Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Masthead

Lauren Bosc — 2020-12-10

Surviving a Pandemic

Heather Snell — 2020-12-10

Flourishing in Country: An Examination of Well-Being in Australian YA Fiction

Adrielle Britten — 2020-12-10

This article is the result of a collaboration between two academics—one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous—to investigate the representation of Indigeneity in two contemporary YA novels. Melissa Lucashenko’s killing Darcy is narrated by multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters, whereas Clare Atkins’s Nona and Me is told from the perspective of a white character and explores her relationship with an Indigenous community. Cultural identity forms a significant part of well-being, and this article investigates versions of sufficient well-being. It explores how the novels represent flourishing subjects—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—in the context of Australia as it struggles to come to terms with its colonial past and demonstrates how cognitive mapping replaces damaging colonial assumptions about Indigenous Peoples with a model of overcoming.

Board(er) Games: Space, Culture, and Empire in Jumanji and Its Intertexts

Samira Nadkarni — 2020-12-10

Two recent transmedia narratives—Karuna Riazi’s 2017 middle-grade novel The Gauntlet and the 2017 film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle—have attempted to reclaim the 1995 film Jumanji’s colonial narrative (adapted from Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 picture book). Both present forms of the “portal fantasy,” in which a protagonist supernaturally breaches the borders of another world. The Gauntlet transports its Muslim Bangladeshi American protagonist to a fantastical board game, whereas Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle reconfigures the genre as multimedia immersive gameplay in a fictional “other” realm. Although these reworkings seemingly destabilize white supremacy by centring multi-ethnic American identities, their negotiations with the board game, itself a product of imperial history and a manifestation of the “gamification” of empire (wherein progress is measured by control of the board) complicate this. The creation of an American neo-colonial nationalism through a system of orientalizing these fantastic spaces (the jungle within the 2017 film and Riazi’s clockwork Islamic city) affirms the need for their control or eventual destruction by the protagonists. This effectively creates cultural borders that extend into these fictional spaces, playing out historical systems of empire in a bid to gain access to neo-empire.

“You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth”: Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s

Tommi Römpötti — 2020-12-10

In several Finnish films of the 2000s, Finland is portrayed as divided geographically into two parts: the small urban area around Finland’s capital, Helsinki, in the south and the rural areas in the country’s north. This polarization frames conceptualizations of social class, particularly in films that depict young people leaving their homes. Forbidden Fruit (Kielletty hedelmä) and August (Elokuu) are examples of Finnish cinema in the 2000s that negotiate ideas about class and circulate this polarized imagination through geography. Both films depict the young leaving their homes and then clashing with a geographically marked border. The films are analyzed in the context of the neo-liberal success story which defines the ideal subject of contemporary society. The article argues that the cinematic journeys of the young show the power of geography in reproducing class structures.

Entering the Chthulucene? Making Kin with the Non-human in Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound Trilogy

Alena Cicholewski — 2020-12-10

Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s YA Starbound Trilogy takes its readers to a faraway future in which humanity has colonized several foreign planets. This is made possible through the invention of hyperspace travel by engineer and entrepreneur Roderick LaRoux, who—upon discovering that the dimensions affected by this mode of travel are inhabited by a sentient collective consciousness—imprisons and enslaves parts of this consciousness to exploit them to maximize his profits. Throughout the trilogy, six teenage protagonists encounter the imprisoned sentient non-humans (known as “whispers”), form collaborative relationships with them, and eventually set them free. In this article, I argue that while the Starbound Trilogy advocates for multispecies justice through its representation of teenagers who form alliances with non-human beings and stand up to corporate practices exploiting them, the novels ultimately fall short of abandoning their anthropocentric perspective.

