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  • From the Editor
  • Julie Pfeiffer (bio)

In an Anansi story retold in Matthew Lewis's 1834 Journal of a West India Proprietor, the obedient heroine is sent out to gather eggs and is warned to ignore the talking eggs that clamor for her attention in favor of those that are silent. Despite the fact that the talking eggs are plentiful and attractive, the girl collects "three little dirty-looking eggs, that had not a word to say for themselves" (257). This complex tale, which is usefully analyzed by Courtney Weikle-Mills in her essay in this volume, seems particularly apt at a cultural moment in which loud voices demand our attention on every side and we may find ourselves drowning in what José Esteban Muñoz calls "the quagmire of the present" (1). Just as the girl in the hen house is rewarded for her obedient attention to that which is hidden, these essays help us to see softer, less visible perspectives and offer strategies for new ways of seeing ourselves and others.

Volume 47 of Children's Literature opens with a forum on Latinx Young Adult literature, coedited by Marilisa Jiménez García. In her introduction to the forum, "The Lens of Latinx Literature," Jiménez García calls for a critical discourse that pairs attention to Latinx YA novels and picture books with the acknowledgment that the long history of Latinx criticism gives us a framework that helps us see "how children's and young adult literature behaves as an aesthetic and political medium." In the two forum essays that follow, Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez ("Conocimiento Narratives: Creative Acts and Healing in Latinx Children's and Young Adult Literature") and Angel Daniel Matos ("A Narrative of a Future Past: Historical Authenticity, Ethics, and Queer Latinx Futurity in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe") provide examples of how the lens of Latinx criticism can help us enter a fluid space of boundary crossing between trauma and creativity (Rodríguez) and between historical realities and fiction (Matos). Jiménez García writes, "We forget that although Indigenous and people of color writers and scholars have been marginalized in literary and cultural history by conquest and colonization, the contributions of these communities are not marginal"; in the work of Latinx scholars we find strategies that help all of us negotiate the space of what Gloria E. Anzaldúa calls nepantla, "the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems" (11). [End Page vii]

This overlapping space is one way of creating a bridge that can lead us out of quagmires. In "now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner work, public acts," Anzaldúa calls for a creative revolution in our self-awareness, bridge-building, and advocacy. Anzaldúa imagines this shift as an awareness of our own epistemologies and the ways our "constructions violate other people's ways of knowing and living" (44). The essays in this volume share her commitment to the flexible space of kinship, the work of acknowledging our own violations, and the power of the imagination to reimagine present and future possibilities.

With "The Obscure Histories of Goosee Shoo-shoo and Black Cinderella: Seeking Afro-Caribbean Children's Literature in the Nineteenth Century," Courtney Weikle-Mills offers us a reframing of children's literature of Afro-Caribbean enslaved peoples. Weikle-Mills calls on us to approach non–Anglo-American sources flexibly, "not seeing them as irrelevant to the field because they do not have a wholly child audience, connection to a genealogy of printed European children's literature, and relationship to an Anglo-American concept of childhood innocence." The "two-shoe" method of this essay helps us see the double narrative in Afro-Caribbean stories that use "childhood, especially girlhood, as a site for resistance."

Dawn Sardella-Ayres argues for the transgressive potential of The Little Colonel and its heroine, Lloyd, in "Rewriting and Re-Whiting The Little Colonel: Racial Anxieties, Tomboyism, and Lloyd Sherman." While Lloyd appears to embody the privilege of the "Beautiful Child," her transgressive movement between identity categories unsettles white aristocratic privilege. Unlike the girl protagonist who must be cured of her nonwhiteness in order to save...

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