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The Borders of Empathy in
Children’s Fiction
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction centres the question of how
reading fiction develops our moral imagination and our capacities to think
and feel with others. The question is approached with a good dose of
scepticism, revising tensions between ethical, aesthetical, and pedagogical
dimensions when certain books, films, and other cultural materials are
recommended for children. This volume examines how texts addressed
to children are meant to assist socioemotional education and whether we
put forward adultist assumptions around such conceptualisations of the
emotional. The book is organised into nine chapters, with some of them
focusing on “dicult” themes— such as violence, xenophobia, death,
migration, as well as gender and social exclusions— and some others on
more general relationships between emotions, media, and education. The
chapters combine a textual analysis of recommended cultural materials
for children with insights from empirical research and ethnographic
approaches to children’s cultures. A common thread throughout the book
is the open question about the epistemic injustices in knowing children
and childhood and how this may be overcome by shifting our research
practices with posthumanist philosophies.
Macarena García-González is Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher at
Pompeu Fabra Univeristy, where she directs the interdisciplinary research
group JOVIS, on childhood and youth studies. Her publications include
two monographs— Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children about
Immigration and International Adoption (2017), and Enseñando a sentir:
Repertorios éticos en la ficción infantil (2021)— , as well as several art-
icles and book chapters on children’s literature, reading promotion, cul-
ture and education. She is the Associate Editor at the Children’s Literature
in Education journal.
Children’s Literature and Culture
Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor
Philip Nel, Series Editor, 2011– 2018
Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall, Current Series Editors
Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children’s Literature and Culture is the
longest- running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and
culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to pro-
moting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture,
in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and
it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of
dierent childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe,
the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity.
Children’s Literature and Culture oers cutting- edge, upper- level schol-
arly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race,
picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others.
Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects
and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Narratives for Young Readers on West Asia
War, Trauma and Resilience
Arya Priyadarshini and Suman Sigroha
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children’s Literature
Edited by Mateusz Świetlicki and Anastasia Ulanowicz
Cultural Perspectives on Sweets in Children’s Literature and Media
Edited by Sabine Planka and Corina Löwe
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Macarena García- González
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle dge.com/ Childr ens-
Lit erat ure- and-Culture/ book- ser ies/ SE0 686
The Borders of Empathy
in Children’s Fiction
Macarena García- González
Designed cover image: Macarena García- González
First published 2025
by Routledge
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© 2025 Macarena García- González
The right of Macarena García- González to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives
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funding reference EP/X033937/1.
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
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hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 9781032854458 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032862873 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003522225 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/ 9781003522225
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 The Uses of Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 13
2 Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 26
3 Necropolitics in the Picturebooks by Armin Greder 38
4 Testimonies of Border Crossing 53
5 Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 70
6 The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 89
7 Climate Crisis, Water Wars, and Post- Anthropocentric
Narratives 111
8 Entanglements of Social Marginalisation and Reading
Promotion 125
9 The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 136
Final Thoughts 152
Index 158
Figures
2.1 Death comes to take away the child. La madre y la muerte
by Alberto Laiseca and Nicolás Arispe 29
2.2 “But he was dead”, the final double- spread of La madre y
la muerte 30
3.1 Double- spread from Armin Greder’s The Island 43
3.2 “Racists. They don’t welcome him. They treat him like an
animal/ Lonely – because without work – he has no name,
he tries everything.” Child intervention on Armin Greder’s
The Island 44
3.3 “(He is) naked, bald, skin is hairless, has big ears, is
without clothes, is serious.” Child intervention on Armin
Greder’s The Island 45
3.4 Description of the town’s inhabitants: “they are cruel,
they bully him, they are afraid of him because they don’t
know who he is, they are very naive.” Words around the
man: “Someone. Why does he have clothes? How does he
arrived there? Indierence”. Child intervention on Armin
Greder’s The Island 46
3.5 “Cannibal, diabetes, racists”. The man is dressed as a
punk. Child intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island 47
3.6 Emotions are sensed: “he is embarrassed, he feels like
trash.” Child intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island 48
4.1 From Hear My Voice by Warren Binford © 2021.
Illustration by Michelle Ortega. Reprinted by permission of
Workman Kids, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 60
5.1 The intimidating wall where we can discern the
partially- erased word resistencia 76
5.2 The student has been biting the pencil, and the eraser has a
small hole in the middle 77
List of Figures vii
5.3 The protagonist’s grandfather paints an iconic mural of the
Chilean revolution 82
5.4 In Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra by Jairo Buitrago
and Daniel Blanco. The visual narrative belies the verbal 83
6.1 Frida leading a march. Frida para chicos y chicas by
Nadia Fink and Pitu Saá 99
7.1 Child’s drawings in response to Abuela Grillo. The old lady
standing in the rain 119
7.2 A child’s illustration from the #EstoTbn project depicting a
close- up of Abuela Grillo crying, highlighting her tears as a
central visual metaphor in the film 120
7.3 Abuela Grillo enters the city of La Paz, after leaving her
community 122
7.4 Abuela Grillo is forced to sing to bring water for profit 122
Acknowledgements
Writing a book is never a solitary task, despite the many hours of soli-
tary work. Rather, bringing a book to publication is a collaborative
eort, a mix of tasks and influences. I wish to express my gratitude to
those who made it possible. First, I thank my Marie Curie fellowship at
the University of Glasgow: this book was motivated by the intellectual
exchanges during that project, and I began writing it with the time that the
grant aorded me. A special thank you to my adviser and partner in the
grant project, Professor Evelyn Arizpe, for encouraging me to finish it and
for all the conversations about the limits of empathy and what books may
be good for. I also thank my long- time collaborators, Dr. Soledad Véliz
and Dr. Justyna Deszcz- Tryhubczak, for all the thoughts we have shared.
Traces of our reflections and joint studies are woven throughout this book.
The Ramón y Cajal (RyC) fellowship at Pompeu Fabra University has
allowed me to bring the project to completion. Time, as we all know, is
the most precious resource in writing, and the RyC— Grant RYC2022-
035167- I funded by MICIU/ AEI/ 10.13039/ 501100011033 and by ESF—
has enabled me to resist the relentless pace of academic publishing.
I also want to thank the series editors, Professors Kenneth Kidd and
Elizabeth Marshall, for their trust in this manuscript, and the anonymous
reviewers for their helpful suggestions and constructive comments. I extend
my thanks to all those other reviewers who commented on earlier versions
presented at conferences, as well as on the articles that have nourished
this work.
Lastly, I cannot end without thanking the man, Ricardo, who has read
all my work and has been my toughest critic throughout the years. Thank
you so much, love. I look forward to many more to come.
newgenprepdf
DOI: 10.4324/9781003522225-1
This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
Introduction
On the first page, a man sinks into the sea surrounded by fish that pick on
his dead body. The fish are captured in huge nets and sold in the market. In
the next double- spread, we see men who eat fish in an elegant restaurant.
We later see those men storing rifles in crates and loading them on to a
large ship. Now the arms reach a group of soldiers led by a bald man in a
suit. The book has no words in it, but in a dark double- spread we see how
those soldiers attack and burn down a small town. The town residents
flee. We see them walk in procession with their few belongings until they
get into a truck. Later we see them in a group that appears to be negoti-
ating something. A penultimate double- spread shows a crowded boat. It is
an illustration that we recognise from the media reports on immigration.
In the final picture only the hull of the boat is visible, it is sinking with
everyone onboard. Now the cycle begins again: a man sinks into the sea.
The Mediterranean is the title of the book. It is a children’s book by Armin
Greder (2018).
Armin Greder is a well- known author of what may be categorised as
“challenging picturebooks” (Evans, 2015; Ommundsen et al., 2021).
These are books that defy our notions of age- appropriateness and touch
on controversial matters. Some good examples include Smoke by Antón
Fortes and Joanna Concejo (2009), Lejren [The Camp] by Oskar K and
Dorte Karrebæk (2011), Rose Blanche by Christophe Gallaz and Roberto
Innocenti (2011), Pikinini by José Miguel Varas and Raquel Echeñique
(2017), Farfar [Grandpa] by Lilja Scherfig and Otto Dickmeiss (2015), and
La madre y la muerte/ La partida [Mother and Death/ Taken] by Alberto
Laiseca, Nicolás Arispe and Alberto Chimal (2016), all books dealing with
dicult subjects— Holocaust, domestic violence, death— in rather contro-
versial ways. However, the concept of challenging picturebooks is also
used to describe more amenable works like Duck, Death and the Tulip by
Wolf Erlbruch (2007) or The Girl in Red by Aaron Frisch and Roberto
2 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Innocenti (2012), with seemingly more accepted narratives about the end
of life and gender violence.
When the category of challenging picturebooks emerged, scholars noted
that these publications were mostly found in Nordic countries where the
culture of childhood is seen to be less protective and less constrained by
the trope of the innocent child. Scholars probably noted this because
they write about these books in English, our academic lingua franca, and
with the exception of some Australian publishers, the Anglo- Saxon book
market appears to be quite conservative in its representations of childhood.
We do find examples of these books published in other languages, such
as Spanish. While the Latin American children’s literature field is fairly
conservative and tends to be organised according to ideas of the child
as a figure to be protected from the corrupt world of adults, we do find
interesting transgressive narratives that touch upon social taboos in rela-
tion to children such as state violence, social exclusion, death, and sexual
abuse. Pikinini is brave in its telling of the genocide of the Patagonia’s
Indigenous people, La madre y la muerte/ La partida renders a quite crude
story about child deaths, and Somos como las nubes/ We are like the clouds
by Jorge Argueta (2016) describes the terrible conditions that force young
people to undertake the extreme risk of migrating from Central America.
The exploration of what poses a challenge to children and how these
challenges relate to their aective responses, forms the core of the questions
that inspire this book. What kind of emotions do we allow in children’s
literature? Who says which stories are appropriate for children? How do
we talk about dicult topics? Whom are we allowed to empathise with
and feel compassion for? How are these responses related to the hardships
endured by young readers? Why do we find such relief in claiming that
children’s literature fosters empathy in its readers? In this book, I delve
into these questions by taking a fresh look at emotional repertoires in
children’s fiction and reading promotion, and how they relate to ethical
and political projects. This is a book written after years of fieldwork with
children, librarians, school teachers, and parents in Latin America, and
as such it is also informed by an acknowledgement that in this region we
have challenging readers, as many of them have grown up in contexts of
marginalisation that do not fit into idealisations of innocent childhoods.
I approach emotional reactions as forms of social reproduction, namely
not within a traditional psychological framework in which emotions
express an inner world, but one where they are founded in a complex
social and cultural flow in which separating the inner from the outer world
is impossible. This way of understanding emotional reactions is inspired by
the aective turn in the humanities (Clough, 2008) and its new emphasis
on embodied, spatial, and relational ways of understanding interactions
between human and more- than- human entities. It is also particularly
Introduction 3
inspired by posthumanist and new materialist philosophies (Garcia-
Gonzalez and Deszcz- Tryhubczak, 2020) and their explorations of the
entanglements of art and education as a new lens through which to con-
sider children’s literature, media, and culture (Hickey- Moody et al., 2016).
