Outward Bound: Adventures in Cross-Cultural Reading and Global Citizenship in North American Young Adult Literatures

There has been a spate of YA novels in North America that mobilize discourses of cosmopolitanism to construct static, “worlded” sites where adventures in cross-cultural reading and global citizenship can be staged for the benefit of young readers largely coded as white and middle class. As analyses of two such novels show, the adventures staged tend to rely on a rhetoric of deflection in their writings of the “other,” in turn engendering constructions of white subjects as givers of aid in relation to “Third World Others.” The essay concludes with analysis of a text that avoids this kind of rhetoric.