All Because You Matter – Manifestations of Black Struggle and Resilience in Black Lives Matter Children’s Picturebooks

Ewa Klęczaj-Siara

Abstract


The paper examines #OwnVoices literature, a new subgenre of children’s literature that emerged with the Black Lives Matter movement, situating two sample picturebooks, All Because You Matter (2020) and We Shall Overcome (2021), within the recent political context and analysing their illustrations and themes. It argues that through such texts children’s literature is progressing
out of its “diversity crisis”. These texts have a new set of themes that emphasize Black people’s struggle and resilience rather than trauma and hardship.


Keywords


diversity crisis; resilience; Black Lives Matter literature; #OwnVoices literature; picturebook

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and using books for the classroom, 6(3), ix-xi.

Bishop, R. S. (2007). Free Within Ourselves. The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Heinemann.

Chandler, K. (2019). Uncertain Directions in Black Children’s Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn, 43(2), 172–181. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2019.0017

Charles, T., & Collier, B. (2020). All Because You Matter [Ebook].Orchard Books.

Clements, P. (2017). The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life. Routledge.

Collier, B. (2021). We Shall Overcome. Orchard Books.

Cran, R. (2014). Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture. Joseph Cornell, William

Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan. Ashgate.

Demirtürk, E. L. (2019). African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life. Lexington Books.

Dumas, M. J., & Ross, K. M. (2016). “Be real Black for me”: Imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415–442.

Gardner, R. P. (2020). The Present Past: Black Authors and the Anti-Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature. Journal of Children’s Literature, 46(2). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1275638

Feelings, T. (1985). Illustration Is My Form, the Black Experience, My Story and My Content. The Advocate, 4(2), 73–82.

Fuente-Lau, S. (2021). What Does Own Voices Mean? And Why It Matters. Little Feminist. https://littlefeminist.com/2021/02/22/what-does-own-voices-mean/

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge.

Krishnaswami, U. (2019, January-February). Why Stop at Windows and Mirrors?: Children’s Book Prisms. The Horn Book Magazine, 95(1), 54–59.

Lapointe, G. (2022). What happened to the own voices label? Book Riot. https://bookriot.com/what-happened-to-the-own-voices-label/

McKinney, L. L. (2020, June 17). The Role Publishing Plays in the Commodification of Black Pain. Reactor.

McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(8), 947–963.

Michel, N. (2018). Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Towards a Critical Black Politics of Vulnerability. In E. Ferrarese (Ed.), The Politics of Vulnerability (pp. 90–109). Routledge.

Myers, C. (2014, March 15). The Apartheid of Children’s Literature. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html

Neal, L. (1994). The Black Arts Movement. In M. Angelyn (Ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Duke University Press.

Nel, P. (2017). Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism in Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford University Press.

O’Meally, R. (2021). Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture. Columbia University Press.

Painter, C., Martin, J., & Unsworth, L. (2014). Reading Visual Narratives. Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. Equinox.

Rappaport, D., & Collier, B. (2001). Martin’s Big Words. Jump at the Sun.

Sexton, J. (2011). The social life of social death: On Afro-pessimism and Black optimism. In Tensions, 5, 1–47.

Short, K. (2019). Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images. In H. Johnson, J. Mathis, & K. Short (Eds.), Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young Readers: Reading Images (pp. 3–22). Routledge.

Social Justice Books of Teaching for Change, Retrieved June 1, 2023, from https://bookshop.org/lists/black-lives-matter-at-school-unapologetically-black?page=3

Wilkerson, I. (2016). Where do we go from here? In J. Ward (Ed.), The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (pp. 47–60). Scribner.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2024.48.2.73-83
Date of publication: 2024-07-10 11:05:37
Date of submission: 2023-07-14 03:08:15


Statistics


Total abstract view - 399
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 127

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2024 Ewa Klęczaj-Siara

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.