To say that a literary work for children is didactic has often been found
to be a way of degrading its aesthetic potential. Those of us involved in
cultural ecosystems for children try to avoid moralising intensities if only
because we acknowledge that children’s books were first published to
instruct them. The history of art (and philosophy) already incites much
tension in relation to particular cultural products, where a clash may be
perceived between the autonomy of the artistic object and the conditions
imposed by the institutions that aord and regulate artistic production.
This book considers certain questions within this space, investigating how
texts that are recommended for children and young people reveal tensions
between the pedagogical and the aesthetic, and whether such tensions can
be reimagined as places of collaboration and transformation. Exploring
this space allows us to give some thought to the emotional and aective
repertoires in children’s fiction and how they are linked to notions of ethics
and justice.
The idea that books are a precious tool for educating children at the
emotional level has been woven into a larger argument about how lit-
erature develops the moral imagination— namely the ability to put our-
selves in the shoes of others, in order to have some rapport with their lives
and sorrows (see Zunshine, 2006; Hogan, 2022). American philosopher
Martha Nussbaum asserts that literary reading increases readers’ empathy
and lays the groundwork for democracy (1995). Nussbaum argues from
an Aristotelian tradition, in which rationality needs emotionality for
judgement building. According to her, fiction, and particularly the social
realistic novel of the 19th century, would allow us to rehearse dierent
perspectives on the world, thus preparing us to lead better lives. With
the onslaught of positivism in academic research, this argument has been
subjected to the rules of the empirical production of knowledge. Cognitive
psychologists David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, researchers at Harvard,
have carried out studies in which they have observed that those who read
“quality” literature (which they uncritically relate to processes of can-
onisation, particularly National Book Award- winning texts in the USA)
experience improved theory of mind— the capacity to understand what
others are thinking or feeling— more than those who read bestsellers (as
informed by Amazon) or non- fiction literature. In 2013, they published
the results in Science, producing evidence that was quickly taken up by
other researchers. Kidd and Castano were providing a scientific truth
to the reading- for- pleasure crusade and its possible benefits. Kidd and
Castano, both psychologists with no training in literary studies or literacy,
4 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
begin one of their articles by quoting Barack Obama and his reflection on
how he attributes his moulding as a citizen to reading novels and learning
that the world is “complicated and full of grays” (2019, p. 423). In order
to bolster their argument about the cross- cutting nature of the conviction
that reading helps us improve our interpersonal skills, Kidd and Castano
also cite Martha Nussbaum and Jerome Bruner, the latter a cognitive
psychologist with a strong influence in the field of education. As they inter-
pret why award- winning literary works are the ones that would provide
the best tools, they draw on the theory of Bakhtinian heteroglossia: the
novel is made up of dierent voices and worldviews that problematise the
truth. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin illustrates
how the Russian writer’s characters are autonomous consciousnesses that
confront the consciousness of their author (2013). This lack of authorial
perspective in the novel, the “polyphonic novel”, as Bakhtin calls it, forces
readers to become involved to make sense of the story. This involvement,
Kidd and Castano postulate, can increase our abilities to stand in someone
else’s shoes.
Along similar lines, Nussbaum expresses her belief in the value of the
nineteenth- century realist novel as a tool to educate us emotionally on the
value of democracy. She argues that novels by authors such as Charles
Dickens, Henry James, and Leo Tolstoy provide a detailed and nuanced
exploration of human emotions, relationships, and social conditions,
which are crucial for ethical reflection and development. We do not find
in the work of Nussbaum or Kidd and Castano any reflection on the value
of writings marginalised from the processes of canonicity. Over the last
decades, we have witnessed an emerging interest in testimonial writings
and ego- documents from authors of minoritised collectives, with heated
discussions concerning who is entitled to write about which subjects, but
little discussion on the authenticity of what is consumed and what sorts
of testimonial texts are favoured by our publishing markets and literary
ecosystems. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, in her monograph about authors of
colour in the UK, demonstrates how publishing houses are now interested
in publishing authors of colour, but their inclusion is most often tokenistic
or a way of narrowcasting to target niche audiences (2019, p. 49).
The question of how literature produces empathy is a tricky one. Literary
scholars have largely claimed that characters oer readers the possibility
of learning about and understanding other people in a way that would
be impossible to achieve in real life (Nikolajeva, 2014 p. 75). Cognitive
criticism in literary studies began to gain prominence in the late 20th cen-
tury, as an approach that integrated cognitive science with traditional lit-
erary analysis, arguing that reading literary texts can significantly enhance
empathy by allowing readers to experience diverse perspectives and emo-
tional states. By engaging with the characters, readers would be opened up
Introduction 5
to new thoughts, feelings, and motivations, which would foster a deeper
understanding of the experiences and viewpoints of others. Cognitive criti-
cism posits a number of claims about the emotional engagement of readers,
but it lacks the conceptual development of aective criticism. Cognitive
criticism, as its name rightly underscores, privileges the rational aspects
of interpretation, potentially neglecting visceral, embodied, and emotional
responses and engagement with texts.
How do testimonial writings manage to engage readers in imagining
another life? What are the repertoires of otherness that we make available
through what we consider literary? The definition of “literary” seems to
be part of the problem of the humanistic defences of reading for empathy
development. The definition of literature appears to be unassailable, an
evident quality of some texts. Martha Nussbaum argues that training in
philosophy is less crucial than reading novels, precisely because in novels
meaning does not lie in a regime of truth, but in allowing us to revise
our own points of view. She suggests that the established and contingent
thinking of narrative, and the setting in motion of ethical choices in its
characters, would prepare us for a life in democracy in which the ability to
agree provides a foundation stone for coexistence. Moreover, this ability
would be the key to facing the threatening future that the American phil-
osopher outlines in her later texts. But what novels does she consider
proper? Why would television series or soap operas not have a similar
eect? What about non- fictional accounts? How is it that we agree that
some testimonial accounts are literary while others are not?
If reading literature makes you a better citizen, then getting children
to read becomes a state goal— you are eectively reading for democracy.
Reading- promotion programmes are more or less explicitly based on the
following premise: the more children read, the better democratic coex-
istence there will be. This premise has a long genealogy in the children’s
literature field if only because children’s books, as a category of their
own, originated in the need for texts for the purpose of religious instruc-
tion. As it moved on from religious teachings, the children’s literature
field started to include stories that warned of the threats of modern life,
a process that Jack Zipes covers in his fabulous Sticks and Stones. The
Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to
Harry Potter (2001). Books for children are defended today for their aes-
thetic values, but the field is still patrolled and policed by adults. This has
become evident recently when we have seen schools and public libraries
becoming the battlefield for culture wars. Censorship has returned and
is on the increase. Adults, both conservative and progressive, have a say
in what gets published, what is recommended and what is bought, each
adducing arguments about children’s preferences and needs. This problem
has been highlighted for a long time by critics of children’s literature.
6 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Jacqueline Rose (1984) famously stated that “Children’s fiction rests on
the idea that there is a child who is simply there to be addressed and that
speaking to it might be simple” (p. 1– 2). Her ground- breaking monograph
drew attention to adultcentrism in cultural production for children. Two
decades later, Maria Nikolajeva, coined the term aetonormativity to talk
about how certain ideas about age and maturity become normative, and
how being immature and a child is considered deficitary (2009). Narrative
voices, perspectives, and endings in children’s books pinpoint a relation-
ship of power in which the adult is normal and children are both present
and presented as being on the road to adulthood and, until then, in need
of adult guidance.
From the philosophy of education, Karin Murris (2013) has advanced
untangling issues when it comes to how to address children. She uses
Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” to observe that children
are not considered knowledgeable subjects and are constantly interpreted
and explained by adults. Murris progresses the argument of the postulates
of the movement for Philosophy for Children, which tends to recognise
children as epistemic subjects, in the direction of posthumanist philosophy.
Posthumanism endeavours to make sense of an uncertain planetary future
by developing a critique of how the human condition was philosophically
built on the foundation stone of the White, Western, heterosexual, cul-
turally Eurocentric, educated man. Karen Barad, posthumanist philoso-
pher and physicist, claims that posthumanism welcomes “females, slaves,
children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled from the land
of knowers by Aristotle more than two millennia ago)” (2007, p. 378).
Posthumanism searches for new epistemologies and develops new ethics
on the basis of which to produce knowledge. This philosophical current
has helped to reimagine the position of the child and the notion of age in
contemporary childhood studies. In this reimagination, the child is not
misconstrued or misrecognised by adults, but rather “produced” through
our research and material practices (see Spyrous, Rosen and Cook, 2018).
The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction investigates adult
expectations as to how fiction guides children towards better and fairer
relationships (and aectivities). In investigating this subject, I have
combined traditional textual analysis, which reviews responses to literary
works and the production of ideological frameworks, with insights from
empirical studies involving children, schoolteachers, and other reading
mediators. I intersperse analyses of narrative texts— most of which are
multimodal— with observations on how these works circulate and are
produced in dierent spaces, exploring in this way a posthumanist angle
on literary criticism. I am inspired by Rita Felski’s notion of postcriticism,
in which she proposes giving less attention to the ideologies on which the
literary works might be based, and more to the ways in which we find
Introduction 7
aesthetic texts captivating (2015, 2020). What follows is that there is no
interpretation of what the literary works may mean, but rather multiple
ways of thinking about their relationship with their contexts.
I was attentive to how fiction for children takes into account adult’s
hopes about the future while fearing children’s emotionality and what this
confidence and these fears may do when the artworks “intra- act” with
young people (Barad, 2007, p. 37). I am aware that my own confidences
and fears are also part of this complex network of media, aects and
readers. My work has been inspired by Peter Hunt’s call for childist
criticism in which researchers in children’s literature studies would read
alongside children (1984). Childism has received increasing attention in
academic cultures as a framework to counter adultism in the way we order
the social and material aspects of our lives (see Biswas et al., 2024; Wall,
2022). Combining narrative analysis with insights from empirical work
with children has led me to argue for an aective childist criticism in which
our interpretations are informed by the readings and interpretations of
actual children, which could be more eectively traced and analysed when
moved away from a discursive approach into the realm of the aective
and emotional (see García- González, 2022). Inspired by the posthumanist
and aective turns in critical theory, I use childism to refocus attention
on the medium’s agency and vibrancy, particularly when it renders stories
using multimodal aordances. The aective turn follows the monist philo-
sophical tradition of Baruch Spinoza and its subsequent elaboration by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; a turn that resists Cartesian binarisms
and raises questions about how bodies have the capacity to aect and
be aected (1987). This outlook heralds new possibilities when it comes
to thinking about the aesthetic, ethical, and pedagogical intensities of
children’s cultures.
Over the last decades, we have witnessed the advance of emotionalisation
in public discourse, and we have acquired a range of new terms to describe
the social production of emotions and aectivities. I propose the term
emotional repertoire as an allusion to Ann Swidler’s cultural repertoires
(2013). She expresses a view of culture as a toolbox in which we can find
habits, values, styles, routines, ideas, and narratives to guide our actions.
