Borderland Children: Reflections on Narratives of Abjection

Wilkie-Stibbs examines five paradigm texts of Children's Literature: Thursday's Child, Holes, The Tulip Touch, The Upstairs Room, and Squib. She juxtaposes the texts with quasi-fictional and real life narrative emerging from diverse ideologies, histories, and cultures. She identifies the spatio-temporal positioning of the child's body as the type of borderland that is the condition of abjection in the Kristevan definition. The arguments are set against a backdrop of newly radicalized expressions of "otherness" legitimized by recent political/legislative policies located in a clearly articulated binary logic. She identifies "borderlanders" as the archetypes of ambivalence and the locus of discriminatory power.