Tag Archives: diversity

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Why children’s books that teach diversity are more important than ever

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BJ Epstein, University of East Anglia

If you think back to your childhood, what sticks with you? For many people, it’s those cosy times when they were cuddled up with a parent or grandparent, being read a story.

But bedtime stories aren’t just lovely endings to the day or a way to induce sleep, they are also a safe way to experience and discuss all sorts of feelings and situations. So even when children think they’re just being told about an adorable bunny’s adventures, they are actually learning about the world around them.

We know that children’s books can act like both mirrors and windows on the world. Mirrors in that they can reflect on children’s own lives, and windows in that they can give children a chance to learn about someone else’s life. We also know that this type of self-reflection and opportunity to read or hear about different lives is essential for young people.

Research on prejudice shows that coming in contact with people who are different – so-called “others” – helps to reduce stereotypes. This is because when we see people who initially seem different, we learn about them and get closer to them through their story. The “other” seems less far away and, well, less “otherly”.

But while it may be ideal for children to actually meet people from different backgrounds in person, if that isn’t possible, books can serve as a first introduction to an outside world.

Representing the world

Despite knowing how important it is for diversity to be represented in our day-to-day lives, many children’s books are still littered with white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender, nominally Christian characters. And research suggests that over 80% of characters in children’s books are white – which clearly doesn’t reflect the reality of our world.

All of these reasons are why the We Need Diverse Books movement was set in motion in 2014, stemming from a discussion between children’s books authors Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo. The movement aims for more diverse children’s books to actually be created and for these works to be available to young people. And while we need people to actually write them, we also need publishers to produce them, and bookstores, libraries, and schools to stock them.

Getting diverse books into the hands of young readers.
Pexels.

As someone who researches children’s literature, I think we’d have fewer conflicts in the world if we all read more diverse literature and lived more diverse lives.

I like to think that if we had more diverse children’s books, featuring a broad range of characters in many different jobs and situations, as well as more diverse role models in the media, young people would feel empowered, and they’d believe that when they grow up, they could be anyone and do anything they wanted. And they’d look at their friends and think the same for them, and they’d grow up respecting and appreciating everyone’s talents.

With this mindset present, issues such as race or religion wouldn’t even play a subconscious role. And it would mean that within a generation or two, we wouldn’t read articles about appalling and depressing statistics, and we wouldn’t need campaigns to increase diversity in literature, academia, or anywhere else.

Role models

But books aren’t just about “others”. When we see people like ourselves in the media, including in fiction, we get a glimpse of who we might become, and we feel validated. We can gain role models and inspiration through literature.

Perhaps partly in response to people’s growing awareness of the need for role models – whether in person or in literature – one young black girl, Marley Dias, started a campaign to find 1,000 “black girl books”. Dias recommends works such as Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson and I Love My Hair by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley.

But I wonder how many of those “black girl books” feature black girls in prominent roles, such as working as professors, doctors, teachers, or even as presidents of nations. I have a suspicion that the percentage would be disappointingly low.

Wanted: diverse role models.
Shutterstock

Just featuring a minority character isn’t enough to create quality diverse literature, but it is a first step. And while there are some useful websites that recommend diverse children’s books and even literary awards dedicated to promoting such works, much still needs to be done.

Along with the increased worries today about immigrants, refugees, and general “otherness”, some societies seem to be headed towards a sense of false nostalgia about a time when the world was controlled by whites.

Given this is not how the world is or should be, we owe it to young readers to show them reality in the books they’re reading. Perhaps then the next generation will be less frightened of the “other” if they get to meet them and learn about them from an early age.

The Conversation

BJ Epstein, Senior Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement, University of East Anglia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Why it’s a problem that J.K. Rowling builds diversity into her novels – post facto

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Nick Malherbe, University of South Africa

In his essay The Death of the Author, French literary theorist Roland Barthes proclaims that language is the origin of all texts. Authors then enter a “death” once their works are published, and the author’s interpretation of such work is of no more relevance than that of any other reader.

Barthes’ point is particularly relevant to the work and subsequent pronouncements of J.K. Rowling.

