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?