constitutes an attempt to reaffirm a continuity between past and present that is threatened by the rise of new media technologies, and ponders what the attempt to cohere our disparate temporalities into the present might mean for the future of the field and those on whose behalf it proposes to speak.

Unfiltered and Unapologetic: March for Our Lives and the Political Boundaries of Age

Emily Bent — 2020-02-12

When young people took to the streets on 24 March 2018 as part of March for Our Lives (MFOL), they leveraged narratives of age and generation to inspire others to take action on preventing gun violence incidences across the United States. Despite the political precarity associated with their ages, student-activists claimed public space and voice as more than the victims of the so-called “mass shooting generation.” This article explores how narratives of age and generation shape their political legibility and authority in the MFOL movement. Based on analyses of Parkland student speeches and reflections and MFOL protest signs, I consider the paradoxical manner in which youth-activists play with notions of age in order to mark themselves as essential political actors and vulnerable not-yet subjects in need of protection. It is my contention that MFOL illustrates the liminal borders of youth political (in)visibility and the transformative possibilities of age-based politics for youth-activists.

“I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears”: The Impact of Australia’s Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child’s Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

Dani McAlister — 2020-02-12

As a signatory to both the United Nation Refugee Convention and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia’s border protection policy to detain offshore asylum seekers who reach Australian borders by boat, including accompanied and unaccompanied minors, is under intense international scrutiny. In the context of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” however, the asylum seeker child’s perspectives and their geographies of hope and hopelessness have not yet been fully explored. Drawing on recent literature within children’s geographies, which emphasizes the “emotional” matters within policy development and professional practice, and how they affect children, this paper seeks to contribute to emerging debates exploring borders, asylum seeker children, and children’s emotional geographies. Utilizing drawings, letters, and poems produced by children for an Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention on Nauru, a child-centred approach was applied to privilege children’s own perspective of their indefinite internment. The primary focus of the paper is to emphasize the ways in which “the asylum seeker child” constructs their own emotional geographies within the inherently complex and restrictive context of Australia’s border protection policy.

Coming of Age in the Rio Grande Valley: Race, Class, Gender, and Generations in Narco Culture

Rosalynn A. Vega — 2020-02-12

Based on ethnographic observations in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, this article examines the multiple, overlapping, criss-crossing axes of inequality that both shape and fracture the experiences of individual borderland residents. Instead of focusing on the national border, this article analyzes intersecting axes of social inequality and uses ethnographic data to describe social borders that divide and separate those living in the borderlands. Using ethnographic data culled from 133 young adults in focus group settings, this article merges the theory of intersectionality with border studies scholarship in order to analyze how socio-economic stratification, gender inequality, histories of racial discrimination, and generational differences map onto one another in a place characterized by narco violence. In essence, the article demonstrates how the lives of adolescents and young adults in the Rio Grande Valley are ensnared within a unique matrix of intersecting axes of inclusion and exclusion. The intersecting axes of gender, race, and class inequality unfold in a context of “narco culture,” where residents are not only living along the US-Mexico border, and within social webs of intersectional borders, but also on the border of legality/illegality.

Visualizing the Voiceless and Seeing the Unspeakable: Understanding International Wordless Picturebooks about Refugees

Gabriel Duckels — 2020-02-12

This article investigates the formal and ethical implications of the wordless picturebook about refugees, a recent and international phenomenon. Picturebooks in this small and expanding sub-genre, we argue, are part of the “children’s literature of atrocity” (Baer 382) and use the quintessential features of the wordless form to empower or disempower, humanize or otherize, their child refugee subjects. Some of the examples we engage with problematically rely upon a clumsy refugee/non-refugee binary between safe white child and seemingly perpetually unsafe black “other,” whereas the remaining examples use the wordless form to create more collaborative, dialogical, and less binarized depictions of the relationship between the shores of Europe and the conceptualized Global South. To represent this “unspeakable” reality through wordless picturebooks emphasizes their potency at enabling readers to take risks in their navigation of meaning, transforming non-verbal affective response into speaking the unspeakable aloud.