Since the publication of the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007, Rowling – via Twitter as well as public talks and lectures – continues to illuminate apparent truisms within the fictional universe of her books. Her proclamations range from:

  • the way in which Voldemort’s name should be pronounced;

  • why Harry Potter named his son after Severus Snape; and

  • specifying the religious and sexual orientations of certain characters who inhabit Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Through her pronouncements Rowling refuses her literary death and attempts to position her personal voice as indicative of an ultimate narrative.

Rowling’s failure

The Huffington Post recently ran a piece which argues that Rowling’s continual disregard of her literary death only contaminates the beloved book series if readers allow it to.

The article suggests that one should refuse Rowling’s persistent tinkering and cast it as inconsequential. Although there is merit to this point, it does little to acknowledge Rowling’s failure at writing meaningful diversification into her books.

During her 2007 promotional book tour, Rowling attempted to “out” Albus Dumbledore, a lead character in the book series. Her response was met with the attending audience’s thunderous applause, causing her to respond:

I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.

There is an implication here that by telling us earlier – within the books themselves – the author would have made us unhappy. Herein lies a base fear of much authorship within the Global North to disrupt readers’ heteronormative literary assumptions. Such assumptions are to remain intact if readers are to be “happy”.

Rowling’s posthumous stab at diversification was widely celebrated and caused her to assert the place of a LGBTI community within Hogwarts, as well as the presence of a number of Jewish characters. Neither were written into the books.

Rowling recently commended an interpretation of her work which reads Hermione Granger, a Hogwarts student, as black. This once again met with resounding approval from fans.

JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series.
Reuters/Suzanne Plunkett

We should, for numerous reasons, encourage decolonising interpretations of popular literature. But we should condemn Rowling’s cowardice at not explicitly disrupting the heteronormative assumptions that are couched within her writing. As Barthes argues, such a disruption only carries credence if it is written into the work, rather than after the fact.

A lack of diversity

Many readers’ homogenous assumptions were confirmed by the Harry Potter film adaptations, two of which are co-produced by Rowling. An estimated 99.53% of the dialogue across the eight films was delivered by white cast members.

It may be argued that it is not mandatory for all fiction to disrupt heteronormative thinking. But it seems clear that Rowling’s novels are not averse to antagonising some readers. However, the larger project of antagonising or problematising Western literature appears beyond their agenda.

Had Dumbledore been written as gay, Granger as black, or Anthony Goldstein as Jewish – three interpretations which have been asserted or endorsed by Rowling since publication – she may have diversified her fiction with a legitimate and powerful literary voice.

It may also be asserted that Rowling’s later interpretations and commendations are a signal of her guilt for what she has since realised to be an evasion of diversification in her fiction; her post-publication attempts at transformation effectively being better late than never. But such an argument acts to divert focus from Rowling making no attempt to dismantle or even acknowledge the oppressive social structures that birthed her implicitly homogenous character creation.

Rowling’s repeated assertion in the public sphere of such diversity represents her negation of meaningful, difficult, and necessary personal reflexive engagement with the social and political reasons her fiction lacks explicit diversity.

With the death of her literacy voice, Rowling’s interpretative voice – albeit more prolific than most – remains as insignificant as those passionately asserting their own culturally prejudicial readings of her work. Rowling’s reflection, rather than her inconsequential interpretive reparations, would be a far more significant means of engaging with the lack of diversity in her novels.

The Conversation

Nick Malherbe, Researcher, Institute of Social and Health Science, University of South Africa

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Telling the real story: diversity in young adult literature

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Ambelin Kwaymullina, University of Western Australia

There’s a conversation gaining momentum in Australia about the lack of diversity in Young Adult (YA) and children’s literature. It’s been inspired in part by debate in the US, which many critics date back to a seminal essay by Nancy Larrick titled The All-White World of Children’s Books that was published in the Saturday Review in 1965.

The question of diversity has been raised periodically by critics, readers and writers alike – here and overseas – ever since. In the US, it was reinvigorated in May last year when a group of authors launched the We Need Diverse Books campaign. Its mission? To change the publishing industry so that it produced literature “that reflects and honours the lives of all young people”.

