"Mother Tells Me to Forget": Nostalgic Re-presentations, Re-membering, and Re-telling the Child Migrant's Identity and Agency in Children's Literature

The experiences of migrant figures in children's literature shed new light on the construction of identity and human agency in migration research, which so far has been almost completely dominated by adult perspectives. Examining the first-person narratives of Sandra Cisneros, Fran Leeper Buss, Edwidge Danticat, and Ibtisam Barakat through the lens of postcolonial and narrative theory, this article argues that a focus on displaced children in this epoch of a global refugee crisis is vital to understanding the links between autobiographical memory and human agency in the context of transnational migration. It establishes that children are not merely pawns in the power paradigms of nations but rather subjects with agency, with the ability to traverse the imagined and geographical boundaries of space and time. Situating the protagonists at the juncture of historicity and memory, from which sites of resistance emerge, these narratives subvert the preconceived notions of child migrants, relocating them from the margins to the center, from invisibility to visibility, and from subjugated childhoods to agents capable of reimagining and rewriting the nation in the eyes of the "other."