Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley (review)

Fictions of Integration deals with the politics of African American children and white schools, particularly the novelizations of those politics in texts written for children. Tracing the literary legacies of Brown v. Board of Education allows Naomi Lesley to make three highly successful arguments: first, the school setting in children's literature, much like its real-life counterpart, restricts discourse about racial inequality and simultaneously provides the opportunity for opposition; second, the genre of the conventional school story often molds novels about desegregation, in turn softening the detrimental legacies of Brown; and third, children's literature about desegregation relies on depictions of schoolroom pedagogy as the chief method by which truly desegregated schools might become the flagship for racial equality and justice (8). Lesley hitches her arguments to several hotly debated issues in American education, thereby demonstrating the important place of children's literature not only for literary criticism but also in the politics of the larger American culture.

Lesley takes an unusually perceptive approach to understanding the influence of Brown on children's novels. Her focus is not limited merely to those novels that directly address Brown. Rather, she provides an evenhanded treatment of novels that address the setting, legacy, backlash, and effects—both negative and positive—of desegregation on students. Chapter 1 represents what readers probably will anticipate from literary scholarship about fictions of integration, those novels that depict the educational and social experiences of the first black students to enter predominantly white schools in the 1950s. However, Lesley's scope is more ambitious and more insightful. In chapter 2, she challenges readers to understand the varied criticisms of desegregation from within several black communities. Chapter 3 furthers this approach by focusing on one of these residual effects of Brown, namely the use of disability diagnoses as a tolerable way to segregate students within only nominally desegregated schools. Finally, in chapter 4, Lesley analyzes several novels, such as Louis Sachar's Holes, that do not engage with Brown directly, but instead obliquely observe how the goals of Brown are unfinished and are a present concern, not a past success. The result of such an insightful approach to this topic is that Fictions of Integration becomes a wonderfully balanced and nuanced piece of scholarship.

More specifically, in chapter 1, "Scripting History and the Genre of Desegregation Stories," Lesley considers three representative novels that depict the admittance of black students into white classrooms in the wake of Brown: Dorothy Sterling's Mary Jane (1959), Andrea Pinkney's With the Might of Angels (2011), and Kristin Levine's The Lions of Little Rock (2012). Lesley argues that a major plot arc in post-Brown novels, whatever their publication date, is that of a pre-teenaged black student who represents a sort of "pioneer of desegregation," as s/he "copes with racist bullies, flourishes academically, and befriends a sympathetic white [friend]" (22). Other tropes in these novels "include a depiction of pedagogical anxieties and changes prompted by the Cold War, a romantic friendship as the key to the utopian vision of desegregation, and an emphasis on a resistant racial identity that depends upon academic performance in the classroom" (22). Taken together, these novels "demonstrate the generic power of the desegregation story genre" while "offering examples of how differently authors may negotiate the more troubling aspects of desegregation history" (22–23).

Lesley begins by placing these novels within the context of the genre of the school story while helpfully explaining how the desegregation story "bends" this genre in order to offer criticism of education as an institution in three different ways (27). First, the black protagonists are not the "every child" of school stories; rather, they are intellectually gifted, ambitious, and eager to learn (27). Second, whereas school stories often focus on the social life of extracurricular activities over the classroom itself, these novels unconventionally deemphasize sports and clubs, replacing such events with more eagerness...