I would advance the notion that the emotional and aective dimensions
can also constitute a toolbox to provide us with guidelines as to how to
act— orientations in which categories such as emotional and rational are
not binary but porous. I emphasise here the notion of repertoires because
I see the emotional repertoire as both oering and limiting possibilities.
In this book, I give consideration to the circulation of discourses on the
importance of socioemotional education and the place that reading has
within it. I approach these discourses critically, investigating the limits of
what is considered suitable for children and the hierarchies that order and
8 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
regulate what is understood by emotions (focusing, for example, on the
politics of happiness that permeate our understanding of children’s lives
and childhood). I reflect on critical approaches to emotionalisation such
as those of Eva Illouz and Sara Ahmed, who warn us of the commodifica-
tion of emotional lives that serves neoliberal interests (2008, 2010). The
emotional repertoire that children are oered and obliged to negotiate,
presents both possibilities and constraints.
In the chapters that follow, I explore how narratives for and by children—
understanding that this division is porous— are assembled on the basis of
what their creators know about the world. We are growing aware of how
digital practices and new technologies exploit and capitalise on emotions,
exacerbating social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nation-
alism (see Boler and Davis 2021). In educational practices, this awareness
is often fuelled by a media panic that sees books as a vital lifeline. In this
book, I will carry out a critical review of our epistemological habits in
terms of how we understand that which is excluded from children’s litera-
ture and culture. I reflect on the question of how intersecting exclusions
should be considered, with a suspicion that we often deal with them at
a discursive level, turning our attention away from the materialities that
produce them.
In the first chapter, I delve into how picturebooks have regularly started
to appear on agendas aimed at socioemotional education. This is a chapter
that sketches out a criticism of the discourses on emotional literacy for
early childhood and questions the view that books are useful tools for
shaping emotional management. I pay special attention to the Spanish
bestseller The Colour Monster and link this book to the animated film
Inside Out and its sequel. I outline the cultural narrative of basic emotions
that orient our actions as the prevalent discourse about the emotional
sphere in education.
Chapter Two integrates an empirical study of encounters with books.
I report on a project in which we worked with challenging or controversial
picturebooks, that is, with books that make some adults uncomfortable
and doubt whether they are appropriate materials for children. I focus
on an encounter between schoolchildren and reading mediators with
La madre y la muerte, a rather unusual and even macabre book, which
features death, bodily mutilation and the trope of the sacrificial mother.
My analysis is not focused on the literary text, but on the intensities and
emotions that appeared in the reading, engendering questions about why
certain subjects might be considered taboo.
The third to the seventh chapter explore other dicult subjects—
xenophobia, human rights violations, family separations, illness, dictator-
ship, and water wars— inquiring into how some emotional repertoires are
done in them. In Chapter Three, I delve into contemporary picturebooks
Introduction 9
about refugees, forced displacement and xenophobia. I use the concept
of necropolitics coined by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe
(2019) in my reading of picturebooks by Armin Greder: The Island,
The Mediterranean and The Inheritance (2007, 2018, 2021). I probe
the narrative devices used to allude to the brutality with which certain
populations are left to die and how they challenge the imperative of hope
in children’s texts. I combine this textual analysis with some insights on
reader response to these books.
In the fourth chapter, I expand my reflection on narratives about migra-
tion aimed at children with a close reading of non- fiction books. I focus
on texts that recount the crossing of the US- Mexico border, exploring how
the hostland is depicted in these stories and which repertoires are available
to discuss illegal immigration and deportation. I focus on books published
in both English and Spanish editions, contemplating who would constitute
an ideal reader of such books, how the hardships of crossing the border
are depicted and how the testimonial voice works dierently in books
for children and for adults. I combine an analysis of two picturebooks
for children with an essay published as adult literature inquiring into the
aordances of the dierent formats.
The fifth chapter focuses on a subject matter that is most often avoided
in works aimed at children: human rights violations under authoritarian
governments. I focus on the case of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile,
appraising how it has been narrated to children. I analyse four texts in
relation to memorialisation: a poetry book by María José Ferrada (Niños,
2013); a picturebook by Jairo Buitrago and Daniel Blanco (Un diamante
en el fondo de la tierra, 2015); the short, animated film Bear Story (by
Punk Robot, 2014); and the illustrated book La Composición by Antonio
Skármeta and Alfonso Ruano (2005). I argue that these texts are modelled
by the diculties of reaching a national consensus on appropriate ways of
rendering dictatorship and human rights violations for children.
The sixth chapter moves to another elusive topic: the gender norm in
literature for children. Here, I do not address the most manifestly taboo
dimensions, such as sexual orientation or transgender and transexual iden-
tities, but how certain notions of women’s empowerment are problem-
atic. I examine the rise of biographies of women in children’s literature
with a focus on the figure of Frida Kahlo, the most biographied figure in
children’s literature published in Spanish. I examine three illustrated biog-
raphies using a critical feminist lens to examine how her life is presented
as a model of resilience and choice obscuring structural injustices and the
masculine figuration of the artist as a genius.
In Chapter Seven, I reflect on the cultural texts that are recommended
for children in relation to the environmental crisis, focusing on stories
about water scarcity. I contend that the focus on the younger generations’
10 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
agency in relation to the ecological crisis fails to recognise the need for
immediate adult action and policy change. In this chapter, I consider
post- anthropocentric narratives with a focus on the short, animated film
Abuela Grillo [Grandmother Cricket] (Chapon, 2009). This film is based
on an Indigenous tale from the Ayoreo people of Eastern Bolivia about a
grandmother whose songs can bring rain to Earth. I review how coupling
childist thinking and environmental justice allows us to decentre humanist
ideals to imagine other possible narratives about the climate crisis.
The two final chapters aim to bring a counterpoint to the rest of the
book. Chapter Eight introduces ethnographic work about schemes
for reading promotion and aective repertoires. The matter of what is
considered appropriate in texts for and by children resurfaces, in tandem
with questions about aective and emotional repertoires for adults in
relation to frustration and loss. This chapter also studies how we, as
researchers, likewise find ourselves trapped by the politics of happiness
and hope that are criticised throughout this book.
In Chapter Nine, I sketch out possible new directions for research
on emotional repertoires and ethics by looking at how we make sense
of writing by children. The quest to counter adultism in culture has
motivated a variety of initiatives that give “voice” to children and rec-
ognise their creations and preferences. In this chapter, I use a relational
ontologies lens to explore texts written by children and analyse what they
tell us about the conditions of authorship that are allowed by our adult-
centred culture. I examine initiatives that promote children’s writing,
appraising how dierent institutional frameworks— an educational policy
for fostering creative writing, a literary competition, and a child jury for
literary prizes— provide the space for dierent forms of moral imagination
and aective repertoires.
I close the book oering a critical reflection on how books may be useful
to deal with complex topics opening up emotional and ethical repertoires.
I propose to follow posthumanist childist approaches to decentre age
and generation as limiting categories in our political engagements with
children’s fiction and culture.
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003522225-2
This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
1 The Uses of Picturebooks for
Socioemotional Education
It was not until the 1990s that the Spanish- language publishing markets
began to produce picturebooks, and it was to be at least two more decades
before they had a name: libros- álbum (in Latin America) and álbumes
ilustrados (in Spain). The format’s proliferation coincided with the emer-
gence of new reading cultures and the crystallisation of new guidelines
for reading- promotion programmes that advocated for the replacement
of canonical texts by multimodal narratives, which include picturebooks,
comics, and graphic novels. The premise at the time, and still so today, is
that new generations would need a tailored, more visual, reading oer, or
they might never start to enjoy reading. Picturebook publishing rocketed
in the space of a few years, and we may credit its vertiginous take- o to
the work of a network of “actants”, to use Latour’s term to highlight the
agency of objects, institutions, and structures (Latour, 2007).
One of the key actants for picturebook publishing in Latin America has
been the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE),
a state- funded publisher, that launched their picturebook collection A la
orilla del viento in 1995, with an international competition that is still
running today. The collection was initially overseen by Daniel Goldin, an
authority in reading promotion in the region, and has seen the publication
of over 400 picturebooks in 20 years. FCE not only translated contem-
porary classics— such as the books by Anthony Brown, Ian Falconer, Taro
Gomi, Satoshi Kitamura— but also published a vast number of original
works that had been discovered through participation in the annual com-
petition. Many of the books that did not receive awards as part of the
competition were nevertheless taken on by other publishing houses.
Another key actant was public policy on reading promotion. Laws in
dierent Latin- American countries favoured national purchases that bene-
fited local publishing companies and boosted the publishing markets in
Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. Despite fluctuations in their pol-
itical and economic situations and the resulting changes in public policies,
14 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
each of these countries witnessed the rise of publishing houses producing
impactful picturebooks. Such books successfully transcended national and
linguistic borders; the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico, and the Bologna
Children’s Book Fair, became important hubs for the internationalisation
of Latin- American publishers and authors. Some countries funded annual
trips by illustrators, authors, and publishers to these fairs under a pro-
gramme for the internationalisation of their publishing industry.
The first decades of the new millennium saw picturebooks quickly
becoming the darlings of reading- promotion schemes, edging out more
lengthy narratives (see Munita, 2021; Arizpe and Styles, 2002). The format
appealed because of its interplay of visual and verbal narratives, one that
was attuned to new generations of readers. Before long they tantalised
with another promise: that reading picturebooks would foster empathy
in the reader. Maria Nikolajeva claimed that as meaning- making required
an understanding of the interplay between the visual and the verbal,
picturebooks were particularly well attuned to developing theory of mind
and becoming a major tool for socialisation (Nikolajeva, 2012, 2014,
2017). Even if Nikolajeva asserted that such a claim rested on speculative
arguments, picturebooks were soon being promoted as under this banner
(Swietlicki, 2020; Tabernero and Tagueña, 2020; Daly, 2021; De la Vega,
2023). Picturebooks became the preferred format of reading- promotion
experts (and academics alike), and the industry responded accordingly.
While publishers tendered to eschew overtly pedagogical content, showing
a marked preference for books featuring visual and experimental design
and art, the demands of the education sector were still being met. Many of
the new titles published responded to modern educational agendas, very
much framed by new discourses about emotional repertoire and shared
values such as respect (for others and the environment).
In this chapter, I explore some discourses on how picturebooks are used,
focusing on how certain narratives about the development of empathy in
the reader seem to be preferred. The book market is currently flooded with
lists of recommended books about grief, domestic violence, divorce, illness,
war, disabilities and the like. There are hundreds of books designed to
make you feel at home after you have migrated, to help you cope with the
departure of a loved one or to teach you kindness and cultural awareness.
There are books that explain how dicult it is to cross borders and others
about how tiny actions on your part may save the planet. Some are not
afraid to include the word manual or guide in their titles, such as the book
Empatía. Guía para padres e hijos [Empathy. A guide for parents and
children] published in 2017, with a later edition tailored to the challenges
of coping with the Covid pandemic, which I will appraise later in this
chapter. These books appear to cater to a contemporary sensibility about
what it means to be a child.
Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 15
In the context of recent social studies of childhood, researchers have
noticed the emergence of “intensive parenting” (Faircloth, 2014) in which
social mandates related to the care and training of children are ampli-
fied and diversified. Such intensive parenting responds to a perception that
children today are more vulnerable to risks impacting their physical and
emotional development, and parents are understood as the deterministic
figures in preparing children to cope with those risks. The inflated social
importance of the parental role is reflected in the picturebook publishing
boom. Parents are expected to socialise their children into reading from
very young ages. This desired parental function appears in public reading-
promotion campaigns as, for example, in Encouraging your child to read,
developed by researchers at the Harvard School of Education, which
inspired similar campaigns in Latin America (see Errázuriz and Garcia-
Gonzalez, 2021).
Reading is supposed to make us better. There are several studies that
show correlations between frequent reading and overall enhanced aca-
demic achievement. The experiments by Kidd and Castano (2013),
described in the introduction, argue that reading for pleasure is beneficial
for a healthy theory of mind. Others emphasise that reading can lead its
audience to resignify traumatic experiences (Véliz et al., 2022) and even
achieve greater financial success (Mol et al., 2008). Reading is alleged to
be beneficial to almost every aspect of human potential, but these promises
are bound to a somewhat narrow understanding of reading as the prac-
tice of following and interpreting a linear literary text in print format.
These armations about the benefits of reading fiction do not investigate
or refer to the possible benefits of internet- based reading practices such
as audiobooks, webtoons, fan culture, podcasts, films, series, and social
media engagement.
The benefits of reading fiction are often shaped as related to the benefits
of reading for pleasure. The National Literacy Trust (UK) (Clark &
Rumbold, 2006) defines reading for pleasure as, “Reading we do of our
own free will, anticipating the satisfaction we will get from the act of
reading” and adds that while the initial impetus may have come from
someone else, readers continue because they are interested; reading has
a promise if related to pleasure, not duty. A key actant on this front is
the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test taken
by 15- year- olds in OECD countries, which measures their ability to use
their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge and skills to meet real-
life challenges. The PISA programme produces evidence on reading for
enjoyment by asking children how frequently they read, what they read,
and whether they do it out of their own free will. For many years, the
results have sounded alarms by indicating that children across the dierent
countries are reading ever fewer fiction books, magazines, or newspapers
16 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
of their own free will (McGrane et al., 2017). In 2018, the number of
students that stated that they considered reading “a waste of time” was
higher than ever before. The results were received with considerable con-
cern. Yet the PISA programme defines enjoyment and pleasure quite nar-
rowly. May we also find enjoyment and pleasure in task- oriented reading?
Do reading short stories on Wattpad or webtoons count as reading for the
children answering the survey?
In this book, we return to the lengthy debate on the use of fiction,
appraising its ethical and political dimensions and how they are connected
to the aective discourses. At the same time, we examine why the question
of why read literature resurfaces so repeatedly, often related to claims
about emotional development.
Picturebooks about emotions have become a niche of their own in
recent years. These books find shelf space not just in bookshops, but also
in school libraries, classrooms, kindergartens, and psychologists’ oces.
Books about emotions for children seem to respond to the perception
of a growing need for educators— teachers, librarians, and also parents
and other caregivers— to educate in the socioemotional realm. The most
common emotional theme is the all- time classic of fear, closely followed by
grief, anger, and shyness. Death has made the leap from being a taboo sub-
ject to one that is widely addressed: see, for example, the internationally
renowned Duck, Death and the Tulip (Erlbruch, 2007) Sad Book (Rosen,
2004), The Memory Tree (Teckentrup, 2013) and What Happens Next?
(Clayton, 2012) or the Latin- American books Es Así (Valdivia, 2010) and
La madre y la muerte/ La Partida (Laiseca, Chimal and Arispe, 2016). The
repertoires that seem most absent are those that Sianne Ngai (2005) iden-
tifies as “ugly feelings”, feelings that the modern capitalist society might
provoke in us and which today’s picturebooks do not seem to tackle: para-
noia, anxiety, irritation. We might add the feeling of frustration or feelings
of obstruction to this list, subjects only rarely mentioned in the undis-
guised catalogues of emotions. Frustration seems to matter only when it
rises to overflowing and turns into rage, as shown in David McKee’s Not
now, Bernard (1980) or in Oram and Kitamura’s Angry Arthur (1993).
Among reading mediators, a clear division is drawn between those who
prefer more literary books that explore emotions in complex ways and
those who prefer texts that are nothing more than resources for emotional
literacy. A prime example of a book aimed at emotional literacy is The
Colour Monster, by the Spanish author Anna Llenas (2012; trans 2012), a
key actant in coupling picturebooks with socioemotional education. I have
yet to meet a child growing up in a Spanish- speaking country who has not
read this book. According to the publishers, the book has sold more than
six million copies, and a quick YouTube search reveals numerous read-
alouds and thousands of online visual representations.
Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 17
Llenas produced a book tailored to the demands of teachers and therapists
which has been a runaway editorial success, translated into more than 40
languages, as well as into a range of merchandising products: colouring
books, board games, soft toys, mugs, etc. The English translation has
appeared on the International Literacy Association/ Children’s Book
Council Children’s Choices List.
The Colour Monster tells the story of a little monster who is very confused
by his mixed- up emotions. A girl teaches him to name and recognise his
dierent emotions, explaining that each of them has a dierent colour. The
monster has to learn to separate out the emotions and put them into glass
jars, allowing him to manage them much better. The hopeful ending is
only possible when all the basic emotions— happiness, sadness, anger, and
calm— are in separate jars. Llenas’ book thus squarely seeks to provide
socioemotional education on containing and limiting emotions through
the process of identification and classification. Organising emotions into
jars serves as a metaphor for emotional clarity and self- awareness, but it is
dicult not to judge The Colour Monster for proposing a narrative about
emotions in which recognising them is linked to separating and containing
them, and even possibly repressing them.
The Colour Monster was published a few years before the Pixar
film Inside Out (2015). Despite the gulf between the two formats— a
picturebook aimed at early childhood years and an animated film that
appeals to both children and adults— , the two are alike in oering a
narrative about basic emotions that control our actions. Both represent a
very limited number of basic emotions which are stereotypically associated
with colours: sadness is blue, and anger is red, happiness— the desirable
one— is bright and luminous. There is a psychological theory behind
both texts: the theory of basic emotions. This theory has its origins in the
work of American psychologist Silvan Tomkins in the 1960s and gained
popularity through subsequent categorisation by his disciple Paul Ekman,
who initially listed six and later 17 basic emotions (Tappolet, 2022). The
premise is that there are universal emotions, suggesting an autonomy of
the central nervous system and, ultimately, that emotions are not learned
but emerge as natural responses to stimuli. Paul Ekman developed his
theory of basic emotions after studying the variation of facial expressions
across dierent cultures and asserting that faces showing fear or sadness
are always recognisable. His findings have been challenged by the scien-
tific community, who adduce anthropological studies showing that this
universality is inaccurate, and that there are multiple communities where
facial expressions dier significantly, and therefore, expressions and
emotions are not purely physiological responses but part of our sociocul-
tural learning. However, like almost all theories that allow for simplifica-
tion, the theory of basic emotions has undergone significant expansion,
18 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
especially in the field of scientific dissemination and popular psychology.
The sequel to Inside Out, released in 2024, responded to the criticism of
its simplification by adding more emotions, but does not err from a safe
narrative path of happy/ troubled/ happy child. Inside Out 2 clarifies to
some extent that certain emotions that we deem negative, such as anxiety
and embarrassment, also play a role in how we manage our lives. These
new emotions have a similar function to that of Sadness in the first movie.
Although the emotional hierarchy is a little less marked in the second
movie, the message seems to be the same: while recognising and hearing
negative emotions, never allow them to take control of you.
Educational programmes that cause the greatest concern to academics
such as myself, who espouse a childist approach to reading, are those that
claim that recognising and giving space to emotions should be monitored
by rationality: emotions are named and distinguished one from another
to prevent them from being too deeply experienced. Such programmes
consider too much emotion to lead to trouble: if only we could learn to
feel a bit less, we would be able to navigate life successfully. The critique
to our contemporary approaches to the emotion in relation to childhoods
has been explored from a historical perspective by Olsen and Vallgarda
(2022), and by Kenway and Youdell (2011).
This desire to control and limit emotions is, as sociologist Eva Illouz
(2008) critically describes, one of the most salient dimensions of our
current culture. We have adopted concepts and guidelines from psycho-
analysis and therapy to organise our social relationships and horizons of
possibilities, thus limiting what we can expect from our lives. Illouz and
other specialists in cultural and sociological studies of emotions, such as
Cabanas (2016), explain that this new emphasis on recognising emotions
hides its agenda about the need to control them, eectively subordinating
emotional and aective realms to rationality. The supremacy of reason
over emotion was crystallised by Enlightenment philosophers and their
notion of progress, in which abstract thought could create universal models
for human development. When the idea of progress is questioned, as it
begins to be questioned when we acknowledge the irreversible damage
that humans are inflicting on Earth, we start to recognise other possible
ways of knowing and feeling. The attention to aect in the social sciences
is an attempt to deal with this failure of progress and to find a way of
reimagining a hopeful future (Hemmings, 2005).
The opposition that we have observed between reading for pleasure
and reading for duty recalls the binary between reason and emotion. From
the philosophical tradition of aesthetics, this leads to a discussion about
the function of political art and the problem of representation. Jacques
Rancière tackles this question by stating that art is not political because
it represents the structures of society, conflicts, or social identities, but
Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 19
is “political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these
functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and
the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space” (2009,
p. 23). In other words, political art should not represent politics, much
less establish any causal relationship, but rather use distance to produce
emancipatory experiences: Rancière advocates a new “distribution of the
sensible” (p. 25). This notion of the “distribution of the sensible” refers
to the implicit rules and norms that determine what is perceptible and
intelligible within a given society, a form of socio- political regulation that
dictates what is visible and sayable. The distribution is not just about sen-
sory perception but also about the allocation of roles, spaces, and times
that define who can participate in certain activities and who is excluded
from them. If we replace the notion of political art with that of educational
art and explore texts that educate our socio- emotionality, what relation-
ship should these texts have with emotions? How might these disrupt the
everyday regimes of feeling?
Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed has dedicated much of her career to the
study of what she calls the “cultural politics of emotion” (2004), describing
and exploring how emotions are socially educated to comply with social
norms. In her insightful book, The Promise of Happiness (2010), Ahmed
traces how happiness is something we are promised if we can postpone
gratification and orient ourselves by notions of status that are presented
as socially rewarded. The culture of happiness produces injustices and
oppresses lives that are delegitimised in the face of consensual narratives
about happiness; Ahmed illustrates this, among others, with the figure of
the happy housewife.
