ChLA 2024 International Panel Abstracts
The ChLA International Committee is pleased to present the abstracts for the 2023 International Panel focusing on Islands in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Please join us at the annual ChLA Conference in Madison, Wisconsin to hear these thrilling papers. The International Panel is scheduled for Thursday, May 30 from 3:00pm - 4:20 pm in University Room D.
WITNESS CHILDREN: Analyzing Spatial Remembrance And Campesino Identity from a Pedagogical Exercise in San Carlos, Colombia
Diana Carolina García Gómez, George Mason University / Bridgewater State University
Given the contributions made by critical geographers such as Edward Soja, we know that the construction and destruction of space have symbolic consequences for its inhabitants and their constructions of collective identities. The spatial turn not only made it possible to overcome the conception of space as objective and static, but it also, as I intend to demonstrate, sharpened the spatiotemporal liminality between being young, a victim, and inhabiting rural spaces bounded by violence. Combining childhood studies, critical geography, and discourse analysis, this paper explains how children and young people in a rural area in Colombia make sense of the armed conflict and their identities as young campesinos through creative writing exercises. It analyzes how the youth deconstruct the local geography as survivors of the armed conflict, thus creating a historical record of the violent events that marked their community. To this end, this article is based on a series of writings entitled "Creative Literary Construction," published in 2007, one year after the "demobilization" process of the paramilitary group, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia - AUC). It comprises first-hand testimonies of personal accounts of survival and intergenerational conversations of the most impactful violent events for the community. With my analysis, in addition to understanding what constituted significant places for San Carlitan youth, I demonstrate how the study of the literary reconstruction of space allows the creation of a Thirdspace marked by violence and hope. Over 80 narratives were analyzed and created by authors between 12 and 16 years old. Although these narratives were created as a school pedagogical exercise, the writings serve as a tool to "hear" the voices of the witnessing children when they reconstruct significant places and events for their campesino identity in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict.
Spectacles of Gender and Violence: The Socially Contested Chinese Schoolgirls as the Product of the Revolutionary Memory
Lidong Xiang, University of Pittsburgh
This paper focuses on the identity construction in autobiographical writings recounting the revolutionary memory during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Examining the centrality of gender in the acts of remembering and forgetting the sanctioned violence, I argue that the socially contested identity of Chinese schoolgirls is constructed intergenerationally. Drawing on newspapers’ coverage and survivors’ memoirs of the historical realities of the Red Guards and their atrocity, I first illuminate the political rhetoric of recasting the good Chinese schoolgirl into the aggressive ideal. Contextualized in the history of the shifting model child, a Good Chinese Schoolgirl was purposely set up in the earlier stages of the CR and became the violence icon in propelling revolutionary fervor forward. Then, focusing on Chen Danyan’s autobiographical novel for children A Girl (1992), the analysis demonstrates the girl protagonist as the 1.5 generation’s urban youth, characterized in memory studies as alternative revolutionaries and representing a deviated experience from the enthusiastic majority that supported the mass violence (Suleiman 2002, Chen 2015, 2019, Shen and Jiang 2011). With that, I unpack the operation of gendered violence and its impact on complicating schoolgirls’ identities and their intimate relationships. Being subject to the tightly controlled circumstances and marginalized positions that schoolgirl identity inevitably garnered, the 1.5 generation schoolgirls internalized gendered oppression as a performance for public spectacle. Given the oscillation between engaging in or receiving violence, schoolgirl identity was made complicated by autobiographical writings’ excusing and admitting one’s role in the spectrum of CR violence. This complication is extended to representations of intimate friendships between schoolgirls as challenged by the shared trauma that was constantly modified by the historical practices of violence and the contemporary recounting of violence.
Constructing Homeland: Postmemory Narratives in Contemporary Chinese American Autobiographical Picture Books
Xinyue Hu, Newcastle University
In On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs posits that individual memory is shaped by societal constructs. For immigrants, the construction of identity frequently involves an interplay between personal experiences and memories inherited from their family members, rooted in their Homeland. The narration of memories tied to the Homeland constitutes a central theme explored by numerous authors of immigrant children’s literature. Marianne Hirsch further proposes the concept of ‘postmemory’ to refer to the reconstruction of intergenerational traumatic memory. Hirsch highlights the creative nature of postmemory and suggests that remembering the traumatic past in an artistic way is significant. This idea is central to what I hope to explore in this paper. This paper will therefore explore the strategies contemporary Chinese American children’s literature writers use to construct the postmemory of the Homeland and the traumatic past.
This paper will undertake a close analysis of two autobiographical picture books: Watercress (2021) by Andrea Wang and Jason Chin, and The House Baba Built (2011) by Ed Young. The former narrative revolves around cooking watercress, serving as a clue for the protagonist’s mother to recount her childhood during the Great Chinese Famine. Similarly, the latter work employs the juxtaposition of archival photographs to portray the author’s childhood experiences in Second World War-era Shanghai. Through the exploration of these books, this paper aims to elucidate how the memory of the Homeland is narrated, how family memory wields a potent influence in facilitating the intergenerational transmission of postmemory towards the Homeland, and how it contributes to the process of identity formation among immigrant children. Ultimately, the paper will reflect on how we should artistically narrate traumatic memory to future generations.
A tentative conference schedule of all the presenters and panels is now available on the ChLA website.
For more information about our distinguished panelists and the 2024 International Committee panel, please visit our conference page. We look forward to seeing you in Wisconsin!
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