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  • ChLA International Committee

ChLA Conversations: "Dreams" in Children's & YA Literature




Please join us for the third installment in the ChLA Conversations series, “Dreams” in Children’s and YA Literature, Sponsored by the International Committee. This installment will be a special discussion following up on the International Committee's sponsored panel at the recent ChLA Conference in Atlanta. Please see details and our panelists' abstracts below. We look forward to seeing you there!


Date/Time: Thursday, June 16th at 10:00 am EST


Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81574405264?pwd=Z3lwQ0d6cFJnRW1pQStXbUorU3hGUT09


Once you join the meeting, you will immediately be admitted into the meeting by the host. For those unable to attend, please know that each installment of ChLA Conversations will be recorded and posted as a resource to the video section of ChLA's YouTube channel.

 

Your Wish is Not My Command: Arab Youth Fighting for their Dreams in Shubeik Lubeik

Reham Almutairi, King Saud University, Saudi Arabia


Reham Almutairi

Like young people around the world, in the Middle East, Arab young people are struggling to achieve their dreams and aspirations. However, political corruption and social, structural, and economic inequalities usually cut these young people’s dreams short. The questions of how to achieve their dreams for a better future and how to assert their rights to dream and have their dreams fulfilled occupy their minds. Recently, young people in the Middle East have begun to use several literary and social mediums to express their dreams and frustrations. One of these mediums is the graphic novel, a literary genre gaining widespread popularity among Arab young people to discuss socio-political issues (De Blasio).


Therefore, in this paper, I examine Shubeik Lubeik, (Your Wish is My Command), a graphic novel trilogy written and illustrated by the young Egyptian comic artist Dina Yahya. It

tells the story of young Egyptians who strive to fulfill their dreams despite their complicated and unstable social and economic situations. The story is set in a fantastical Cairo, a city that resembles real contemporary Cairo, except that in this fantastical world, wishes can be bought from the market in glass bottles. The more expensive the wish is, the more powerful its ability to fulfill one’s dream. The third-degree wishes are purchased by poor people and always result in disasters while the very expensive first-degree wishes are only purchased and manipulated by the rich and those in power. In this paper, I argue that the young artist uses the graphic novel to assert young people’s activism and agency by showing how despite their inability to buy first-degree wishes, these young people continue to challenge and protest the status quo, thereby uncovering political autocracy and interrogating sharp class hierarchies. In addition, I argue that Shubeik Lubeik serves as a critique of neocolonialism, which the book attempts to hold responsible for the failure of many young people’s dreams. In short, I read Shubeik Lubeik as a story of a vision to a better future.

A Child “lighter than his sleep”: Nightmares and Dreams that Shape the Future in Latin-American Contemporary Cradlesongs

Marina di Marco, Argentine Catholic University, Buenos Aires, Argentina


Marina di Marco

As we might be aware, the image of child plays a central role in lullabies, mostly when it comes to lullabies that articulate the emotions of the addresser, presenting the child as a subtle accomplice of those cathartic statements. The result is a poetical space that —by means of fear or desire— eludes the present. In Latin-American traditions, these folk lullabies, which emphasize in the future, usually refer to supernatural creatures, beneficial or damaging, such as angels, monsters or wild animals. Various authors have written or composed pieces based on those anonymous traditions, and this presentation aims to examine precisely these lullabies. Here, fears and desires of the poetic voices appear in the form of nightmares and dreams, and connect the adults, through their memories, with the addressed child.


In relation to memory, we must take into account orality, especially regarding poetical texts that are intersemiotically translated to songs, and therefore, expected to be performed. Critical studies on orality in Latin-American have proven the importance of considering poems in the light of three elements: the structure —articulation of rhythm and prosody, and of syntactical and lexical aspects—, the imaginary dimension of orality —in which the rhythms and modulation of words are organized—, and the manifestation of cultural legacies in the voice tone. These reveal social and cultural contexts through time, with its cognitive implications.


From this point of view, in order to understand how Latin-American authors use nightmares and dreams to form in their lullabies the possible worlds of the future, we will analyze the connection between orality, corporality and affects in performances of Gabriela Mistral's poem “Encantamiento” (Chile, 1922), musicalized by Carlos Guastavino (Argentina, 1945), and of Ruth Hillar's “Noni noni” (Argentina, 2016). This connection stresses the existence of a common atmosphere where bodies and emotions enhance in a singular utterance situation, involving both the adult and the child. In this sense, is it possible for lullabies to contribute to blur the asymmetry between adult and child—considered a key note of Children's Literature—, thus opening our understanding of childhood to more profound, decentered representations?

The Dreaming Subject: Early speculative fiction in colonial Bengal

Atanu Bhattacharya, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India

Preet Hiradhar, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Atanu Bhattacharya and Preet Hiradhar

The speculative dream-narrative is an insistent presence in Bangla YA writings of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The private sanctum that the dream offers, within what is essentially a public enterprise in the colonial regime, creates a speculative stance that counters not only the hegemonic structures of colonialism but also posits an alternative space enabling a negotiation of one’s own subjectivities. The dream may be viewed as a space of reclamation, however transitory that may be, of a colonized self that is located within a technological horizon of ‘colonial governmentality’. This space, however, is often sieved through class, caste and gender structures promising emancipation as the ultimate goal and yet withholding it from ever being realizable within the colonial domain.


Speculative fiction, from its inception, has been imbricated in dreams since its classic commencement in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818). YA fiction assumes added significance in colonial Bengal being located within a network of contesting discourses involving history, pedagogy, gender, technology and religion. Thus, in Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s ‘A Run to Sumeru’ the dream offers a radical re-reading of the Hindu gods and goddesses. Jagadananda Roy’s Shukra Bhraman (Travel to Venus, 1892), one of the earliest YASFs written during the period, the dream is a strategy to subvert both the imperial claims to epistemology as well as the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali youth. On the other hand, Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyaya’s Kankabati (1892), an imitation of Carroll’s Alice, inserts the dream abruptly within the oppressive gender structures of marriage, propelling Kankabati into the domain of the fantastic. Rokeya Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905) is, perhaps, the most discussed of such narratives. Rokeya’s projected dreamscape of Ladyland as well as her other speculative pieces not only problematize the gender debates of the times but also locates them within the larger historical and technological imaginaries within the colonial domain. The paper will explore the significance of such oneiric speculative imaginings in early YA fiction in the context of wider literary practices in colonial Bengal.

 

For more information about our distinguished panelists and the 2022 International Committee panel, please visit our conference page. We look forward to seeing you at this post-conference event!

If you livetweet or Instagram a panel or other conference-related event, please use the #chla22 hashtag so that others can find your posts.

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