African American Genre Crossings

Since the African American Review’s spring 1998 issue on African American children’s and young adult literature, scholars have continued to expand our understanding of the range and importance of black literature for young readers. Recent scholarship on African American children’s literature has uncovered long-obscured picture and photography books, nineteenth-century family novels and poetry, and homemade scrapbooks. In conference presentations and published essays and books, scholars have shared their insights and questions about black fantasy literature, poetry, social realism, nonfiction, and film. For both of us, one of the joys of editing this current special issue on African American children’s literature and genre has been encountering many promising essays that broadened and enriched our sense of the literature, its writers, and the audiences to which it is addressed.

In an attempt to further critical discussion of the range of African American children’s literature, this special issue explores the intricacies, slipperiness, and variability of African American literary genres for children and young adults. The articles concern the ways in which we both define literature by type and play with those definitions, the ways in which critical reading can complicate our sense of a text’s boundaries and take note of genre crossings. Whether discussing masculine authority in biographical picture books or gothic elements in verse memoir, the scholars included here treat genre as malleable, with its defining features unfixed, negotiable.

Melissa Jenkins’s “‘The next thing you know you’re flying among the stars’: Nostalgia, Heterotopia, and Mapping the City in African American Picture Books” focuses on the motif of flight in the work of multiple authors and illustrators. Jenkins seeks to theorize the flight motif as its own mini-genre, which she suggests “helps both children and parents to manage the contradictory impulses of nostalgia and critique, as well as those of social mobility versus social responsibility.” Jenkins notes that managing these contradictory impulses is necessary for navigating the canon of African American children’s literature.

In “Every Tongue Silenced So One Voice Resounds: Redefining Zora Neale Hurston’s Legacy in Adapted Picture Books,” Cara Byrne explores six picture books by Christopher Myers and Joyce Carol Thomas. Based on Hurston’s anthropological field notes, these books speak to both folktales and authorship. Navigating between the books’ nostalgia for the black vernacular and their critique or denial of its emphases, Byrne concludes that these texts use a few words and pictures to “make influential and complex decisions as to how children are taught about storytelling and African American folktales” and that these alterations are both commercially and politically motivated.

While Byrne discusses folklore and Hurston’s authorship, Eleanor Reeds turns her attention to picture book interpretations of biography. In “Representing the Integration of Baseball to a New Generation,” Reeds interrogates popular perceptions of Jackie Robinson and weighs alternative images of African American athletes’ power and civil resistance. Reeds insists on the importance of reading pictures for challenging “authoritative” master narratives that distort the historical realities of African Americans’ fight for civil rights in order to serve capitalist goals.

The final essay in this special issue, Giselle Anatol’s “Brown Girl Dreaming: A Ghost Story in the Postcolonial Gothic Tradition,” challenges common readings of autobiography that emphasize textual realism while perhaps overlooking an author’s reliance on other modes of expression. Anatol points to Jacqueline Woodson’s use of ghosts, and of the Gothic more generally, to invoke both the protagonist Jackie’s personal memories and a larger cultural memory. Anatol suggests that thinking about Brown Girl Dreaming as part of the gothic tradition will expand reader acceptance of genre-blending works that, as all of the articles included in this special issue show, provide a “model for interactions between people of different races, cultures, backgrounds, and life experiences.”