The All-White World of Middle-School Genre Fiction: Surveying the Field for Multicultural Protagonists

Complicating Culture and Difference: Situating Asian American Youth Identities in Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time

“…My own reading problematized how Whiteness is idealized and normalized through Emily's characterization as a benevolent White ally. ''Whiteness,'' in the context of Yee's writing, is an invisible yet powerful norm that renders the ''non-White'' characters as different, exotic, and sometimes undesirable (Agosto et al, 2003). At the same time, Yee effectively engages the readers with two very different Asian American preteens who encounter struggles both unique to Asian Americans and universal to all American preadolescents.…”

“…What is significant about this series is that unlike in mainstream young adult series where Asian American characters are usually relegated into marginal roles, such as Claudia Kishi in Ann Martin's The Babysitters Club or Jade Wu in Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High series, Yee centers two Asian American preadolescents as the protagonists, privileging each character's voice through the literary device of the first-person narrative. Since multicultural literature for readers in grades 6-8 are generally scarce, particularly fiction books focusing on young Asian American protagonists (Agosto et al, 2003), Millicent Min and Stanford Wong are truly groundbreaking works in both mainstream and multicultural literature for young adults.…”

Touchstones as sprezzatura: the significance of attachment to teacher literary formation

“…This sounds like a passive ability, but it is not passive at all: it is what the army would call a basic training for the imagination. (Frye, 2000, p. 150) That training consists of being constantly dipped into the 'cauldron' of children's stories (Cairney, 1990), a corpus that in Western literature has been, and largely continues to be, founded on 'the all white [and heterosexual] world of children's books' (Larrick, 1965; see also Harris, 1994;Mendoza & Reese, 2001;Agosto et al, 2003;Bradford, 2004).…”

Diverse Population, Diverse Collection? Youth Collections in the United States

“…In a study of middle-school genre fiction, Agosto, Hughes-Hassell, and Gilmore-Clough (2003) found that about 16% of books published between 1992 and 2001 included at least one minority character in a significant role. Hughes-Hassell and Cox (2010) found that children's board books rarely include minorities, but when they do, frequently present them in inauthentic contexts.…”