What are the promises of happiness in the books we recommend? In
times when the notion of progress is problematic, happiness appears linked
to hopeful ideas about communities of care. In The Colour Monster (2018)
a little girl helps the monster; in the Inside Out movies, the emotions help
each other and then the humans learn to do so too. The hope is that by
caring we will learn to repress the overflow. Emotional literacy, therefore,
appears to be linked to the notion of controlling, of oering resistance that
operates through the linguistic code to which experience is subject.
In The Colour Monster, the trick for coding, for the creation of lan-
guage, is to associate feelings with colours; this association follows cer-
tain cultural rules such as assigning red to anger, yellow to joy, and grey/
black to fear. These associations are problematic. For example, the ori-
ginal Spanish text about fear states, “Cuando sientes miedo, te vuelves
pequeño y poca cosa …, y crees que no podrás hacer lo que se te pide. El
miedo es cobarde. Se esconde y huye como un ladrón en la oscuridad”.
This might be translated as “When you’re afraid, you become tiny and
insignificant …, and you believe that you will not be able to do what is
20 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
asked of you. Fear is a coward. He hides and flees like a thief in the dark”.
Negative associations accumulate here with the colour black: cowardice,
fear, hiding, fleeing, darkness, thief, insignificance. The English trans-
lation has remedied this with a translation that removes some of these
problematic associations: “When you’re afraid, you feel tiny. You think
you don’t have the courage to face the grey shadows. But I can help you
find your way”. The translation removes the negative associations of the
original and associates fear with grey rather than with black. In both
versions, fear is related to cowardice which could be seen to introduce
the political dimension of fear as a form of controlling the population,
who is only able to oppose it if they have courage, as set out by Corey
Robin in the essay Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004) or A
Philosophy of Fear by Lars Svendsen (2008).
The Colour Monster and other books representing or thematising
emotions are often labelled as self- help books for children. Some Spanish
editions explicitly label them as user guides: Empatía. Guía para padres
e hijos (Biberach, 2017) [Empathy, a guide for parents and children] or
Emocionario [Emotional Dictionary, 2013]. Eva Eland’s When Sadness
Comes to Call (2020) was translated as Tristeza, manual de usuario
(2021) [Sadness, a User’s Manual]. Yet despite these self- help titles, these
books have been promoted as literary works and have been sent to the
juries of major international awards for children’s and young people’s
literature.
The Chilean book Empatía. Guía para padres e hijos was presented to a
number of such competitions, among them the international White Ravens
Honour List and the Colibrí Medal in Chile. This book allows us to make
a critical inquiry into how emotional repertoires are connected to ethical
positioning. As its name indicates, it is a book that explicitly targets the
dual audience of children and adults. Its front cover shows two boys and
a girl hugging each other. The one in the centre asks, “Who do you talk
to?” The girl in a dress answers, “I talk to my dad and my mom”, while
the boy on the left says, “I tell my teacher”. The cover does not frame
empathy as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but as the
ability to communicate with adults and trust them. The book alternates
references to communication between adults and children with reflections
on the ability to be empathetic. Empathy appears in formulations such as
respecting the opinions of others, helping peers, feeling compassion for
those who are suering, accepting mistakes and protecting younger chil-
dren. The book is structured around 28 sentences that propose possible
definitions of what it would be to be empathetic. Before reading them,
we are told that all of them are “correct”. These 28 phrases allow us to
identify a discourse on empathy for children and their emotional limits. In
them, empathy appears as an action: sharing, helping, listening, enjoying.
Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 21
These actions are defined by their distance from selfishness. Empathy
would be a form of altruism.
The relationship of empathy with justice and injustice has been widely
explored in contemporary social theory alongside reflections on how
feelings shape our ideas about what is fair. In the final chapter of The
Cultural Politics of Emotions, Ahmed examines how the limits of our
feelings toward others are interwoven with necropolitics, namely deciding
which lives have more rights than others and who has the greater right to
life (2004). In Empatía. Guía para padres e hijos, altruism does not take
the usual form of guidance towards doing the right thing for the good of
society in times of crisis, but rather is a series of guidelines that relate to
people outside of oneself who are referred to as “others”. As a result, no
space is made for any distrust of the position and privilege of the speaker,
nor is there any attempt to expand the inventory of feelings. Indeed, these
feelings seem to be embodied in a mandate to be more attentive to the
needs of those around you, without clearly specifying how such needs
might be met. Some pages make the cognitive limits of privilege clear; for
example, the phrase “I am empathetic when I include others” and “I am
empathetic if I am tolerant” are revealingly illustrated by, in the first case,
a boy in a wheelchair, and in the second, a Black boy with an Asian girl.
These two phrases are contrasted on a double page, which is probably
an unfortunate coincidence, but highlights the narrative promoting the
empathetic child: on one side the so- called “inclusion” (of dierences in
their most visible form— a physical disability), and on another on toler-
ance, quite a problematic concept especially when it appears to indicate
that ethnic origin is something that might somehow require this emotion.
Wendy Brown (2009) has critiqued the discourse on tolerance for how it is
a regulation of aversion, a position of unquestioned privilege. which does
not oblige us to question why we find a particular person or behaviour at
odds with ourselves. It is striking that to illustrate tolerance, the illustrator
has chosen to use racialised figures— the girl with slanted eyes and the boy
with curly- afro hair and thick lips. The entire book could have included
characters with diverse racial features, but they appear only on this page.
The rest of the book shows all White characters. The empathetic child that
this book promotes, therefore, is a White child who, it is implied, rarely
requires to be shown tolerance themself. On the next double page, the
discourse of tolerance is tested still further: the phrase “I am empathetic
when I am supportive” is illustrated by a girl giving a coin to a young man
holding a cup who is sitting on the floor. On the opposite page, we read,
“I am empathetic when I am generous”, with a girl giving an ice cream to
a boy. The opposition of solidarity and generosity in these two pages is
striking, as it says a lot about the edges of emotional repertoires of justice
for children.
22 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Solidarity has historically been considered a way of maintaining moral
community, an action of joining forces, from the Latin solidare, com-
bining the parts into a stronger whole. In the classical sociology of Emile
Durkheim (1893/ 1933) we find a distinction between mechanical solidarity
towards others and an organic solidarity that responds to an awareness of
the advantages of community- building. A community that is supportive is
able to reach a more advanced stage of order and social cohesion. In Chile,
as in other countries, solidarity has come closer to ideas about charity or
commitments to overcoming poverty. In her book Ayudar a los pobres.
Etnografía del Estado social y las prácticas de asistencia. [Helping the
Poor. Ethnography of the social state and assistance practices], Carolina
Rojas explains that the term solidarity went from being an ethical and
moral response to collective suering under the dictatorship to referring
to tackling poverty in a welfare state (2019). Thus, in Chile, solidarity
is related to a notion of poverty that is not understood as a structural
injustice or failure of society, but as falling victim to the general adver-
sity of life. Generosity, meanwhile— one of the Aristotelian virtues— is
more related to giving to someone who is at a disadvantage. Generosity
is, therefore, related to compassion, and material generosity is usually
distinguished from the generosity shown in caring for another. I distin-
guish these concepts of solidarity and generosity as they are useful in
discerning where certain borders of empathy lie. They are what Mieke
Bal terms travelling concepts, namely ones which move between fields
and disciplines acquiring new meanings (2002). It is striking that in the
children’s book on empathy, solidarity has nothing to do with joining
forces or interdependences of care, but rather with a certain notion of
unproblematised and unquestioned privilege. Empathy, thus, is not a way
of sharing the feelings of others, but rather a learned practice to avoid self-
ishness in interactions with “others”.
In this chapter, I have focused on books for early readers because they
furnish us with multiple examples of texts promoted as educating young
citizens in the practice of putting themselves into others’ skin. We have
seen how this empathic reader is framed by promises of happiness, in
which a hopeful future awaits those who are able to follow social norms.
As the age of the ideal reader advances, such optimism begins to fade and
begins to be replaced by desolation and hopelessness. In young- adult lit-
erature, very little remains of this naive moralism, and emotional break-
down becomes a common theme. The distinction between children’s and
YA literature is the result of editorial categories that help organise the
circulation of these books, their inclusion in reading plans and, also, their
position on library shelves. The distinction also operates by separating
o content that is deemed harmful if read prematurely, before an alleged
socioemotional maturity that will render readers resistant to an ultimate
Picturebooks for Socioemotional Education 23
feeling of hopelessness. Yet, as we shall see in the following chapters, it is
also possible to find children’s literature that grapples with dicult and
challenging themes, with an understanding that the relationship between
fiction and empathy is a complex one.
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
2 Stories About Death and Adult
Anxieties
It has been a widely held view that children’s books should have a happy
ending. However, the highly complex interplay of text and images in
picturebooks makes them a powerful tool for exploring dicult emotions
and alternative endings. While picturebooks that avoid a positive resolution
are still rare in Anglo- American publishing, they do find space with publishers
in Nordic languages, in French and in Spanish. Indeed, books with open
endings, which deal with controversial matters, represent a growing niche
in publishing, while empirical research shows that such books present more
of a challenge to schoolteachers and other adults than they do to children
(Marshall, 2015; Campagnaro, 2015; Pantaleo, 2008; Madalena and Ramos,
2021). Most studies base their research on what is said by adults and children
after they have read these books; however, if we are to make a deeper study of
these books as catalysts for the exploration of complex emotions, it is perhaps
better to move away from a traditional discursive approach.
In 2018, I set up a research study on aective attachments to
picturebooks that explored (alternative) emotional repertoires. Working
with me on this project, funded by the Center for Advanced Studies in
Educational Justice (CJE) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,
was Dr. Soledad Véliz, a PhD student at the time. Our aim was to use new
materialist and posthumanist theoretical and methodological concepts to
explore emotional and aective intensities when reading “challenging”
or “radical picturebooks” in groups (see Reynolds, 2007; Evans, 2015;
Lewis, 2015; Haaland et al., 2022; Véliz, 2022). I was seeking to bridge
literary and educational approaches to these books following Rita Felski’s
(2015, 2020) critique of critique and her invitation to understand how
literary texts and other arts provoke engagement and attachment. New
materialist thinking, in particular Jane Bennett’s (2010) notion of “vibrant
materialism”, inspired me to consider some picturebooks as having an
agentic materiality, a non- human capacity to aect and modify not only
people, but spaces, feelings, and other relationalities.
Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 27
The classification of picturebooks as challenging, along with other
such classifications used in children’s literature studies, relates to our
conceptualisations of children as innocent and vulnerable. While acknow-
ledging this, it remained the obvious description for our selection of five
books, which we organised from least to most challenging. We define chal-
lenging as a category that relates to adult ideas of what is appropriate for
children and sought out for books referring to xenophobia and death. Of
the two, death is certainly more of a popular subject and we may trace how
it has become an increasingly approached subject in publications by small
independent houses. Some notable titles published in the last two decades
include The Swing by Britta Teckentrup (2023), Remembering by Xelena
González (2024), Life and I: A Story about Death by Elisabeth Helland
Larsen and Marine Schneider (2016), Cry, Heart, But Never Break by
Glenn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi (2016), The Dead Bird by Margaret
Wise Brown (2016), The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeers (2010), and
Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (2007) and Le Visite De Petite
Mort by Kitty Crowther (2011). All these books aim to balance simplicity
with depth and are often recommended as a means to start conversations
about the end of life.
