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  • ChLA International Committee

ChLA 2019 International Panel Abstracts


BAME Children's Literature

With two weeks until the 46th Children's Literature Association's annual conference, the ChLA International Committee is pleased to present the abstracts for the 2019 International Panel focusing on Black Asian Minority Ethnic Children’s Literature from the United Kingdom. Please join us Friday, June 14th in Capitol III from 3:30-4:45pm to hear these thrilling papers!

 

Well, if I can do it... not everyone can

Patrice Lawrence, Distinguished Speaker, Award-winning British Author

Ute Dettmar

In 2017, 114 books were nominated for the CILIP Carnegie medal, a high profile award for books published by children's publishers. The list included books by Caribbean, Asian and African-heritage authors. Many, like Patrice Lawrence herself, had been shortlisted for and won other prestigious prizes. Of the 20 books longlisted, not one was by an author of colour. The original response to criticism argued that “The books on the long list are judged on merit and on an equal playing field.” Using her own journey into publishing, Patrice Lawrence’s talk will explore why there is “no equal playing ground,” the explicit privileges that she enjoys that other authors of colour may not and why, in spite of the bad news, authors of colour can flourish.

Be The Change: author and publisher activism in the monochrome UKYA market

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, University College London

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold

The UKYA market has flourished since 2006: the number of titles published, annually, more than doubled from then until 2010. Despite the growth and popularity of YA, there is a dearth of authors of colour, particularly British BAME authors, being published in the UK. In fact, UKYA BAME authors were less well represented in 2016 than they were in 2006, and authored only 1.5% of the titles published, in the UK, during this period. The marginalisation of authors and characters of colour has a long history in Anglo-American publishing, which has engendered a racialized, cultural hierarchy in publishing output. This imbalance of cultural output affects aspiring and emerging authors, trying to break into the market; however, it also impacts established midlist authors, who, despite being undervalued, prop up an industry that is focused on bestsellers. Consequently, writing and publishing against the grain can be seen as a type of activism. By contextualising the book within my quantitative study of the UKYA market (2006-2018), this paper will focus on the A Change Is Gonna Come (2017) anthology, which was commissioned in response to the lack of ethnic diversity in British publishing. This collection of, multi-genre, UKYA short stories and poetry, published by Stripes, features British BAME authors who are at different stages in their careers. Through interviews with the authors in the collection, and the books’ commissioning editors, this paper will examine how the authors and independent publisher are collaborating to disrupt the cultural hegemony in the UKYA market.

Police Violence in the "Multicultural" Londons of Farrukh Dhondy and Michael de Larrabeiti

Aishwarya Subramanian, Newcastle University

Aishwarya Subramanian

Farrukh Dhondy’s The Siege of Babylon (1978), dramatizes an encounter in 1970s London between young black men from Brixton and the police. This book, and Dhondy’s short stories for children collected in East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come to Mecca (1978), were published during a period of violent confrontations between London’s Metropolitan police and ethnic minority communities, culminating in major riots in Brixton (1981) and Tottenham (1985). Depictions of racialized state violence during this period were thus particularly fraught. In 1985, the publisher Collins cited the Brixton and Tottenham riots in their refusal to print Michael de Larrabeiti’s children’s fantasy novel The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis. De Larrabeiti’s Borribles trilogy (1979-86) depicted a multi-ethnic group of childlike creatures from across London ranged against a violent and bigoted metropolitan police force.

Stuart Hall describes the moment when “the term ‘black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, amongst groups and communities with […] different histories, traditions, and ethnic identities.” Drawing on Hall, A. Sivanandan and Ashley Dawson, this paper will contextualise Dhondy’s and de Larrabeiti’s work within 1970s discourses around race and police brutality. It will emphasise the role of inter-community solidarity in resisting state violence in these texts, and demonstrate these books’ participation within a larger history of networks of anti-racist activism, linking both fictional and real cross-community solidarities to Hall’s “new politics of resistance.”

 

Abstracts from all of the papers that will be presented during the ChLA 2019 Conference in Indianapolis are now available on the ChLA website.

For more information about our distinguished panelists and the 2019 International Committee panel, please visit our conference page. We look forward to seeing you in two weeks in Indianapolis!

If you livetweet or Instagram a panel or other conference-related event, please use the #chla19 hashtag so that others can find your posts.

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