Lectures

This presentation will examine the role of poetry to Black literature for youth, focusing particularly on the United States and the Caribbean. Beginning in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and moving into the Black Arts Movement on the 1970s, the talk will consider the intersection of poetry with two other modes of art: performance and the visual arts. Children's public readings (within theatrical productions and recitations) demonstrated a shared sense of aesthetics and built connections across age for Black communities seeking social change. In terms of the visual, poetry has been linked to illustration and photography, especially in books tied to Black power and liberation. The talk will consider the political possibilities for this particular approach to word/image collaboration, especially in contemporary texts that engage the ongoing struggle for black survival and empowerment. 

Over the past twenty-five years, a considerable number of books for children and young people have been published in France and Germany that aim to combat racism. Which narrative strategies do they use and what are their potentials and their pitfalls? This presentation will present narrative anti-racist strategies used in French and German children's and young adults' books and map them within national and global discursive trends in anti-racist education and antiracist movements. Not all of these strategies are helpful in the fight against racism, and some even unconsciously reproduce the racism they mean to fight. The presentation will thus also analyze narrative anti-racist strategies and discuss their effectiveness and pitfalls through the prism of anti-racist pedagogy (Eser Daviolo & Eckmann 2002) and multicultural education (Banks 2008).

The children’s literature archive is a repository, first and foremost, of original materials documenting the production of children’s books. From letters to authors, poems, artwork, and school projects – which challenge the understanding of children’s literature as a space where ‘the adult comes first’ (Rose 1984)—the archive documents young readers’ creative collaborations with children’s authors, including the act of writing children’s literature itself. In this lecture, I begin with a series of case studies from some of the major children’s literature collections around the world, examining the significance of these creative collaborations as a means of understanding the archive as a historical repository of children’s social activism and political engagement. I then turn to a consideration of the children’s literature archive as a site of inquiry in itself: how, for example, have these collections contributed to debates about power, voice, and agency in children’s literature? As early as the mid-twentieth century, curators and archivists were actively seeking ways to meaningfully engage with children and invite them into the children’s literature archive. Yet, despite significant strides in the acknowledgement of children’s creative contributions to children’s literature (Gubar 2009, Ford Smith 2017), little attention has been given to the role children’s literature archives have played in addressing inequities in power within children’s literature. The engagement work of children’s literature archives feeds directly into the social justice mission of these special collections, and has given rise to more collaborative and participatory methods for including children’s voices in the archive. A critical reflection on the children’s literature archive as a key influencer in shaping children’s literature is therefore essential to our understanding of some of the key debates within the field today, as well as instructive when it comes to thinking about our own ethical engagement with these unique collections.

Seen in bookshops, museums and art galleries all around the world, the Polish informational picturebook Mapy [Maps], created over a decade ago by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińscy (2012), quickly became a national and international bestseller with seven Polish reeditions and translations into more than thirty languages until now. The immense success of this atlas, presenting forty-two maps in the first edition, came with a price, as numerous verbal and visual elements were edited and reworked to adjust to the changing Polish audience and suit foreign publishers’ requirements, also in terms of inclusivity and diversity shown in the atlas, such as adding more female historical figures in the later editions. Moreover, as Mizielińscy stated on their website, a map of Israel/Palestine was to be never published, yet it appeared in the latest German (2024) and Italian (2024) editions.

Editorial and translation practices such as these make Mapy a complex work worth investigating regarding inclusion and diversity. As questionable as the idea of showing the whole world in one book may be, the national and international success of Mapy provokes questions of Mizielińscy’s selection, organisation, and interpretation (von Merveldt 2018) of geographical, political, natural, and cultural elements shown in their maps. How inclusive and diverse is this journey around the world in 153 pages? Which elements are received as controversial and unacceptable by foreign publishers? How do the authors respond to reach the international market? By analysing verbal, visual and paratextual (Goga et al.) elements of Mapy – also looking at a well-developed author’s website (https://oladaniel.com/) – and other materials, I will shed light on the internationally recognised informational picturebook that may serve as a window to the world for the young readers. But what can we see through its frames?

Children’s literature in Indonesia has always been used to foster social control and shape national characters and strict regulations on children’s literature are imposed by the government. This practice originates from the establishment of state-owned publisher Bureau voor de Volkslectuur / Balai Pustaka during the Dutch colonial era and persisted in the post-independence era (after 1945). Despite this massive amount of propaganda and nation-building through children’s literature, Indonesian ethnic and linguistic diversity is utilized differently in children’s literature. As a part of Dutch colonial policies, Bureau voor de Volkslectuur was instructed to favour the colonial perspective by publishing more Euro-centric texts in various local languages. In the post-independence era, especially during the New Order regime (1966 – 1998), Balai Pustaka published almost exclusively in the national language (Indonesian) and disregarded the local languages. Despite the different treatment of linguistic diversity, the racial diversity in Indonesia has never been considered in both periods.

This lecture will thus discuss the shifts in treatment and portrayal of linguistics and racial diversity in Indonesian children’s literature from the colonial era to the post-independence era. The consequences of this political agenda, which has run for almost a century, will also be discussed by taking closer look at the attempt to rejuvenate Indonesian children’s literature focusing on linguistics and racial diversity in the last ten years.

The lecture is dedicated to the representation of queer desire in current German-language comics. For the analysis, spatial-theoretical considerations are combined with a memory-cultural perspective. The initial thesis is that the comic, in its bicodal forms of representation of image and text, firstly shows memories in spatialised representation. Secondly, the constructional character of memories is made visible in its mediality. On the subject level, the focus will be on comics that tell of growing up queer. Queer life plans in particular are often not a ‘binding object of an overarching cultural [...] horizon of meaning, as a myth of binding cultural memory’. (Erll 2011, 202) Rather, in these comics, ‘memory competitions are negotiated in literary terms’ (Erll 2011, 202), whereby the representation of space, not least in the metaphorical designation of the closest for un-outed persons, occupies a central position. In this way, the lecture also reflects the tension between individual memory and the social framework, which is particularly central in adolescence.