Contemplating and Extending the Scholarship on Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Literacy Research, this article reviews the trajectory of a particular line of scholarship published in this journal over the past five decades. We focus on African diaspora youth literature to contemplate and extend the ways in which literacy researchers carry out textual analysis research of diverse children's and young adult literature. We situate this line of scholarship (and its trajectory) within the broader literacy field and then narrow to a focus on diverse books. Next, to turn our gaze as literacy researchers forward to the future, we present our own critical content analysis of a young adult text collection. Our analysis incorporates postcolonial theory and a youth lens to interrogate how underlying ideologies identified within the novels support, refute, or reconstruct dominant beliefs about Black girls. We end with a set of implications for researchers interested in theorizing about or further investigating diverse children's or young adult literature. Keywords African American children's literacy, critical content analysis, young adult literature Serving as a school counselor in an ethnically diverse city in the Northeastern United States, D.C. (second author) learned that a number of Ethiopian and Jamaican girls disliked being mistaken for "Black American." African American girls, therefore, surmised that those groups thought they were "too good" to hang out with "regular Black girls." 1 Some of the Afro-Caribbean and African American girls spoke negatively about the girls from Ghana and Nigeria, commenting on their dress, speech, and bodies. In turn, the girls from West Africa used words such as "cotton pickers," in hushed tones, to label the other groups of Black girls. Despite each group's desire to separate itself from the others, many on the school's staff perceived them as indistinguishable, referring to them collectively as "the Black girls."

Reenvisioning space, mobilities and public engagement with young adult literature

“…Our methods of analysis draw on what we are calling a literary discourse approach (Mills, 1997(Mills, /2004, similar to what others have described as a top-down, bottom-up process of critical content analysis (Bradford, 2017;Brooks and Cueto, 2018). Situating our readings in geography and mobilities frameworks, we examine the relationships between individual interactions and wider social discursive and social structures (Mills, 1997(Mills, /2004.…”

“…Scholars are only beginning to look at the implications of cultural and spatial analyses of literature in their work with young people and with literacy educators (Brooks and Cueto, 2018;Glenn, 2017;Spring, 2016). Building on our methods of spatial literary analysis and discussions with teachers detailed in this paper, our work going forward is to further engage in these frameworks with teachers and their students in classroom settings.…”

“Bet You Can’t Wait to Get Out”: Complicating Narratives of Leaving in Rural Young Adult Literature

“…Recent scholarship has examined depictions of constructs in contemporary YA literature, such as identity construction of Black immigrant youth (Omogun & Skerrett, 2021); dominant beliefs about Black girls across the African diaspora (Brooks & Cueto, 2018); queer elements and ideologies (Blackburn et al, 2015); and depictions of poverty (Hill & Darragh, 2016). Following in these researchers' scholarly footsteps, we undertook a critical textual analysis of a selection of YA books focusing on a different underrepresented population-working-class youth in rural Appalachia-to understand how the political and cultural structures of their communities have influenced and shaped the identity construction and movement of the characters.…”