Postcolonial Intersectionality in Contemporary Children?s Literature: Reading Across Worlds

Postcolonial Intersectionality in Contemporary Children’s Literature explores how we can read postcolonial writing for the young today, and how the themes and structures of that writing might enrich readers’ insight into the various margins, crossings, and subversions of their own worlds.

Postcolonial writing for the young is not merely a mirror to contemporary issues such as continued racial inequalities or authoritarian, hostile, and violent responses to alterity, but a mode of drawing out and reflecting critically on postcolonialism’s intersections with other contemporary modes of engagement that draw attention to the urgency of the socio-cultural and political causes that they seek to present. The reading for intersectionality that this writing stimulates is shown to offer a particularly significant cultural, imaginative, and formative medium through which young readers can develop an especially attentive and deliberately dialogic approach to and renew their perceptions of the world around them. The book unfolds as a series of readings that track both the ubiquity of intersectional violence and how young people are motivated to resist it, with an emphasis on gender, environmental, posthuman, gothic, and transnational justice.

This thought-provoking work invites various border-crossing engagements from academics, practitioners, and students with an interest in children’s literature and in decolonisation of knowledges more widely.

Blanka Grzegorczyk teaches at the University of Cambridge and Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015) and Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2020).