Katharine Capshaw Smith

Trauma and National Identity in Haitian-American Young Adult Literature

Various, multifaceted, and provocative, African American children’s literature in trie twentieth and twenty-first centuries resists simplistic encapsulation. The explosion in contemporary picture book tides has prompted critics like Michelle H. Martin to posit that we are currendy in “the same sort of ‘Golden Age’ that mainstream Anglo children’s literature underwent in the late-nineteenth century” (xi). Certainly the last 30 years have produced world-class African American authors like Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and Angela Johnson. But as critical attention has turned to texts produced for children by black authors before the 1970s, dozens of exciting artistic voices have emerged, each attesting to the significance of childhood within African American communities and to the crucial position of children’s literature in crafting a community’s sense of history and identity. Lost voices from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, like Arna Bontemps, Effie Lee Newsome, Silas X. Floyd, Jane Dabney Shackelford, Rose Leary Love, and many, many others, have called on us to reshape our construction of an African American children’s literary tradition. Whereas critics outside of black children’s literature may be aware of a few threads of that tradition—Langston Hughes’s poetry, for example, or Mildred Taylor’s historical novels—within the critical conversation scholars have been amazed by the sheer variety of forms and subjects available historically to black child readers.