Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between literacy and minoritized youth. In a climate informed by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement—though far from fully responsive to it—it is not surprising to find texts focusing specifically on adolescent literacy among underrepresented teens. Literacy and minoritized communities have a vexed relationship in the USA, from the denial of literacy to enslaved peoples to the literacy tests used to deny voting rights. The readers I examine in this chapter do not take their literacy for granted, but they are also under no illusion that reading alone will make them either whole or free. Economic power and political engagement take a backseat to empathy in novels that strive to reimagine the literary tradition. As both fictional characters and implied readers engage with the White canon, they must also craft their own—and the novels themselves may become the stories their characters seek out.
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Notes
- 1.
This underrepresentation, of course, also significantly affects school curricula—which, however, often even neglect the diverse options that are available, as the first two chapters suggest.
- 2.
The WNDB Web site defines diversity broadly: “We recognize all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities*, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities” (https://diversebooks.org/about-wndb/).
- 3.
I am indebted to Phil Nel for pointing out this quotation as well as the earlier-quoted comments about failures of representation by Zetta Elliott (Nel 2017, 7–8). Laymon goes on to note that “my most meaningful discoveries about the act of being human have come through the solitary act of … reading, and rereading,” and he names specific African-American classics, including Kindred and The Bluest Eye, as part of his heritage (Laymon 2013a, 62).
- 4.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas quotes Latrise Johnson: “Students don’t just need diverse literature because it’s diverse. They need literature that inspires and awakens their potential to be the narrators of their own existence and to imagine a more just world” (Thomas 2016, 117; quoting Johnson 2016).
- 5.
As with Melinda of Speak, Miles of Alaska, or even Mia of The Princess Diaries, Ari’s reading implicitly leads to writing, though the language here is disconcertingly dismissive of reading as a lifelong pursuit.
- 6.
Anderson here neatly reverses Sims Bishop’s mirror/window metaphor: Melinda implicitly finds a mirror in Angelou’s story.
- 7.
Emphasis in original. The authors of the books are, in order, Rachel Wise, Rick Riordan (the first two are series titles, both in the first line), Pseudonymous Bosch, Nikki Grimes, Caroline Starr Rose, Suzanne Collins, Kate DiCamillo, Raina Telgemeier, Matt de la Peña, Rebecca Stead, Shel Silverstein, Renee Collins, Jacqueline Woodson and Walter Dean Myers (on the same line), S.E. Hinton, and Rita Williams-Garcia.
- 8.
Kertzer also notes brief allusions to A Tale of Two Cities and Yeats’s poem, “A Second Coming,” both accessible only to those who have already read Dickens and Yeats, as the texts are not named.
- 9.
Frank, a psychotherapist who specializes in trauma, thanks the staff and clients of Polaris New Jersey, a program dedicated to eliminating human trafficking. She also provides resources on human trafficking and sex slavery at the end of the novel. While the novel is obviously a fiction, Frank is careful to suggest its origins in fact.
- 10.
The list here is not aspirational, as are the lists in Cloudwish , The Princess Diaries, or The Perks of Being a Wallflower—or even Absolutely True Diary, which lists at least a few novels some readers might not be familiar with. The novels listed in Dime—with the exceptions noted below—are all picture books and middle-grade novels, easily read by and familiar to most American children.
- 11.
Two other books get brief mentions in the novel. The first is Flowers in the Attic, not strictly for adolescents though frequently read by them, and, like The Color Purple and To Kill a Mockingbird, centered on the sexual, emotional, and physical abuse of children. The other, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is another novel depicting a legacy of rape and domestic violence, and the only Black-authored text mentioned besides The Color Purple.
- 12.
Dime refers to her books as an escape more than once. See, for example, 125–127 and 179–180.
- 13.
The abuse in The Color Purple, as in Dime, is intersectional, attributable to the interrelationship of race, class and gender.
- 14.
Jackie in Brown Girl Dreaming and City in Long Division also uncover difficult personal histories and include them at arm’s length in their narratives, though not in Latin.
- 15.
See introduction for a brief discussion of reader-response theory.
- 16.
Compare: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before” (Twain 1884, 229).
- 17.
See, for example, the “Kids and Family Reading Report” published by Scholastic in 2008: “Among kids age 9-17, ‘having trouble finding books that I like’ is among the top reasons for not reading more books for fun” (15). Scholastic does not provide disaggregated data by race or ethnicity, although the 2017 report is more attentive to diversity than previous reports. The 2009 NEA Report, “Reading on the Rise,” while generally optimistic about the state of reading in the USA, noted significant gaps in the “literary reading rates” of Whites as compared to African-American and Hispanic American readers. While these gaps were narrowing in the period studied (2002–2008), they were still significant and indicated that fewer than 50% of minority youth were frequent pleasure readers.
- 18.
The Book Thief refers primarily to imaginary texts, though of course Mein Kampf exists in consensus reality.
- 19.
- 20.
Of course Jane Eyre , the important pre-text to so many of the novels discussed in the previous chapter, is also a key Gothic text. However, in the reworkings its Gothicism is often masked or muted. The African-American Gothic treated here seems an even more salient tradition.
- 21.
Like Dime, Brown Girl Dreaming evokes a White tradition of children’s literature here. Unlike most of the other novels treated in this chapter, however, Brown Girl Dreaming begins by citing an African-American tradition and only slowly incorporates the White fairy-tales cited here, reversing the movement seen in other texts. And unlike the novels treated in Chapter 2, Brown Girl Dreaming is neither structured nor inspired by the fairy-tales it references.
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Gruner, E.R. (2019). “Dreaming Themselves into Existence”: Reading and Race. In: Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53924-3_4
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