Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields

The Children’s Literature Association’s 2014 conference took place in Columbia, South Carolina, in the United States, and was hosted by the University of South Carolina and the Carolina Children’s Literature Consortium. The conference spotlighted the University’s Hollings Library, the Augusta Baker Collection and other research resources, the art and literature of Anita Lobel, and the work of publishers of ethnic children’s literature. Capshaw delivered the Francelia Butler lecture, the keynote academic talk of the conference, and considered the conference theme of “Diverging Diversities: Plurality in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Then and Now” in order to chart the currents that have shaped critical attention to texts by authors of color.

I want to begin this presentation with the question of movement. What are the forces that have moved our field toward a discussion of diversity? What is the role of civil rights movements in shaping our field? And what are the directions that our field may take in consideration of the past and the pressures of the moment? Movement is on my mind—where we have been and where are we headed. Our position today, where we are as a field, is fundamentally vexed. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, in the wake of the revolutionary student movements of the 1960s and 70s, and the tremendous activism of groups like the Council on Interracial Books for Children and others, and we are here (fig. 1), an image you may have seen through social media and other outlets. We are in a place where books by ethnic authors are not being published and sold at the rates proportional to the population of children of color in the United States, as this image from Lee & Low Books pointedly indicates (fig. 2). But with the efforts of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, Teaching for Change, American Indians in Children’s Literature, the We Need Diverse Books campaign, the “color my shelf” hashtag on Twitter, and so on, the need for a more inclusive children’s literature has taken center stage. It’s about time. I realize that you are familiar with the statistics in these images and that many of you have spent your professional lives advocating for a more expansive children’s literature. There are various forces at play in the marginalization of books by people of color and about ethnic experience, the foremost being publishing as a field; we were so grateful to hear from publishers Lee & Low, Scholastic, Cinco Puntos Press, and Young Palmetto Press at the panel here two days ago.¹

Figure 1.

Copyright 2013 by Tina Kugler, tinakuglerstudio.com.

What I want to add to the conversation is a call for our scholarship, for our work as teachers and within institutions, to grow. We are in a place where, especially in terms of race in the United States, our scholarship is bereft, where there is only one major critical article on Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, a smattering of work on Virginia Hamilton, and relatively little on the great bodies of Asian American and Latino/a children’s literature, despite all of the awards and accolades these texts and writers have received. Child readers suffer from a lack of books, and we suffer from a lack of scholarship, scholarship that can filter down into our classrooms to feed our students and their students. We also suffer from historical tendencies in our criticism, which I’ll discuss a bit later. I’d like us to think about why, in U.S. scholarship, attention to race in children’s literature has been a difficult

Figure 2.

Infographic by Lee & Low Books, designed by Ben Mautner.

prospect. What I thought I would do with this presentation would be to consider how we arrived here and what scholarship in ethnic studies can tell us about the institutional structures that have contributed to our limitations in terms of work on race. Also, I acknowledge that I cannot cover...