For the purposes of the study, we looked for an educational establish-
ment in which reading was a highly regarded activity. This requirement
was met by a school in Santiago, Chile, run by a flagship, not- for- profit
organisation. The school had a bright, attractive library, with a varied
collection of books and two welcoming librarians. The Chilean educa-
tional system comprises private, state, and subsidised school provisions
in a highly segregated system. The 150- year- old organisation that runs
the school has focused on providing (subsidised) education to children
from lower middle classes. As the head teacher herself stated, this school
has an ethos of instilling “strong discipline”, in its students. Like the
other establishments run by this organisation, this school is academic-
ally demanding and strives to pave the way to better opportunities for its
students. The promotion of reading, which forms a core part of the cur-
riculum, is based on the conviction that frequent reading is a determining
factor in overall academic success.
We were interested in how age played a part in emotional engagement
with these books. Among other research activities, we set up a study that
included two primary school classes: one with children aged 7 to 8 and the
other with children aged 10 to 11. We worked with the entire class groups,
but we also conducted small- group discussions and interviews with chil-
dren, parents, teachers, and librarians. The group readings were organised
in the form of five weekly meetings, each lasting 40 minutes. We started
each session by reading aloud a picturebook and then separated each of
the classes into two groups for the purposes of discussion.
28 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
The first book we brought to the school was Eloísa y los bichos [Eloise
and the Creepy Crawlies] by Jairo Buitrago and Rafael Yockteng, a
story about a girl who moves somewhere new with her father and feels
strange and out- of- place. Originally published in Colombia by Babel
Libros in 2009, the book has received wide international recognition,
including plaudits from El Banco del Libro de Venezuela (in 2011) and the
Internationale Jugendbibliothek of Munich, in its White Ravens Honour
List (in the same year). In Eloísa y los bichos, Eloísa misses her mother,
whom we assume has passed away. The verbal narration tells of her ter-
rible loss and grief, while the visual narration describes how she feels out-
of- place in an unfamiliar new city, a city of bugs, where she is the only
human being. This book is often recommended as a resource for tack-
ling the theme of migration, yet it could better be described as a story of
displacement and loss, which does not necessarily involve crossing inter-
national borders. Of all the books included in the study, this one was the
only one with a happy ending: in a final double- page spread the narrator
tells us that after many years she now feels as if she belongs in this place.
A week later we brought in The Journey, a picturebook by the Swiss- based
Italian illustrator Francesca Sanna. The Journey tells the story of a family
fleeing from war who must overcome all sorts of obstacles to cross the
(European) border to safety. The visual narration tells us that the father
has died in the war and that the mother is bearing an immense sorrow on
this journey (an impressive illustration depicts the mother crying at night
while the two children lie asleep next to her). This book also concludes
with a seemingly happy ending as the family is able to find a safe place
where they can start a new life.
Week three was Ícaro [Icarus], by the Spanish author and illustrator
Federico Delicado, a book that brings a more complicated narrative. This
book tells the story of a child who has been abandoned by his parents,
who had flown away after turning into birds. The child is taken to an insti-
tution where no- one understands what he is going through. In the end, the
boy starts to grow his own wings and leaps out of the window.
In the fourth week, we read The Island, by Armin Greder (2002), a book
that addresses xenophobia bluntly. The story tells of a man who arrives
on an island after a shipwreck but who is denied shelter. We considered
this book to be more challenging than the previous ones because it oers
little hope in humanity: a group of villagers, moved by their fear of an
outsider, eventually force him back into the sea. Thus, the story ends with
these people eectively causing the newcomer’s death, with no suggestion
of punishment or redemption.
We organised the readings from what we considered to be least to most
challenging. Our last session was devoted to La madre y la muerte [The
Mother and Death] written by Alberto Laiseca and illustrated by Nicolás
Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 29
Arispe (2016) a seemingly macabre book in which Death snatches a child
from his mother; as the mother desperately pursues them. This story is
part of a double picturebook which also includes La partida [Taken] by
Alberto Chimal. The book has two covers, and each story ends in the
middle where a double- page spread featuring a common final illustration
in the form of a mirrored image connects the two works and is a prompt
to flip the book over and start the other story. Both tales have black-
and- white illustrations by Nicolás Arispe, reminiscent of the macabre fig-
ures of the Mexican print- maker Guadalupe Posada. We only read one of
these stories, La madre y la muerte, a tale that reinvents Hans Christian
Andersen’s “Story of a Mother” (1848/ 2020). As in the original fairy tale,
there is a mother who refuses to come to terms with the death of her
child. The mother in the story by Laiseca and Arispe is portrayed as a
fox. After waking to discover that Death has taken her son, she sets out
to follow him and bring the child back (Figure 2.1). Along the way she is
obliged to give up her eyes to cross the river, her legs to traverse the forest
and one arm to pass the mountain. When she finally reaches Death’s lair,
Death is impressed and tells her that it is the first time he has seen anyone
achieve this feat, and agrees to return her son. After this promise, overleaf
Figure 2.1 Death comes to take away the child. La madre y la muerte by Alberto
Laiseca and Nicolás Arispe.
Source: Reprinted with permission of Fondo Cultura Económica.
30 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
is a double- page illustration depicting Death— a skull wearing a military
fatigues— watering a wild garden. As we turn the page once again, the
words “but he was dead” starkly indicate that there is no possible happy
ending to this story. She cannot have her child returned alive. We see an
empty cradle and a burning stove (Figure 2.2). The story ends there, but as
the book has two covers and two stories it may take some time to realise
that what comes next is not a more hopeful ending but rather another very
sad story about Death, and another mother and child.
We hired a reading mediator to read the books to the children and guide
conversations about them. The figure of the “reading mediator” is quite
popular in Latin America and can be described as someone who selects
and reads books to children as part of broader ethics of care (see Véliz
et al., 2022). We invited the mediator to be a participant in our research,
as the meetings in advance of the reading sessions and our conversations
would form part of the data to be analysed. The reading mediator was to
read aloud to the entire class and then lead a discussion with half of the
class. The other half would carry out a dierent activity in relation to the
book in a separate room, moderated by another team member. The reading
mediator stated that she would have preferred to have been involved in the
selection of the texts. She did not like our selection. She did not like Ícaro,
Figure 2.2 “But he was dead”, the final double- spread of La madre y la muerte.
Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 31
nor The Island and she was very much against reading La madre y la
muerte. During one of the preparatory meetings for the project, she made
her apprehensions clear:
This is an unkind view of death. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to the
children about death; rather, it is at what age do I talk to them about
death? … With books that I know that it’s normal for kids to get sad,
I read them. But with this one, which is so cruel, it is not necessary to talk
about death. I consider it irresponsible. In no way do I see it for the 2nd
grade class. Those in 5th grade might enjoy the images, maybe a younger
child would too. It is sullying the subject … addressing it ahead of time.
She asked us whether we could read a dierent book to the younger chil-
dren, aged 7 and 8. She told us, as other reading mediators had done pre-
viously, that she would prefer talking about death with a text that referred
to the cycle of life, conveying a hopeful message. We clarified that it was in
no way our intention to have her doing something she considered inappro-
priate and we looked for another story. We suggested The Memory Tree
by Britta Teckentrup (2014) a kind story about a fox that “falls asleep for-
ever” after living a long life. Fox’s friends soon start arriving to share their
joyful memories about him and a tree begins to grow. The tree becomes
bigger and stronger with each memory, protecting the animals in the forest
just as Fox did when he was alive. The Memory Tree tells a much more
comfortable story of death, if only because the fox passes away “after a
long and happy life” and can die in his favourite place in the forest.
I have set out these prior discussions because they allow us to outline
some ideas about when reading is beneficial for socioemotional education
and what is appropriate or otherwise for children at any given age. One
of our research questions was, precisely, what is the basis on which we
decide that a particular text is appropriate for a particular age: why would
La madre y la muerte be (more) inappropriate for children aged seven
and eight? Why do we imagine that older children can deal with dicult
topics more easily? What are the significant dierences between these two
groups? How can we learn what they are? We aimed to explore these
questions while recording the depths of our own feelings and uncertainties
about them. The topic of age, and age appropriateness, has been much
discussed in children’s and young adult literature studies.
We have aimed in this study to engender a discussion of what is appro-
priate to children and what gives them pleasure. Our approach has been
framed by discussions about adultism and aetonormativity in children’s lit-
erature studies (see Nikolajeva, 2009; Beauvais, 2013; Deszcz- Tryhubczak,
2016) as well as by critical accounts in the sphere of childhood studies of
32 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
the weight of developmental psychology in our understandings of children’s
lives (see Spyrou, Rosen and Cook, 2018; Rosen, 2019). We have also
taken inspiration from Kathryn Bond Stockton’s critique of the cultural
emphasis on ideas of growth and maturation. Bond Stockton notes that
to “grow up” is an imperative that represses other forms of development,
which she refers to as “growing sideways”. She notes how this emphasis
on growth and maturation as something “upwards” condemns as deviant
any form of development that does not follow a predefined track and is
outside of adult conceptualisations about how children should behave.
Bond Stockton uses queer theory to explore adult fears about children
and childhood. From the field of developmental psychology, Erica Burman
(2016) has made a forceful criticism of ideas of development and growth,
registering dierent epistemological and methodological problems within
her own discipline. Burman outlines how psychology emphasises the
mother- child dyad, obscuring the importance of other relationships and
social materialities. In recent years, interdisciplinary research in childhood
studies has critiqued developmental psychology and sketched out new con-
ceptual and methodological frameworks to overcome adultist perspectives
on children’s lives.
These bodies of work inspired us to tackle ways of rethinking and dis-
mantling the adult/ child binary in research. We were aware of the critical
take of childhood scholars on participatory methodologies that claim to
give “voice” to children and on how much qualitative research involving
children is based on claims of having access to the authentic perspectives
of children (Spyrou, 2011). Our readings in post- qualitative research
had warned us of the risk of approaches that proclaim the inclusion and
representation of subjects who come from excluded groups (Mazzei and
Jackson, 2008). We hoped, instead, that the agentic force of the books
could give us new insight into possible relationships between children and
books, the ways of understanding children’s intra- actions with a reading-
promotion programme, as well as notions about what it is appropriate to
read to children at dierent ages.
The reading mediator, the school librarian, and the school teachers had
certain ideas about how the books we read to the children could help
their socioemotional development. They mentioned, for example, how
Eloísa y los bichos could resonate with students who had moved countries
or recently arrived from another school. They also commented that The
Journey might be a resource they could use to broach the subject of war
and migration— a heated topic of discussion at the time we conducted this
study. The group of adults was not convinced by the titles selected for the
forthcoming sessions; Ícaro, The Island and La madre y la muerte seemed
particularly to cause some concern. “These sad texts that you bring,”
the librarian remarked to me the morning before we read La madre y la
Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 33
muerte, a book that was the most controversial of our choices but equally,
in my opinion, the most vibrant. She said this before we read the book to
the group of 10- to 11- year- olds. We always started with the older group
of children.
