- Anuja Madan
CFP: Postcolonial Children’s & YA Fantasy
CALL FOR PAPERS
Postcolonial Children’s & YA Fantasy
Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn
Guest Editors:
Naomi Wood, Kansas State University
Anuja Madan, Kansas State University
Traditionally, the genre of fantasy has been associated with white authors and Western cultures. In a 2014 op ed in the New York Times, US children’s author Christopher Myers lamented what he called the “Apartheid” of American children’s literature in particular, wherein children of color and others were implicitly barred from fantasy. Similarly, Zetta Elliott mentions in a famous essay that she “learned early on that only white children had wonderful adventures in distant lands” and had to consciously decolonize her imagination. Happily, the Anglo-American predominance over children’s and YA fantasy is now being steadily challenged. Where once English (and occasionally American, Swedish, or German) children dominated magical adventures, and Celtic- and Norse-influenced mythologies dominated the lists, now children’s and YA fantasy rejoices in stories about Mayan gods in 1920s Mexico (Silvia Moreno-Garcia); water goddesses in the Middle Passage (Zetta Elliott); Jumbies in the Caribbean (Tracey Baptiste); wizarding school in Nigeria (Nnedi Okorafor); ghosts and gods in Malaysia (Zen Cho); and many more. This phenomenon is linked to a larger shift in the field of speculative fiction, which has seen many works of postcolonial fantasy by authors such as Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Marlon James, and others. Simultaneously, academic scholarship has started paying more attention to the traditions of speculative fiction in many regions of the Global South that had been too long ignored.
Contemporary fantasy for young people offers new maps with counterfactual histories, revisionist legends, and stories of wonder and liberation, subverting colonial tropes of fantastical adventure stories and the imperial nostalgia of mid-twentieth-century fantasy. Writers from around the world are using fantasy to explore identity, history, hopes, fears, futures, and new ways of seeing/being. We invite papers on any aspect of postcolonial fantasy in children’s and YA literature.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Postcolonial fantastic imaginaries
Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to and/or retellings of Western children’s and YA fantasy
Afrofuturism
Africanfuturism
Indigenous futurisms
Non-Western genres of the fantastic
Theories of the fantastic by authors from the Global South in relation to children’s and YA fantasy
Mythology, folklore, and magic in fantasy of the Global South
Cartographies and mapping in fantasy of the Global South
Secondary worlds and portal fantasies
Utopian and dystopian societies
Empires and revolutions
Essays should be sent to guest editors Naomi Wood and Anuja Madan at WeLovePOCOFantasy@ksu.edu by February 15, 2023. Submissions ideally are in the range of 5000 to 8000 words (although we will also consider shorter, forum-length essays). Accepted articles will appear in The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 47, no. 3 (September 2023).
ABOUT THE EDITOR: Naomi Wood is professor of English at Kansas State University, where she teaches children's and young adult literature in the MA program and to undergraduates. She writes about nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century fantasy literature and culture. Most recently she edited A Cultural History of Fairy Tales—Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury). Since 2009, she has co-edited The Lion and the Unicorn with David Russell and Karin Westman.
ABOUT THE EDITOR: Anuja Madan is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Kansas State University, where she teaches courses in world literature, cultural studies, global comics, and children’s literature. She received her Ph.D. in English from University of Florida and her M.Phil. and M.A. in English from Delhi University. Her co-authored book, Notes of Running Feet: English in Primary Textbooks (with Prof. Rimli Bhattacharya, Sreyoshi Sarkar, and Nivedita Basu) grew out of a group study of Indian English-language textbooks. She has published articles on English-language picturebook adaptations of the Indian epic Mahabharata, redactions of classics in Indian textbooks, and Jean-Luc Godard's films. Her recent articles include one on a graphic novel retelling of the Indian epic Ramayana, published in Graphic Novels for Young Adults and Children: a Collection of Critical Essays (2017), edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, and another on contemporary Indian animation films for children, which appears in The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2017), edited by John Stephens, Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, et al.