Reforming Borders of the Imagination: Diversity, Adaptation, Transmediation, and Incorporation in the Global Disney Film Landscape

Michelle Anya Anjirbag — 2020-02-12

The transmediation involved in recent Walt Disney Company productions including A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Coco, and Moana engage with a process of visualizing the nonvisual in ways that have heretofore differed from past Disney offerings. These films respond to calls for increased diversity, unlocking the potential of imagined spaces on a global scale. Although it addresses postcolonial identity politics that are both salient and fraught in the current geopolitical climate, such diversity nevertheless serves Disney’s corporate interests, (re)producing a colonizing progression decentralized from the nation-state but rooted in projection of culture. As Disney adapts new narratives, it also engages in a process of incorporation, absorbing these narratives into the larger framework of the overarching corporate structure of the “magic kingdom”—intended to designate a cultural home for childhood, imagination, and reminiscence of how things were and what they might become. I contend that Disney’s incorporation of new narratives extends greater access to imaginary spaces while producing a homogenizing effect on global media culture.

The Role of Borders in the Lives of Greek–Cypriot Enclaved Children in Ira Genakritou’s Beyond the Barbed Wire

Maria Chatzianastasi — 2020-02-12

A dramatic increase in Cypriot juvenile literature appeared in the decades following the traumatic events of the coup d’etat and subsequent Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. A crucial aspect of the political-national situation arising from those events—which affected the political geography of Cyprus, defined its contemporary history, and had an impact on several areas, including writing for the young—was the creation of a 180 km border dividing the island. The focus of this paper is on literary representations of enclavement and the strong impact borders and barbed wire played in the lives of young enclaved—those who chose to stay in their place of origin rather than be displaced. The discussion focuses on the book Πέρα από το συρματόπλεγμα (Beyond the Barbed Wire) and the traumatic separations of young children from their families arising from enclavement. Τhe story offers important insights into a situation that is not so well known or represented in juvenile literature and highlights the threating, violating, and traumatic role borders can play in young people’s lives.

Representing Childhood and Forced Migration: Narratives of Borders and Belonging in European Screen Content for Children

Christine Singer — 2020-02-12

This article explores representations of childhood and forced migration within a selection of European screen content for and about children. Based on the findings of a research project that examined the intersections of children’s media, diversity, and forced migration in Europe (www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the article highlights different ways in which ideas of borders and belonging are constructed and deconstructed in a selection of films and television programs that feature children with an immigration background. Drawing on ideas around the “politics of pity” (Boltanski; Chouliaraki), the analysis explores conditions under which narratives of otherness arise when it comes to representing forcibly displaced children within European-produced children’s screen media. It also examines screen media that destabilize borders of “us” and “the other” by emphasizing the agency of children from migration backgrounds and revealing both the similarities and the differences between European children with immigration backgrounds and White European-born children. It is argued here that these representations destabilize narratives of borders and otherness, suggesting that children with a family history of immigration “belong” to European societies in the same ways as White European-born children.

“It’s Such a Small Planet, Why Do You Need Borders?”: Seeing Flying in Le Petit Prince and Its Screen Adaptations

Aneesh Barai — 2020-02-12

In this article, I analyze the potential positive impact of aerial perspectives on children’s understanding of their place in the world, with Le Petit Prince envisioning a borderless world of ecological and social unity. The novellas of the pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry encourage their projected viewers to see the interconnectedness of all life, including the life of the planet itself. Most notably, Le Petit Prince raises environmental responsibility in discussing the prince’s planet and undermines ideas of national difference as the prince views the earth from space. Visual adaptations of Le Petit Prince by Stanley Donen and Will Vinton pick up on Saint-Exupéry’s phenomenology of perception and translate them through visual techniques into politicized aerial perspectives. Looking at Le Petit Prince and its film adaptations, this article argues that aerial perspectives work to transform children’s perceptions and break down bordered mappings of the world.

Good, Mad, or “Incurably Bad:” The Borders of Normalcy and Deviance in Film Representations of Sociopathic White Schoolgirls

Caroline Hamilton-McKenna — 2020-02-12

Through the lens of feminist cultural geography, the authors seek to understand how film and television depictions of the violent white schoolgirl across the idealized space of white suburbia temporarily disrupt but ultimately sustain the borders that define gender, youth, normalcy, and deviance. The authors analyze contemporary cinematic and televised dramas, including Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, the 2018 HBO series Sharp Objects, and Cory Finley’s 2017 film Thoroughbreds to demonstrate how spatial dimensions of “deviant” white adolescent femininity enforce the boundaries of “normal” girlhood.

Representing Death in Children’s Literature: Border Crossings

Maria José Botelho — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Dekko, Espen. Paws and Edward. Illustrated by Mari Kanstad Johnsen, Kids Can, 2019.