Sarah Ayoub.
Courtesy of Sarah Ayoub

The campaign has quickly grown from a grassroots movement into a global phenomenon that’s also generated widespread debate in Australian literary circles.

Aussie authors who have written on diversity in youth literature include myself, Erin Gough, Gabrielle Wang, Danielle Binks, Sarah Ayoub, and Rebecca Lim.

There is, of course, no single diverse experience. I am an Aboriginal author (Palyku people), but there are differences between my experiences and those of other Indigenous writers, and indeed those of diverse writers more broadly. We Need Diverse Books defines diversity as:

all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of colour, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.

But while there are many differences between diverse peoples and identities, there are also points of intersection, and one of them is the degree to which our young people are being failed by literature.

Why is diversity important? Author Malindo Lo, one of the founders of We Need Diverse Books, gave this answer:

Diversity is not important. Diversity is reality … Let’s stop erasing that.

Many minority writers cite the experience of being erased from reality as the reason they began writing in the first place. As Lebanese Australian Sarah Ayoub recently said of her YA novel Hate is Such a Strong Word (2013):

I wrote this book to reconcile everything I felt as a teenager. When I go out and speak to schools with students from different cultures, I always say that you don’t have to change who you are to fit into the world and that your story is just as relevant as any white story.

A lack of diversity not only influences how diverse peoples see themselves, but how they are seen (or not seen) by those of the dominant culture. The situation is not helped by the fact there is often a long history of distortion of diverse identities in narratives written about the (so-called) “other”. In relation to Australian Indigenous peoples, Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko has described this as “the great poisoned well of historic writing of Aboriginal people”.

The representation of diverse peoples, and especially of colonised or oppressed peoples by those who have inherited the benefits of colonisation or oppression, remains a fraught area. As Latino author Daniel Jose Older has commented:

Authors of colour struggle to get our voices heard, and publishing houses that espouse diversity publish more white authors writing characters of colour than anything else. Cultural appropriation matters in this context because it is about who has access and who gets paid, even beyond the problems of a poorly crafted, disrespectful representation.

Melissa Lucashenko.
Mark Crocker/AAP, CC BY

As a diverse YA author I am often asked, usually by teens searching in vain for their own reflection in the novels they read, whether I think things will ever change. I do, mostly because I believe there is a limit to how long literature can peddle the fantasy of a non-diverse world to readers who are living in a diverse reality.

And in relation to cultural diversity, increasing minority populations will change readership and hence (eventually) world markets. In the US, the Census Bureau has forecast that by 2043 minorities will comprise a majority of the US population, while the 2015 UK Writing the Future report noted that predicted increases in minority groups meant the book trade would have to change to remain relevant:

[P]ublishers’ present concentration on People Like Us – White, aged 35 to 55 and female – will not reflect the society of the future, no matter how much that elides with their own current workforce […] the book industry risks becoming a 20th century throwback increasingly out of touch with a 21st century world.”

A country with as many voices as Australia has much to offer the children and teens of the globalised and pluralist 21st century. Except that, even within the Australian market, it can be difficult for Aussie voices to be heard (and correspondingly more difficult for diverse Australian voices to be heard).

This is where weneeddiversebooksau intersects with another campaign – that of LoveOzYA.

LoveOzYA was started this year, partly in response to concerns that Australian titles were struggling to be noticed among the onslaught of US blockbusters, many of which had been the subject of big-screen adaptions. In the words of Australian author Ellie Marney:

When a book is promoted online, on screens, in films, in print ads and bookstores and toy stores and fast-food outlets ad infinitum – it’s kinda hard to ignore.

LoveOzYa is not suggesting teens should stop reading books they enjoy. Simply that there may well be other Australian books they’d enjoy as much (but that were published in the comparatively tiny Aussie market and hence do not have the benefit of the marketing resources behind the US titles dominating the shelves).

In short, the goal is that Australian literature receives the proverbial “fair go”. Perhaps in this sense, the end game of both weneeddiversebooksau and LoveOzYA converges upon a vision of a more equitable future: a world in which all voices have an equal chance to be heard, and all voices are heard equally.

The Conversation

Ambelin Kwaymullina is Assistant Professor (Law School) at University of Western Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.