Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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The Silence of Fragmentation: Ethical Representations of Trauma in Young Adult Holocaust Literature
No full textHolocaust literature is a challenging space in which to write, seeking to convey an event that cannot truly be represented in words: the systematic destruction of millions of lives, an estimated 1.5 million of which were children who were permanently silenced in the concentration camps. Young adult authors have the added challenge of creating texts that convey the trauma of the Holocaust in ways that are accessible to teenage readers, attempting to reconcile a moral duty to historical accuracy with the desire for an engaging, empathetic novel. This article addresses the evolving use of silence and fragmentation to represent the trauma of the Holocaust in three young adult novels from the last thirty-five years: Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992), Marianne Fredriksson’s Simon och ekarna (Simon and the Oaks, 1985), and Sharon Hart-Green’s Come Back for Me (2017). As this event recedes further into history, historical knowledge of it may be in decline, while anti-Semitism is still prevalent. The Holocaust is something about which we must continue to speak, but now we must do so in different ways. Building on the work of Lydia Kokkola and Leona Toker, this article demonstrates how silence has been used to represent the trauma of the Holocaust as we become increasingly removed from the event. If a traumatic event is understood as it returns to a victim in shards of memories, then fragmentation can be used to recreate the experience for a reader, representing the chaos as opposed to attempting to order it. By writing in a form rife with silent gaps in narrative, knowledge, and understanding, young adult authors can select that which they reveal to their readers according to present historical knowledge while simultaneously mimicking the chaotic, fractured experience of trauma itself. Ultimately, that which is not said becomes as powerful as that which is
Visual Identity and the Queer Aesthetics of Passing: Gay Teen Body Politics in Sebastian, Beautiful Thing, and Get Real
No full textThe theatricality of passing as heterosexual in the face of legislative, medicalized, and stigmatized homophobia serves as the primary lens through which I analyse three European, gay coming-out films from the 1990s. In all three films – the Swedish-Norwegian film Sebastian (När alla vet, 1995), and two British films Beautiful Thing (1996) and Get Real (1998) – the physical bodies of the white protagonists complicate normative binaries and stereotypical queer aesthetics ascribed to homosexuals in the late 20th century. Specifically, these three films serve as cultural artifacts about the time period, lending insight into how late 20th-century governmentsfrom the two regions treated the homosexual experience through the implementation of legislative, medicalized measures, specifically regarding HIV/AIDS
Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-enchanted: The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century
No full textReview/Recensio
Seeking Asylum, Speaking Silence: Speech, Silence and Psychosocial Trauma in Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth
No full text
“How could she ever put the terrible pictures in her head into words?” (Naidoo, Truth 51). This question is at the heart of Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth (2000), which narrates the trauma of Nigerian asylum seeker children Sade and Femi as they flee to Britain. Speech and silence are ambivalent within the text, fluctuating in meaning dependant on the social context in which they are enacted. Showing this text to be primarily a narrative of activism, I explore how Naidoo’s representations of trauma inform her critique of the British immigration system. This text invites a reading that draws on recent postcolonial theories of trauma. Using both textual and paratextual analysis of the novel and Naidoo’s archive, held by Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books in Britain, I draw on Greg Forter’s model of psychosocial trauma to demonstrate that the trauma the protagonists face is a result of their encounter with a racist society and bureaucracy. Reflecting Adrienne Kertzer’s claim that social justice should be central in trauma narratives for children, Naidoo shows healing from trauma to be the locus of political awakening for both characters and implied reader. The aim of this article is to integrate contemporary models of postcolonial trauma with an understanding of the activist nature of Naidoo’s work, showing that in this sort of children’s trauma narrative, the site of healing from trauma is simultaneously the site of social change. Since the trauma that the child protagonists face is a social phenomenon, the speech that allows the children to begin to heal is similarly socially situated, and their healing is synonymous with social justice
Introduction: Diversity in Nordic Children’s and Young Adult Literature
No full textIntroduction: Diversity in Nordic Children’s and Young Adult Literatur
Silence and Absence in the Political Discourse on Section 28 and Children’s Literature in the United Kingdom
No full textThis article considers the previously unexamined political uses of children’s literature in the 1986–1988 British Parliamentary debates of the legislation that became Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988. This law, now repealed, prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality and “pretended” same-sex family relationships by local authorities in the United Kingdom. The effect of the legislation was a widespread silencing of LGBT+ people in institutions across the nation. But while much has been written about those effects and on Section 28 generally over the past 30 years, there has been less sustained attention, within the context of the debates, given to those children’s books and how they were used by politicians to justify the law. With a particular focus on two of the most prominent texts in the Parliamentary debates – David Rees’ teen novel, The Milkman’s on his Way (1982), and Susanne Bösche’s picturebook, Mette bor hos Morten og Erik, published in English as Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (1981/1983) – this article examines the political uses and constructions of children’s texts and argues that silence and absence were a key discursive strategy deployed by supporters of the law. 
The Pioneers of Sámi Children’s Books : The “Mothers” Who Made the Invisible Visible
No full textThis article discusses the Sámi children’s books produced in the 1970s and 1980s during the Sámi political “awakening,” and which are part of the larger Sámi project of cultural self-determination. In the historical legacy of images of the Sámi that were part of the vast colonial apparatus employed by the surrounding majority cultures, Sámi children of earlier generations had been exposed to and internalized representations of themselves that reproduced a hierarchical social order in which they were on the lower rungs. Since the 1970s, Sámi children’s book creators have been actively engaged in decolonizing children’s literature from this legacy of settler colonization and assimilationist policies by not only foregrounding language and Sámi traditions, but also reappropriating stereotypes and images in a decolonizing gesture in order to reclaim their past and their identities. Because the first generation of Sámi children’s book authors and illustrators were women, Vuokko Hirvonen has termed them the “mothers” of Sámi literature (Voices from Sápmi). Their books also contain deeply feminist critiques, not only of the legacy of the majority culture, but of patriarchy within Sámi culture as well. By working and reconfiguring traditional narratives, their books have thus a dual mission of giving voice, visibility and agency to the Sámi while recouping the silenced female voice