James, Matt. The Funeral. Groundwood Books, 2018.

Quan, Betty. Grandmother's Visit. Illustrated by Carmen Mok, Groundwood Books, 2018.

Young, Cheyanne. The Last Wish of Sasha Cade. Kids Can, 2018.

Utopian Grandparents

Perry Nodelman — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Balasubramaniam, Saumiya. When I Found Grandma. Illustrated by Qin Leng, Groundwood, 2019. 32 pp. $17.95 hc. ISBN 9781773060194.

Chabbert, Ingrid. A Drop of the Sea. Illustrated by Guridi, Kids Can, 2018.

Lê, Minh. Drawn Together. Illustrated by Dan Santat, Disney Hyperion 2018.

Sage, James. Old Misery. Illustrated by Russel Ayto, Kids Can, 2018.

Uegaki, Cheri. Ojiichan’s Gift. Illustrated by Genevieve Simms, Kids Can, 2019.

Leaving Home: Stories about Immigration, Migration, and the Diaspora

Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Charles, Veronika Martenova. The Land Beyond the Wall: An Immigration Story. Nimbus, 2017.

Díaz, Junot. Islandborn. Illustrated by Leo Espinosa, Penguin, 2018.

Gay, Marie-Louise. Mustafa. Groundwood, 2018.

Morales, Yuyi. Dreamers. Porter, 2018.

Tran-Davies, Nhung N. Ten Cents a Pound. Illustrated by Josée Bisaillon, Second Story, 2018.

Writing Identities, Erasing Borders: The Night Diary, Front Desk, and Our Shared Story of Migration

Paige Gray — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Hiranandani, Veera. The Night Diary. Kokila, 2018.

Yang, Kelly. Front Desk. Levine, 2018.

Beyond the Digital Border: Modern Life on the Network

Christina Fawcett — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Barnard, Sara, Holly Bourne, Tanya Byrne, Non Pratt, Melinda Salisbury, Lisa Williamson, Eleanor Wood. Floored: When Seven Lives Collide. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2018.

McCulloch, Amy. Jinxed. Simon and Schuester, 2018.

Owen, David. All the Lonely People. Atom, 2019.

Steven, Laura. The Exact Opposite of Okay. Electric Monkey, 2018.

State Against the Migrant Child: US Government Systems and Legal Processes in Dealing with Undocumented Youth

Catherine Appleton — 2020-02-12

Review of:

Boehm, Deborah A., and Susan J. Terrio, editors. Illegal Encounters: The Effect of Detention and Deportation on Young People. NYU P, 2019.

About Jeunesse

Lauren Bosc — 2020-02-24

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Masthead

Table of Contents

Purple Mountains

Kid President: The Aesthetics of Childhood in Political Cartoons

Only Connect: Children’s Literature and Its Theory in the Extended Present

Unfiltered and Unapologetic: March for Our Lives and the Political Boundaries of Age

“I See Nothing but a Fence of Tears”: The Impact of Australia’s Immigration Detention and Border Protection Policies on the Asylum Seeker Child’s Geographies of Hope and Hopelessness

Coming of Age in the Rio Grande Valley: Race, Class, Gender, and Generations in Narco Culture

Visualizing the Voiceless and Seeing the Unspeakable: Understanding International Wordless Picturebooks about Refugees

Reforming Borders of the Imagination: Diversity, Adaptation, Transmediation, and Incorporation in the Global Disney Film Landscape

The Role of Borders in the Lives of Greek–Cypriot Enclaved Children in Ira Genakritou’s Beyond the Barbed Wire

Representing Childhood and Forced Migration: Narratives of Borders and Belonging in European Screen Content for Children

“It’s Such a Small Planet, Why Do You Need Borders?”: Seeing Flying in Le Petit Prince and Its Screen Adaptations

Good, Mad, or “Incurably Bad:” The Borders of Normalcy and Deviance in Film Representations of Sociopathic White Schoolgirls

Representing Death in Children’s Literature: Border Crossings

Utopian Grandparents

Leaving Home: Stories about Immigration, Migration, and the Diaspora

Writing Identities, Erasing Borders: The Night Diary, Front Desk, and Our Shared Story of Migration

Beyond the Digital Border: Modern Life on the Network

State Against the Migrant Child: US Government Systems and Legal Processes in Dealing with Undocumented Youth

About Jeunesse