Surveillance in Hogwarts: Dumbledore’s Balancing Act Between Managerialism and Anarchism Abstract This article considers the fictional depiction of surveillance in Harry Potter, and compares the two different models of school leadership represented by Dolores Umbridge and Albus Dumbledore. The Harry Potter books put forward a vision of school leadership that affirms the necessity of surveillance. The optimal degree of surveillance means a fine balance between managerialism and anarchism. Neither a panoptic gaze of discipline and management which aims to control the minutest details of a person’s action, nor the absence of surveillance is desirable. Hogwarts is a surveillance school, and the difference between the two principals, both of whom insist on the maintenance of a hierarchical power structure, lies in the extent to which surveillance is in operation. Whereas Umbridge represents the failure of extreme managerialism which only results in fierce resistance, Dumbledore is portrayed as the desirable model of a temperate leader who, through reducing management and developing trust, succeeds in cultivating in students a version of discipline that is not based on external behaviour but on internal values.

Do You Have Papers?: Latinx Third Graders Analyze Immigration Policy Through Critical Multicultural Literature Abstract This article discusses the results of an empirical study that examined third grade Latinx children’s discussions of literature dealing with themes of immigration. The study focused on the reading of six picture books by Mexican-origin children at a public elementary school located in the southeastern portion of the U.S. The data were collected by audio recordings, blogging transcripts, interviews, and children’s artifacts. The findings suggest that discussions about immigration in elementary classrooms have the potential to help young children name, react to, and analyze issues related to immigration. This study aims to offer critical literacy approaches to elementary education, providing insights into how teachers can purposefully select and guide discussions around taboo topics such as immigration.

“I Write to Frighten Myself”: Catherine Storr and the Development of Children’s Literature Studies in Britain Abstract In Britain, children’s literature studies emerged in the late 1960s, largely through the activities of what is now the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter. This article uses the Catherine Storr archive to revisit some of the contexts and concerns of those early days, many of which continue to have relevance. Storr was involved in aspects of the initial Exeter projects. A children’s writer known for unsettling stories that often made use of supernatural or Gothic elements, she also spoke and wrote about the importance of fear in children’s literature. Her work provides the focus of this discussion of the relationship between frightening fiction for children, the interest in psychological approaches to reading and producing children’s literature evinced in the foundational work at Exeter and still evident today, and current concerns about the wellbeing of British children.

Cultural and Textual Encounters in Gavin Bishop’s The House that Jack Built , a New Zealand Picture Book Abstract The House that Jack Built by multi-award winning author-illustrator, Gavin Bishop, is one of New Zealand’s most sophisticated picture books for children. Recently republished by Gecko Press in Te Reo Māori as well as English, it depicts the colonisation of New Zealand from 1798 to around 1845, and the beginning of the New Zealand Wars between Māori and Pākehā over land. Rather than simplistically depicting antitheses, the book emphasises mixed truths and a fusing of sides. This article considers the book’s interweaving of diverse cultures through its multi-layered story, which conflates several narratives, including those that are global and local, exotic and indigenous and, finally, those that are oral, written and visual. It examines the book’s deepest “truth,” which lies in its interaction with other texts, and the fact that the multi-literate reader must engage in the book’s playful intertextuality in order to access this larger “truth.” Drawing on ethnographic studies of historical, cross-cultural encounters, the article also explores Bishop’s appropriation and theatricalising of found texts, which he incorporates into his socio-political ideology, thus producing a work that forms an ironic counterbalance to more standard and sedimented versions of the past.

New Realities and Representations of Homelessness in Chinese Children’s Literature in an Era of Urbanization Abstract In the social context of China’s rural–urban migration, a varied set of forces has increasingly challenged the conventional assumptions used to underpin the notion of home as a space fixed in geography and one’s lineage. This essay calls into question the essentialist values associated with home, and explores new realities and representations of homelessness in contemporary Chinese children’s literature. Taking into account critical work on globalization, where the emphasis is on issues of mobility, and reflecting on the Chinese conceptualization of home, this study considers how the traditional territory of home is remapped using literal and allegorical tropes, and argues that representations of floating children, street children and left-behind children in China, as central to the discussion of contemporary Chinese children’s literature in an era of urbanization, mark the transition of the Chinese concept of home from an established locus of security to an open signifier of precariousness and uncertainty.

“No Strings Attached?” Sex and the Teenage Mother in American Young Adult Novels Abstract American culture is greatly influenced by conservative and religious views that construct adolescent sexuality as problematic. Consequently, American teenagers are often informed that abstinence is the right moral choice and will allow them to lead a successful adult life. The ultimate punishment for engaging in pre-marital sex is deemed to be teenage pregnancy. This is evident in the way that the adolescent mother is constructed as a deviant citizen who drains the government of welfare payments, rejects family values, and defies the rigid path to economic success advocated by capitalist ideology. Young Adult literature reflects and communicates such dominant societal attitudes to young readers. In this article, four Young Adult novels were selected to see whether negative attitudes towards teenage sexuality and pregnancy were replicated in the narratives. The two novels from the mid-twentieth century, Two and the Town (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1952) and My Darling, My Hamburger (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1969), reinforced contemporaneous attitudes by presenting adolescent sexuality as wayward and thus punishable with the shame of enforced marriage or illegal abortion. To examine whether such conservatism still exists in the twenty-first century, two contemporary novels, Jumping Off Swings (Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA, 2011) and Me, Him, Them and It (Bloomsbury, New York, NY, 2013), were selected for comparison. These novels contain similar messages since casual sex only led to shame for the female protagonists and the penalty for their recklessness was pregnancy. The novels, regardless of period, reinforce conservative messages that tell adolescents to be wary of their sexual urges, to abstain from sex, and to view teenage motherhood as deviant.

