Editor's Introduction
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The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn explore how texts for young readers encourage us to challenge cultural norms.
In "Not Another Dead Indian: Young Adult Fiction, Survivance, and Sherman Alexie's Flight," Domino Renee Perez uses theories of survivance to reframe conventional readings of the novel's plot and its protagonist. "Rather than a conventional coming-of-age story," Perez writes, "Flight makes a powerful statement about Native people in YA fiction and U.S. culture more broadly by plotting Zits' narrative absence into presence and the teenager's unwillingness to vanish permanently." By reading Flight alongside Alexis's other works and through this critical lens, Perez concludes, we can see how Alexie "mov[es] beyond temporality, genre, and narrative convention" in order "to imagine stories that reject an American literary tradition with an historical and political investment in vanishing Natives."
Cristina Herrera also takes us beyond cultural stereotypes in her essay titled "Soy Brown y Nerdy: The ChicaNerd in Chicana Young Adult (YA) Literature." Riffing in her title on the song "Soy Yo" by the Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo, Herrera explores the "reclamation and powerful acceptance of one's nerdy Chicana self in two young adult (YA) texts by Chicana writers, Ashley Hope Pérez's What Can(t) Wait (2011) and Isabel Quintero's Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014)." The "ChicaNerds" of these texts not only destabilize the white masculinity associated with "nerd" but also resignify that label, aligning it instead with the "sociopolitical consciousness of Chicanisma" to develop an "an empowered subjectivity."
KaaVonia Hinton and Angela Branyon's essay, "'Your Hair Ain't Naughty': Representations of Women in Rita Williams-Garcia's Novels," provides a study of Rita Williams-Garcia's One Crazy Summer novels (One Crazy Summer [2010], P.S. Be Eleven [2013], and Gone Crazy in Alabama [2015]). Hinton and Branyon unpack Williams-Garcia's complex treatment of competing expectations for Black womanhood and mothering against the backdrop of the 1960s. Most crucially, they show how Williams-Garcia [End Page v] challenges multiple stereotypes by creating three-dimensional characters as the child-protagonist Delphine grows into her own apprehension of life's delights and challenges and contests the damaging effects of the "strong Black woman" myth.
Cultural norms connected to the family are the subject of Timothy Baker's essay "'Oh, my dog owns me': Interspecies Companionship in Dodie Smith and Diana Wynne Jones." Here, Baker uses queer and animal studies theory to explore how Dodie Smith and Diana Wynne Jones challenge normative assumptions about family and affective connection by depicting the intimate relationships between dogs and humans. Moving from the comic rendition of Smith's Dalmatian family in The One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and The Starlight Barking (1967) to Jones' more somber story of exile in Dogsbody (1975), Baker shows how both authors serve the utopian goal of "reorient[ing] [our] conceptual frameworks" to break down unnecessary and oppressive boundaries, and to make possible more liberating definitions of love and connection.
Challenging conventional readings of Roald Dahl's relationship to the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Adrian Schober turns to the archive to sort out the authorship, authorial intent, and ideological implications of this "British musical/satirical comedy/fantasy." Schober's investigation centers on "possible origins and sources of the Child Catcher character: literary, autobiographical, historical, ideological" to "argue (contra Ken Hughes) that the Child Catcher bears all the hallmarks of Dahl's imagination." In the resulting essay, "On the Origins and Sources of the Child Catcher: Ken Hughes' Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Roald Dahl Connection," Schober provides "new insights into the workings of [Dahl's] imagination, its sources, influences and preoccupations, and suggests tantalizing links with his values and attitudes."
This issue concludes with the collaborative essay "Panning for Gold: The 2017 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry." This year's judges—Richard Flynn, Lissa Paul, and Poetry Award Editor Joseph Thomas—provide the journal's annual review of the year in poetry for young readers and select this year's award winners, taking as their...
