Clare Bradford

New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature

New World Orders shows how texts fro children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international childrens texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures for child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalisation, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman.

Literacy in the digital age: Learning from computer games

Abstract The need for literacy and the English curriculum to attend to digital literacies in the twenty‐first century is well established. Although studies in digital literacies have examined the inclusion of computer games in schools, there has not been an extended study of English teachers incorporating computer games into their teaching and learning through action research projects. This paper outlines the structure and progress of a research project exploring the uses of computer games in English classrooms. We argue that much can be learned about the teaching of both print and digital literacies from examining computer games and young people’s engagement in online digital culture in the world beyond school.

Everything must go!: Consumerism and Reader Positioning in M. T. Anderson's Feed

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 2.2 (2010) In preparation for the ARCYP round table “Participatory Ontologies and Youth Cultures,” Stuart Poyntz issued an outline of its conceptual framework: “Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the language of consumer media culture through a constant diet of screen images, audio messages, and text-based communication that compete with schools and families as primary storytellers and teachers in youths’ lives.” As Poyntz notes, young people’s engagement with media culture is scarcely a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, the rise of social networking and the ready availability of new technologies have significantly enhanced young people’s capacity to produce and to circulate texts and products. This paper focuses on a novel whose narrative is structured by exactly the processes of production and circulation to which Poyntz refers: M. T. Anderson’s 2002 novel Feed. I analyze the novel’s treatment of human agency in a dystopian future America, where young people are implanted with “the feed,” a computer chip which connects them with a global network of “images, audio messages, and text-based communication” that Poyntz referred to. Secondly, I consider how the novel itself positions readers to engage with Anderson as an author whose public identity has been carefully shaped through his media appearances and especially his website.

“Where Happily Ever After Happens Every Day”: The Medievalisms of Disney’s Princesses

When viewers access the Disney Princess website, they encounter the designated Princesses, who look directly out toward their audience, each in turn performing bodily movements that incorporate a curious mixture of stiffness and seductiveness as the Princesses flutter their eyelashes, smile or laugh beguilingly, drop into curtsey-like poses, adjust their hand positions or (in Belle’s case) brush a strand of hair from their faces.1 The Princesses are framed by “medieval” signifiers: the castle towers adorned with gold and surmounted by decorative finials and the spires and pennants that appear at the left and right of the website’s front page. Located against a backdrop of pink and pastel colors and looped with the fairy dust swirling around the website, these towers are less clearly visible than the Princesses, who are attributed with a higher degree of modality.Z The medieval is, then, hazily present, suggesting a misty, allusive relationship between the Middle Ages and the Princesses: a relationship whose value is vividly implied by the gold leaf and rich adornments embellishing the castle towers. The Princesses, on the other hand, are presented as “real” figures in what resembles a line-up rather than a group of associates; none of the them looks toward or refers to the others, signaling that each occupies a separate notional space. When viewers click on one or other of the Princesses, they are invited into a fantasy world signified by European-style castles (Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle) and their “ethnic” equivalents: Jasmine’s palace; Pocahontas’s green headlands and river vistas; Mulan’s pagoda and garden; and Tiana’s dream restaurant in 1920s’ New Orleans.

The Case of Children's Literature: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of childrens literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and childrens books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Roses rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, childrens literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in childrens texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

The Struggle to be Human in a Posthuman World

Over the preceding chapters, we have discussed many possibilities for new world orders, some utopian but more often dystopian. One of the possibilities facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the prospect that we are entering a posthuman era in which many of the binary concepts used to make sense of experience in the past will no longer function. Western culture, dominated as it has been by liberal humanist principles, has traditionally been underpinned ideologically by binary oppositions between concepts such as natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on. Such binarisms have been increasingly critiqued, first by post-modernist deconstruction of how they function within Western culture as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, and second, through posthumanist reconceptualisations of the oppositional boundaries underpinning dominant conceptual paradigms. Thus, during the last few years a new range of concepts has begun increasingly to enter children’s literature — the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, cloning, and genetic engineering. In short, children’s books and films have begun responding to the posthuman, the focus of this chapter.

The Middle Ages in children's literature

Introduction 1. Thinking about the Middle Ages 2. Temporality and the Medieval 3. Spatiality and the Medieval 4. Disabilities in Medievalist Fiction 5. Monstrous Bodies, Medievalist Inflexions 6. Medievalist Animals and their Humans 7. The Laughable Middle Ages Notes Bibliography Index

Instilling postcolonial nostalgias: Ned Kelly narratives for children

Abstract This essay examines books for children focusing on Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang, published from 2000 to 2011. Drawing upon theories of narrative, memory and nostalgia it analyses the narrative strategies and visual images through which these texts position readers, and their investment in formulations of the Australian nation. The essay argues that these books function as exercises in restorative nostalgia, producing palatable versions of Kelly as an Australian hero, and articulating connections between the Kelly legend and Australian national identity. By foregrounding Kellys Irishness and by representing him as a “good badman”, these Ned Kelly narratives for children, which range across fiction, non-fiction, picture book and play script, reinscribe versions of national identity which occlude more complicated narratives. In particular, their emphasis on struggles between Irish and English settlers, and between selectors and squatters, displaces Indigenous histories, colonial violence, and systemic discrimination against those deemed outsiders to the nation.

Reweaving Nature and Culture: Reading Ecocritically

One of the more extreme polarities of utopian and dystopian representation appears in the relationship between nature and culture in depictions and interpretations of ‘natural’ environments. This is not a concern which in itself emerges as a consequence of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’, but the range of discourses falling under the broad titles of ecopoiesis and ecocriticism emerged slowly and sporadically in the last quarter of the twentieth century from even broader discourses about ‘the (natural world) environment’ or simply ‘nature writing’. There were, however, some significant confluences. As an analytical discourse, ecocriticism became identified as a distinctive — albeit loosely defined — field in the first half of the 1990s. The collapse of the East-West binary also coincided with a growing acceptance across the world that global warming was a fact, not a theory. Hence, the coincidence of an identifiable critical discourse emerging at the same time as major changes in global political structures resulted in a palpable shift of emphasis, and for almost a decade until the advent of the ‘war on terror’ environmental issues, especially global warming, were widely perceived as the greatest threat to the continued survival of human beings. Environmental issues — habitat protection (and celebration of wilderness), ecosystem conservation, pollution prevention, resource depletion, and advocacy of harmonic balance between human subjects and natural environments (as opposed to an anthropocentric hierarchy of humans and nature) — became major social concerns.

Masters, Slaves, and Entrepreneurs: Globalised Utopias and New World Order(ing)s

In Julie Bertagna’s Exodus (2002), Noospace is superior to the old cyberspace. In Noospace young people literally jump into a new cyber world and race at frightening speed through the gleaming maze that traverses the New World, with its endless pattern of connections: ‘A living world of info and data within each pattern. All of it endlessly changing and mutating and repatterning. All dying and recreating every microsecond’ (Bertagna, 2002, p. 245). Welcome to global utopia: the ultimate adventure!