Do you think there is any truth in the argument that the fairy tale “gives the child material which he is incapable of handling”?
Can you think of any children’s book that does an excellent job of meeting both the educational and imaginative needs, while perhaps even offering social intervention?
Though I have not read All Bears Need Love, do you think it stands apart for addressing the fears of the surrounding adults? Is that more realistic? Do we think children would understand that the fears are projected?
What do you think about books that feature characters of color that are written/drawn by white creators? My daughter and I love the book Julían is a Mermaid, but I am conflicted because it was created by a cisgender white woman. I guess I don’t mean conflicted, but rather I was bummed when I learned this small fact. Who is “allowed” or should be allowed to tell these stories?
I must say that I really enjoyed the Bow essay. The following line in particular struck me and I think provides excellent food for thought for our class discussion: “Anthropomorphic abstraction enables the fantasy of neoliberal futurity—it enables adults to pretend”
A multicultural representational politics (anthropomorphic or otherwise) in children’s literature that fails to renegotiate genre, coyly encourages children’s’ divergence from the normative but in a socially permissible manner and worse, leads to a domestication of race and by extension racism. Like most other literary forms, children’s literature too can be formulaic–as made permissible by genre. What then are the merits of renegotiating the limits of children’s literature as a genre as I think Bow attempts to do here in this essay?