Children’s Fiction about 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic, and National Identities (review)

As early as 2002, the Christian Science Monitor estimated that 300 books had been published about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93. Fifty books on the Monitor’s list were examples of children’s nonfiction, fiction, and poetry (Lampert 18), and the category continued to expand as commentators sought to interpret the traumatic events for young audiences. Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler consider September 11 a failed opportunity for critical self-reflection on the part of the United States. But Jo Lampert’s Children’s Fiction about 9/11—the first book-length study of this material—opens up a space for rethinking this position by way of children’s literature. Lampert is certainly not the first to address children’s literature in the context of September 11; Paula Connolly, Kenneth Kidd, Anastasia Ulanowicz, and Richard Flynn, among others, have published on this topic. Lampert does, however, create a new platform for thinking about the political work of children’s books on this shattering day and its aftermath.

In her title, Lampert accepts the common term “9/11”—a convenient and yet troubling shorthand that assumes an American context and ignores other tragedies on the same date (Redfield 224). She centers on children’s writers’ and illustrators’ initial responses to the tragedy, arguing that early books about the September 11 attacks reformulate what it means to be an American. Authors and artists partake in political mythmaking that might be likened to fiction, using narrative to create idealized representations of the nation (Lampert 24).

Lampert focuses on interrelated categories of ethnic, heroic, and national identity. Her category of ethnic identity addresses the post-September 11 shift in notions of a fluid, multicultural inclusiveness, and points to the challenges faced by those—particularly Muslim Americans and people of Middle Eastern descent—who identify themselves as American while valuing a non-U.S. or non-Judeo-Christian heritage. For instance, Lampert identifies xenophobic representations of nonwhite children in Andrea Patel’s On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children, and in Joseph Geha’s short story “Alone and All Together,” in which Arab American sisters, Libby and Sally, must choose between their Arab and American identities. Lampert demonstrates how pre-9/11 multiculturalism is “now complicated” (92), with children’s books portraying the United States as a “unified West where unity is privileged over diversity” (92–93). Such a reading, though, begs the question of whether U.S. children’s literature achieved a genuinely diverse, nonassimilationist vision prior to the disillusionment of the terrorist attacks.

Alongside texts on ethnicity, Lampert identifies texts that reinforce national identity and strive to represent America as strong and noble; she notes that belief in a coherent national identity is “important . . . to maintain, especially in hard times when it would be easier to despair” (95). In this category, Lampert includes texts invested in the myth of a stable, shared American past, such as Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked between the Towers (about the stability of American memory, even if its protagonist is a French high-wire artist) and Victoria London’s Lucy and the Liberty Quilt (part of the Christian Gifted Girl series, in which a time-traveling girl ventures between the post-9/11 United States and moments in American Revolutionary history). Such narratives attempt to reify a vision of American wholeness and to reassure young readers that the nation is still strong and powerful.

In Lampert’s category of heroic identity, readers find texts that formulate American male identity. Heroes in these children’s books are common men doing their civic duty. They react when necessary and—though lacking in superhuman powers—face extraordinary situations with legendary bravery. Lambert reads examples of post-9/11 masculinized heroism in light of America’s so-called War on Terror. For instance, she notes how Maira Kalman’s Fireboat: The Adventures of the John J. Harvey (2002) virtually excludes women...