Abstract

This essay explores Gwendolyn Brooks’s use of temporality in crafting multiple childhood subjectivities in Bronzeville Boys and Girls, a collection of poetry for children published in 1956 and reillustrated by Faith Ringgold in 2007. Brooks’s treatment of child characters’ engagements in and with time, including their active roles in relation to time and the varied implications of time for self-experience, contributes to the plurality of representations of childhood subjectivities. Focusing on how temporality structures and complicates considerations of childhood subjectivity in poetry for children can contribute to our thinking about poetry for children and our theorizing of childhood subjectivity.

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