The day we read La madre y la muerte, the reading mediator arrived
dressed in black, carrying a framed photo of a friend of hers who had died
three years previously. She told the children how much she missed her
friend and described the care her mother had given to this friend before
she passed away. In my field notes I record this entrance, highlighting
how much it bothered me. We had set ourselves the task of recording our
feelings and anything that would be dicult for us to say in other spaces.
Reading this comment subsequently, I connected with other moments in
which I have felt discomfort at how certain readings are framed by adults
and how a particular environment is prepared in a way that appears to me
to limit a book’s aesthetical potential. The mediator’s introduction on this
day struck me as a form of reducing the story to one of maternal love for a
dying child, which was quite a problematic reading of this story.
The day we read La madre y la muerte we had several adult females
in the room. There were two librarians and a schoolteacher, plus the two
reading mediators who were part of our team. Soledad and I, the two
researchers, were also present. As the reading mediator read aloud this
macabre story, I had the feeling that we were doing something inappro-
priate. The mediator had warned us about the importance of treating
death as a part of the cycle of life and in La madre y la muerte Death is
not only whimsical but also terribly cruel. The images did not help; they
depict Death as a skeleton wearing an old military uniform. Moreover, not
only is Death a terrible figure, but all of nature appears to rally to his side.
While the story was being read aloud, one of the teachers commented on
how sad it all seemed to her. As soon as the reading was finished, one of
the librarians came over to tell me that this story had left the children in
tears. The children were silent, surprised, and I had a feeling that a certain
transgression had taken place.
After the reading, we divided the children, as we always did, to make
two groups of about 15 children each. One group stayed with the medi-
ator who had done the reading aloud and who engaged them in a verbal
conversation. The other group moved to an adjacent room where a second
reading mediator would guide an activity; the aim was for the children to
work individually and render their “responses” in less discursive ways. We
often asked them to draw something. In this case, the mediator asked them
to draw whom they would bring back from the dead and what they would
give in exchange. It is perhaps worth mentioning that among the group
doing the drawing task, there was a lot of conversation about wounded
or mutilated bodies (and children showing the dierent wounds and scars
34 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
on their bodies), while in the discussion group, initial talk was about fear
of one’s own death, and sorrow for those who pass away. In both groups,
however, we could note a certain fascination with the story they had just
heard. They asked to hold the book in their hands and children would
even stroke the cover, which had a textured image. What was happening
there? We could identify traditional emotional repertoires, but also others
that would be more dicult to describe. “It made me like … like …
frightened, but at the same time excited. Excitement because the mother
fought against everything, against everything nature threw at her, to save
her son, and sadness because … ahhhh, or more like, and fear, or more
like something here,” said one girl, letting her silences also speak for her.
When the session was over, the 10- and 11-year-olds got up and formed
a semi- orderly queue to leave the room. We only had a couple of minutes
to get the room ready for the next group of the younger children. In those
few minutes, while moving chairs and returning the bean bags to the col-
oured carpet, I thought I should ask the mediator if she felt she should
not be reading this book to the younger students. She was arranging
some chairs and looked up, responding yes without hesitation. We put
away The Memory Tree books we had brought and discussed the matter
no further. Later, she would tell us that the first reading and subsequent
conversations had surprised her a great deal, that she had realised that
the children liked to talk about death and did so “naturally”. “Before,
I thought that with this book I was going to give them a vision of death, a
tragic vision, but no, in the end it didn’t happen that way; for them it was
just bringing them the topic of death. No- one questioned that in real life
it was death that came looking for us, nor did anyone focus on how death
was visually represented, or on whether it was good or bad, as I would
have imagined,” she wrote in her field log. She also noted that she had no
hesitation in reading it to the younger children, because not to do so would
be to deprive them of “a quality work”.
The session with the younger ones thus took place in a more relaxed
atmosphere. It was as if the previous session had been cathartic or, rather,
had validated our approach. The children ran in to occupy the comfortable
beanbags and were eager to listen to the story. During the reading, some
expressed surprise and one commented that it was like his “mommy”,
who had died. When the mediator finished, the children broke into spon-
taneous applause and asked her to read it again. The subsequent conver-
sation was mainly about the mother’s sacrifice: they said that they would
like to have a mother who was prepared to make such sacrifices. A girl also
commented that she did not want to be like that as a mother. The medi-
ator asked them about the emotions that the book had provoked. One girl
said the book had brought her “happiness”. I transcribe the conversation
from there:
Stories About Death and Adult Anxieties 35
Mediator: What made you happy?
Girl: Because it was a rather sad story, so the other day I went to
see my grandmother And (the story) reminded me a lot …
because she died of an illness.
Mediator: Where did you go to see her?
Girl: To the cemetery. When I was little she mashed my banana
with orange, she gave me food in my mouth every day.
Mediator: And what gave you happiness …?
Girl: When they handed over the baby to her. I was curious when
they handed the body over to the person.
Mediator: And that made you happy and did you remember? Because
you remembered your grandmother?
Girl: Because it turns out that she died from a super serious illness
… she had a lot of hypothermia and everything, and it made
me remember.
Mediator: And did that memory give you happiness … what was it
about the story that made you happy?
Girl: When she had to remove her arms and body.
Mediator: Why did it make you happy … ?
Girl: Because it turns out that when she died, the body was already
dead, that is, in the story is dead …
Teacher: Time is up now.
Girl: I feel very happy, I remembered when she was feeding me
everything into my mouth, I was sitting in the chair.
[Teacher addresses the mediator by her name]
Mediator: But what made you happy was remembering your grand-
mother …
The mediator is interrupted by the teacher, who warns her that time
is up. The bell has not yet rung, but they need to wrap up the session
and prepare to leave the library. The dialogue, on which it did not seem
possible to agree on a meaning, was curtailed. The mediator assures the
girl that the story has given her happiness because it reminded her of her
grandmother, but the girl’s happiness seems to relate to bodies that deteri-
orate but are still present (because they die but are not physically gone).
The fascination with mutilated bodies was to come up repeatedly in the
readings we did with this book in other educational spaces. The medi-
ator, however, noted in her log that her attention had been drawn by the
opinion of a girl who told her that it had brought her happiness. “She told
me that she had recently gone to visit her grandmother in the cemetery and
that the story made her remember her and how much she loved her, how
she gave her food and that memory made her happy.” An explanation for
this may be that the happy memory of the time shared with those who are
36 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
gone is the agreed emotional repertoire for talking about death. But when
listening again to the girl’s comment and her need to keep on explaining
herself, despite the teacher telling the class that they had run out of time,
makes me wonder whether the girl was talking more about the orange and
the banana, about the care put into mashing the two together, and her little
mouth, and how we could keep meeting with bodies that have died.
Whenever we have spoken about the shared reading of this book, it has
triggered a wide range of questions about how to talk to children about
death. One reading of this for me, is that maybe death only makes sense
when we relate it to other things. In La madre y la muerte, death is not
as central as the tireless search, the bodies that are snatched away and
deteriorate, the capacity to stand firm and never give up and the price that
may be paid for it, the bodies that disappear, and the bodies we cannot
talk about.
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
3 Necropolitics in the Picturebooks
by Armin Greder
Aylan Kurdi would be a teenager today, but he died at the age of two, trav-
elling to Greece in an open boat. You may remember the image: a boy in
a red T- shirt, blue shorts— a lifeless body on a beach in Turkey. The image
travelled around the world and was part of a marked turn in the attention
given to the global tragedy of refugees in the aftermath of the Syrian War
in 2015. It was only at this point that the media began to report at any
length on the drama of those dying in their quest to cross the European
border. It also marked the time when the media stopped using the word
immigrants to describe these people and started consistently using the term
refugees, in acknowledgement of their right to flee. It was only really after
the image of the boy in the red T- shirt lying on the beach that politicians
started discussing, in public, attitudes to the refugee crisis. Leaders said
they were horrified: Hollande, the President of France at the time, called it
“an appeal to help refugees” while Merkel, the then German Chancellor,
emphasised that this crisis concerned us all. Meanwhile Erdoğan, the
President of Turkey, accused European countries of indierence. The
image of the Syrian- Kurdish boy went viral and became a postmortem
icon of the violent tragedy of the unfairness of geopolitics. Although there
were those who questioned whether it was appropriate to publish such a
photograph— journalistic deontology puts the right to privacy in death
before the right to information— its viralisation was accompanied by
hopeful reflections on how this image would mobilise people to action. In
meme culture, the recumbent figure of Aylan Kurdi was appropriated and
re- versioned multiple times and in multiple directions, in some cases with
illustrations or montages making funerary tributes, as if to try and provide
redress for the pain of his death.
Cypriot scholar Michalinos Zemblyas appraised whether the viralisation
of the image contributed to the normalisation of “necropolitics” (2020,
pp. 1– 15). He used this term, coined by the Cameroonian philosopher
Achile Mbembe, to argue how the countries of the so- called third world
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 39
are in a systematic state of emergency in which a right to let die is exercised
(2019). Mbembe built the notion of necropolitics on Michel Foucault’s
concept of biopower, arguing that biopower alone is not sucient to
explain the ways in which power not only decides who is desirable or
normal, but who lives and who can die (2003).
Mbembe insists that necropolitics do not refer so much to the right to
kill, as to the right to expose some people to a life that will eventually be
taken from them or leave them in a situation of such precariousness that he
calls it “living dead” (2019). Mbembe works on examples of contemporary
slavery: apartheid in South Africa and the figure of the suicide bomber.
The concept became especially relevant to understanding pandemic pol-
icies and how dierent government strategies exposed dierent groups,
but for many it has been a term of reference for the European policy of
what often appears to be negligent patrolling of the Mediterranean where
according to UNHCR data (2023) the number of registered deaths grow
year on year. The frequent shipwrecks and the fact that so many die trying
to reach European shores is supposed to act as a deterrent to the others
planning to make the crossing. Necropolitics becomes possible when these
deaths are normalised, a normalisation that operates because a stranger is
a “body out of place,” as Sara Ahmed says (2000, p. 55), namely a body
that is foreign to “us”, to a community that is recognised and protected.
The media has shown many images of shipwrecked boats, rescues, and
more bodies on the shore, but Kurdi’s may well be the most iconic image
of a dead refugee, perhaps because children occupy a liminal space in the
visual imagination from which they can never fully be expelled. The trope
of the vulnerable child triggers our protective and receptive capacities and
serves as a violent reminder that not all children are promised brighter
futures.
I bring up Kurdi’s image here as springboard to considering what
necropolitics would look like if explained to children. In recent years, we
have witnessed a growing number of picturebooks that deal with death,
but very few of them would dare to speak about genocide or necropolitics.
A handful of heartbreaking picturebooks refer to the horrors of WW2—
Rose Blanche (Gallaz and Innocenti, 1983), Erika’s Story (Zee and
Innocenti, 2004), Smoke (Fortes and Concejo, 2008)— but no other
author has addressed necropolitics and xenophobia as directly as Armin
Greder, a Swiss- Australian author currently living in Peru. Greder is most
famous for The Island, published in 2002 as Die Insel, a book that refers
to fear of the other and how such xenophobic fears can come to control
a community.