Shoujo Versus Seinen? Address and Reception in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) Abstract This article uses the Japanese television anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children’s literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and reception studies, which typically gather data through empirical work with children. The figure of the “child reader” is claimed by both traditions, although in one case that reader is a textual construct and in the other a human being; yet this ambiguity is not typically addressed within studies of individual texts. Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a complex work that disrupts viewer expectations and genre assumptions, both destabilises its implied viewership and challenges conventional beliefs about the tastes and capacities of actual viewers, especially the extent to which those viewers can be categorised by age or gender. I argue that, by taking a sideways step from page to screen, and especially by analysing a non-Western work, it is possible to highlight the contingent and arbitrary nature of some of the assumptions that permeate literary critical discussion, and to help bring narratalogical and reception studies into a more productive relationship.

Black Girls Matter: Black Feminisms and Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer Trilogy Abstract Media platforms frequently report on “Black Lives Matter” in order to raise awareness about institutional racism. However, these platforms often focus on African American male teenagers (Trayvon Martin in a hoodie and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” for Michael Brown). Noticeably absent are images of Black girls. As a response to these male-focused images, the hashtag movement #BlackGirlsMatter draws attention to the injustices Black girls face. Unfortunately, the reach of this hashtag movement is limited; only select outlets mention the significance of #BlackGirlsMatter. This limited reach is problematic given that many public schools—where many Black girls experience oppression—are still unaware of the institutional racism within their own policies and procedures. In order for educators and children to become cognizant of the systematic oppression at the intersection of race and gender, they must read texts that clearly align with cultural theories, such as Critical Race Theory and Black feminism, in order to potentially empower young readers. This article demonstrates how Black feminist theory can provide a useful framework for exploring the nuances of children’s novels, using Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer trilogy as an example. One Crazy Summer (Amistad, New York, 2010), P.S. Be Eleven (Amistad, New York, 2013), and Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015) contain representations of Black women and girls that assist readers in recognizing and naming systematic racism and sexism so that they may become more aware of paths for social justice.

Such Books Should be Burned! Same-Sex Parenting and the Stretchable Definition of the Family in Larysa Denysenko’s and Mariia Foya’s Maya and Her Mums Abstract As there is a myriad of Anglophone picturebooks featuring same-sex parents, some Western readers familiar with them would probably see little that is ground-breaking in the visual and verbal narrative of Larysa Denysenko’s and Mariia Foya’s Maya and Her Mums (2017). The picturebook’s first-person narrator and protagonist is a ten-year-old girl who describes her 16 classmates and their families; it includes no violence, no nudity, and no sexual references. Despite the title suggesting the story to be about the eponymous heroine and her family, Maya briefly introduces readers to her two mothers in one of the last doublespreads. When Maya and Her Mums was included in the programme of Ukraine’s most important book fair, the Lviv Book Forum, it became a political tool in the confrontation between homophobic Ukrainian nationalists and progressive intellectuals. In this essay, I want to examine the depiction of same-sex parenting in Maya and Her Mums and argue that it implies gradual widening of tolerance, with households headed by lesbian parents being the most controversial. Thus, the picturebook suggests that the definition of the family is stretchable, even in a conservative socio-political climate. By familiarising readers with Denysenko’s and Foya’s picturebook, I want to show what makes it different from equivalent Anglophone picturebooks and argue that the Ukrainian book market is slowly becoming more inclusive and diverse. Hence, despite the conservative backlash, the need for for same-sex parents and their children to be represented in children’s literature can no longer be ignored.

“Lurched Forward and Stopped”: Last Stop on Market Street and Black Mobility Abstract This article examines the racialized productions of space in Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson’s 2015 picturebook Last Stop on Market Street, arguing that depictions of characters’ movements show how Black mobility constitutes a form of resistance to state circumscription. Language and illustrations both work to portray CJ and Nana’s environment as fundamentally flexible, often exceeding the confines of what appears to be possible. The geographies of their journey on a city bus privilege communication, alternative epistemologies, and the spatial transcendence of creativity over literalism. Yet, importantly, other realities also impact the way characters move; the carceral regulation of Black people within the United States inevitably shadows this book’s spatial optimism, and Nana’s loving surveillance and careful direction shape the outlines of CJ’s imagination. To move while Black, Market Street suggests, is to create new possibilities within the confines of limitations, the process of motion a continual and unsettled oscillation.