Barnboken – Journal of Children's Literature Research
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Meidän piti lähteä and the Problematics of Voicing the Refugee Experience in a Wordless Picturebook
No full textMeidän piti lähteä (We Had to Leave, 2018) is a wordless picture-book by the Finnish author Sanna Pelliccioni. It is a work of 41 pages, most of which are formed from pairs of images with matching colours produced in acrylic. It starts with images of a family enjoying their life, but shifts to images of aeroplanes bombing a city, a journey over the sea to a place where people build snowmen: the implied narrative is that of a family caught up in the recent refugee crisis seeking asylum in Finland. In this article, I examine the literary strategies in narrating the refugee experience in this wordless picturebook. The approach is pedagogical as I ask: How can a picturebook, such as Meidän piti lähteä, give voice to the refugee experience? I also ask whether picturebooks about the refugee experience can teach about empathy, without essentializing the Other. Two not controversial, but differing views related to the notion of “giving voice” frame these questions. While emphasising the pedagogical opportunities, Julia Hope (“One Day” 302), argues that the refugee experiences in children’s literature form “an ideal context for sharing the stories, feelings and fears” that children have experienced, but also expose stereotypes and media myths. On the other hand, Gayatri Spivak famously argued in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) that, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak. This article situates Meidän piti lähteä in the midst of these discourses to present wordless picturebooks as an arena for diverse narratives about refugees, which have the potential to support empathy, but which may also reinforce stereotypical and tokenistic images of refugees. The analysis suggests that the visual discourse creates an effective narrative, with space for listening. In addition, the article suggests that refugee narratives can foster critical self-reflexivity
Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith & Elizabeth Bullen (red), Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults
No full textReview/Recensio
Review essay/Samlingsrecension: Första världskriget och barnlitteraturen/The First World War and Children's Literature
No full textReview essay/Samlingsrecensio
Har du inga gummistövlar? Fattigdom i 2010-talets svenska bilderbok
No full textTitle: Representations of Poverty in Contemporary Swedish Picture BooksThis article explores nine Swedish children’s picture books that portray children and other people living in poverty. The aim is to scrutinize the discursive and aesthetical practices that construct the literary image of poverty, poor people, and their relationship to society and each other. The article shows that the Swedish picture book participates in recent debates on child poverty and begging EU citizens. The representations of social inequality include both depictions of poor children and of children meeting socially excluded people, such as beggars. The depictions are located in between discourses on poverty, children, and children’s rights. Inequality is, on the one hand, represented by a lack of material resources, such as new rubber boots or expensive fruit, and on the other, by adults begging in the street. The aesthetics of the picture book format is utilized in a productive way, encouraging readers to reflect on questions of poverty, power, and solidarity
Helene Ehriander & Anette Almgren White (red.), Astrid Lindgrens bildvärldar
No full textReview/Recensio
“Don’t be too upset with your unchivalrous publisher:” Translator-Publisher Interactions in the Swedish Translations of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily Books
No full textThis article explores the translation practices of the Swedish translations of Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books from a sociological perspective. By studying the interactions between the different agents involved in the making of the translations, in this case the translators and the publishers, the study adds to previous research on the Swedish translations conducted by Laura Leden and Cornelia Rémi. Through an extensive archival material from Montgomery’s first Swedish publishing house C.W.K. Gleerups, the study uncovers and discusses which norms the translators and publishers worked by, as well as the publishers’ role in the translation process and how the publishers’ profile and praxis affected the translations. The analysis demonstrates that the publishers’ were highly engaged in the translation processes and that their ideas and instructions played an important part in shaping the books’ content and making them part of the children’s canon in Sweden. For instance, it was the publisher and a publishing house board member – not the translator – who came up with the iconic book title Anne på Grönkulla (Anne of Green Gables). The publishers primarily steered the translators in matters that concerned the salability of the novels – the length and the titles of the books – but also on a more detailed level. This close cooperation points to the fact that it sometimes is relevant to refer to the publisher as a co-translator. In line with current research within the field of sociology of translation, the study thus concludes that the process of translating Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books into Swedish should be seen as a collective act