Shakespeare Criticism and Performance in Children’s Literature: In Summer Light and Becca Fair and Foul

Philip Smith — 2020-12-10

In this article, I seek to place Zibby Oneal’s In Summer Light and Diedre Baker’s Becca Fair and Foul in dialogue with the body of texts that adapt Shakespeare’s works into literature for children. In each of these novels, young women interpret and adapt Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Both texts are self-reflexive adaptations; the stories themselves resonate thematically and geographically with The Tempest, and yet both are overtly conscious of the process and politics of adaptation containing, as they do, characters who interpret and critique Shakespeare’s text.

Whose Research Is It? Reflection on Participatory Research with Women and Girls with Disabilities in the Global South

Xuan Thuy Nguyen — 2020-12-10

Drawing on the Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research, and Activism project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2016-2020), this article critically reflects on the project’s participatory research process that involved young women and girls with disabilities in the Global South. I discuss epistemological and methodological questions related to the deployment of decolonizing research methodologies in the Global South in relation to theoretical and methodological approaches for engaging girls with disabilities. I argue that a critical, reflexive, and decolonizing research approach that embodies knowledge from the Global South is essential for empowering these girls to express themselves through multiple forms of representation.

Case Studies of the Child’s Perspective

Lois Burke — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Moruzi, Kristine, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy, editors. Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Palgrave, 2019.

Cameras and Constructs and Cancels, Oh My! Thinking Through Youth and Celebrity

Maria Alberto — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Duvall, Spring-Serenity, editor. Celebrity and Youth: Mediated Audiences, Fame Aspirations, and Identity Formation. Peter Lang Inc., 2019.

Lyga, Barry, and Morgan Baden. The Hive. Kids Can Press, 2019.

Reid, Raziel. Kens. Penguin Teen, 2018.

Gershowitz, Jordan, and Sandhya Prabhat (illustrator). Ignore the Trolls. Pow! Kids Books, 2019.

Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency: A Review of Naomi Morgenstern’s Wild Child

Jen Harrison — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Morgenstern, Naomi. Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. U of Minnesota P, 2018.

Youth Agency and Ideology: La Movida and the Demise of the Francoist Regime

Julia Lin Thompson — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Valencia-García, Louie Dean. Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism. Bloomsbury, 2018.

Navigating Precarities: Agency, Intergenerational Care, and Counter-Narratives among Indigenous Migrant Youth

Diane Nititham — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Heidbrink, Lauren. Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. Stanford UP, 2020.

Integration and Inequality: Mid-1900s Midwest American History, As Told by Modern Youth Literature

Heather J. Matthews — 2020-12-10

Review of:

Cline-Ransome, Lesa. Finding Langston. Holiday House, 2018.

Cline-Ransome, Lesa. Leaving Lymon. Holiday House, 2020.

Cutler, Jane. Susie Q Fights Back. Holiday House, 2018.

About Jeunesse

Lauren Bosc — 2020-12-10

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures

Masthead

Table of Contents

Surviving a Pandemic

Flourishing in Country: An Examination of Well-Being in Australian YA Fiction

Board(er) Games: Space, Culture, and Empire in Jumanji and Its Intertexts

“You Were Born with a Giant Silver Spoon in Your Mouth”: Geography, the Young, and Social Class in Finnish Films in the 2000s

Entering the Chthulucene? Making Kin with the Non-human in Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner’s Starbound Trilogy

Shakespeare Criticism and Performance in Children’s Literature: In Summer Light and Becca Fair and Foul

Whose Research Is It? Reflection on Participatory Research with Women and Girls with Disabilities in the Global South

Case Studies of the Child’s Perspective

Cameras and Constructs and Cancels, Oh My! Thinking Through Youth and Celebrity

Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency: A Review of Naomi Morgenstern’s Wild Child

Youth Agency and Ideology: La Movida and the Demise of the Francoist Regime

Navigating Precarities: Agency, Intergenerational Care, and Counter-Narratives among Indigenous Migrant Youth

Integration and Inequality: Mid-1900s Midwest American History, As Told by Modern Youth Literature

About Jeunesse