The Island was published in English in the same year that the original
German version appeared. In the decades that have followed, it has been
recognised for opening up new spaces, revealing the need for stories that
40 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
are less complacent about host communities. It has been linked to the
Holocaust as well as European and Australian anti- immigration legislation
(Short, 2011). Towards the end of 2017, Armin Greder went further in his
denunciation of the necropolitical order by publishing The Mediterranean,
a picturebook without words in which he delves into the hypocrisy of the
intricate networks that in so many cases benefit from the precarious lives
of others. Both books challenge us to speak about global necropolitics.
In the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, The Island was often recommended
reading for initiating dialogue on the subject. The book appeared in the
UNHCR document “Stand with Refugees”, on a list curated by Amnesty
International UK, as well as in a similar list by the CuatroGatos Foundation
in Miami. Yet not all reviewers analysed the text on how it casts a spot-
light on xenophobia. The Germán Sánchez Ruiperez Foundation, based in
Madrid, gave it the following review:
A tale that tells an everyday story: the fear of the stranger, the fear of the
foreigner. The inhabitants of The Island, in an unjustified panic over the
man who has washed up on their shores, end up returning him to
the sea, then build a fortress so that no one else can find them. The
author of The Island thus places emphasis on a precious asset of our
time, which has not been used as it should be: tolerance. The similarities
of this story to reality are no mere coincidence.
(2015)
This review, published on the Canal Lector website, seems not to
extrapolate this story of one man to a tale that reveals how so many people
die while attempting to flee. The Island does not place an emphasis on
tolerance but rather does the opposite: it attacks and excludes, it sets in
motion the devastating force of believing that to be safe we have to restrict
free movement, and, moreover, indicates how a sense of community and
belonging produces the exclusion of others.
The Island tells the story of a man who washes up naked on an island.
The villagers take him in, but lock him in an abandoned goat pen. When
the man subsequently shows up in the town in search of food, the people
are afraid of him and are not willing to help. No one wants to take care of
him, much less find him a job. A contagious fear takes over the inhabitants
until— in a tumult— they tie his hands behind his back and start to march
him towards the sea. Just one man, the fisherman, the only villager to ven-
ture beyond the bounds of the island, argues in his favour. But the villagers
shout down the fisherman’s suggestions, and expel the man, pushing him
back out to sea to, what we can we assume, is his death. After that, the
inhabitants of the island build a fortress to ensure that no one else ever
comes there again. They even kill all the birds so they will not attract
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 41
anyone to their shores. The last double page depicts a boat on fire out to
the sea. It is the boat of the fisherman, ensuring that he will never leave the
island again. The front and back cover oers us an image of the towering
walls of the fortress.
The political scientist Chantal Moue has worked extensively on how
the suppression of conflict is instrumental in the production of unjust
relations. Moue criticises the cultural politics of recognition in which
dierences are supposedly integrated to produce a new order, arguing
that in this order, dierences and inequalities are buried (2005). Moue
indicates that democracy should not be oriented towards the creation of
consensus, but rather the recognition of multiplicity in all its contradictions
and conflicts. This recognition requires political and institutional channels
through which the dialogue on dierences can be realised, but it also
requires cultural training to make this progress possible. Reflecting on the
books that are recommended for young readers gives us a good idea of
how the culture of consensus is articulated, as we find very few stories
which explore unresolvable conflicts. Greder provides us with a glimpse of
conflict in which, if something becomes fair for some, it is no longer being
fair for others. In The Island there is no possible cooperation, there is no
hope, and that is what makes the book especially urgent and compelling.
The story it tells has little to do with that double standard of discourses
on tolerance. The book itself resists being complicit in the reproduction of
power that entails promoting tolerance without recognising the structural
injustices that put some people in the privileged position of deciding who
to tolerate. What then is the recommended approach to a book like this?
Some years ago, I was able to read The Island with groups of
schoolteachers. This was within the framework of some training on anti-
racism, migration, and children’s literature that I delivered for the Chilean
Ministry of Education. “If you do not show them how to use this book,
they will never read it to a class”, the person responsible for the pro-
gramme at the Ministry advised me. The training was directed at groups
of teachers from dierent cities, who all worked in schools that had a
high ratio of foreign children. In these schools the number of newcomers
registered had doubled in only two years and teachers were often unpre-
pared for dealing with cultural diversity and increasing xenophobia in their
institution. The training was meant to provide them with new resources in
terms of children’s literature.
We read The Island aloud in three dierent workshops, each involving
more than 50 schoolteachers. I used an adapted version of Aidan Chambers
TELL- ME framework to foster conversations about the book and its multi-
modal complexity (1993). The participants tended to start by referring to
the suggestive and shocking nature of the book’s charcoal illustrations and
how they found it dicult to discern what age of reader it was intended
42 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
for. Chambers’ recommendations on triggering literary conversations
suited this book very well, containing as it does several interesting inter-
textual references. The illustration of a panicked woman when she sees
the naked man coming into the town triggers comments about the iconic
painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch (1893). The front cover with
the picture of the fortress brings evocations of divisive walls such as those
of Berlin or Trump’s America. The literary conversations about The Island
were rich, because they allowed us to make sense of multiple elements
in the text and understand how the book is set in motion in relation to
xenophobia and intolerance. The Island was greatly appreciated by the
group of Chilean schoolteachers. Years later I used this book in my work
with children’s literature students in Europe and by this time references to
the Mediterranean, shipwrecks, and the treatment received by those who
reach the shore were more common.
The Island, like La madre y la muerte, is one of those books that
have fascinated me because of what they do to us, because of how they
challenge us. Even if all these conversations about The Island seem to be
so rich in details and readings, I feel that something is lost in them. The
complexity of these picturebooks leaves us wondering if putting language
first, understanding reading as decoding a language, also teaches us to read
with a certain distance— removing ourselves at a cerebral level from the
aective nature of texts.
The Island was one of the books we used in the study I describe in
Chapter Two. We read challenging picturebooks (Evans, 2015) with
groups of children aged 7- to- 8 years- olds and to 10- to- 11- year- olds. On
one of the sessions on Greder’s book, the reading mediator brought a globe
that she showed to the class and told them that in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean there was an island like the one in the story. Her framing was pre-
sumably to set the story as far as possible from the children’s lives. Then
she started to read the book while we projected the pages on to a screen.
The projected images looked even more threatening; large men advanced
with hoes and pitchforks towards a smaller, naked man. When the story
ends and we find out that the inhabitants even killed birds to ensure that
no one else would come there, an 11- year- old boy shouted from the back
row, “finally a book that ends badly!”
In our sessions, we divided the class in two after the reading was finished.
One half stayed talking about the book with the reading mediator, while
the second half, similarly sized, went to an adjacent library room where
they sat down at dierent tables to write or draw. We were interested in
exploring how we might approach reading dierently if we do not have to
give our opinion about it, if we do not have to articulate what we experi-
ence in words. We had photocopied the double- page spread that shows
the man after he has arrived (Figure 3.1). He is depicted naked, from the
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 43
side, and has a range of tools pointing at him— a rake, a pitchfork, a hoe,
and a broom. The text, however, says “They took him in”. We distributed
the photocopies among the groups of children: “But they didn’t accept
him!” says one as soon as he receives the sheet; “They treated him terribly,”
adds another. The mediator in charge of working with this room
gives them instructions: they must write words directly on to the photocopy
to describe this man who has arrived on the island. They ask what
kind of pencil they should use and the mediator responds that they could
use any sort of pencil, and were very welcome to use colour. Figures 3.2
to 3.6 show some of the work done by the students. They used words to
render their descriptions. The words are placed on the pages in very telling
ways. The problem with the term “reading responses” is that it suggests
that they reflect a relationship with the text as if it existed in a vacuum,
but the encounter between a reader and a text is a moment of rich social
materiality, as is especially clear in the context of group readings. We were
interested in mapping and tracing how the reading of The Island provoked
a certain vibrancy in the school class.
While the students were working on the task, we tried to observe as
much as possible what else was happening in the room. Among these other
things, I noted how the task was interrupted to talk about who was a good
Figure 3.1 Double- spread from Armin Greder’s The Island.
Source: Reprinted with permission by Allen and Unwin (2007).
44 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
friend and who was not, who was a bully, who did bad things and whom
they did not want sitting at their table. They also wondered why the man
was naked and why he ate with his hands. They kept interrupting each
other and also shushing to try and get some silence in the room. Some of
them even wanted to make another child leave their table, which resonated
quite heavily with the story of expulsion we had just read. During the
twenty minutes which were allocated to the task, multiple repertoires
related to exclusion dynamics were activated. Even though at that time
a new immigration law was under discussion in the Chilean Congress— a
law that facilitated the entry of Venezuelan immigrants, but imposed a
series of new restrictions on those coming from Haiti, a racialised commu-
nity within Chilean social society— , no child made mention of the migrant
status of the man who arrives. They did, however, mention how he was
dierent from the islanders or, in some cases, how the residents had not
wanted to meet him and had treated him as someone with whom they
could have no anity. The dynamics of exclusion were broader than those
related to xenophobia and migration.
Figure 3.2 “Racists. They don’t welcome him. They treat him like an animal/
Lonely – because without work – he has no name, he tries everything.”
Child intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island.
Source: Allen and Unwin, 2007.
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 45
I worked on these encounters with The Island with Soledad Véliz
and Claudia Matus in the article Think dierence dierently? Knowing/
becoming/ doing with picturebooks (2020). In this article we noted how
the activity of writing words on an illustration segues into drawing them,
arranging them with the intensity of the visual. Some girls in one of the
readings traced the outline of the men with words. Some wrote “hugging”
or “holding” on the man who arrives. Other words were thrown at him: we
were struck by how some travelled diagonally towards the man— big-
eared, long- nosed, bald— while others, perhaps somewhat more neutral
in their description, remained horizontal. Other children transformed the
newcomer into a kind of punk. They gave him a skateboard, a mohawk,
some punk clothing. None seemed to relate the story with xenophobia,
much less with necropolitics, but rather with the multiple forms of exclu-
sion in daily life.
I repeated the same exercise carried out with the children with the
various groups of schoolteachers as part of the Migration and Antiracism
training. This allows for some comparisons, even if the groups and meth-
odological approaches were dierent. Adults found it dicult to follow the
Figure 3.3 “(He is) naked, bald, skin is hairless, has big ears, is without clothes, is
serious.” Child intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island.
Source: Allen and Unwin, 2007.
46 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
instruction to write over the illustration. At least a quarter of them turned
over the paper to write on the blank page on the reverse. They received the
same instruction— “use words to describe the person who arrives”— , but
they tended to use grammatically complete sentences describing the man
as an outsider, an immigrant. There were also, of course, those who noted
that the inhabitants had not even tried to get to know the man, that they
were prejudiced. The instruction itself was an exercise about discrimin-
ation. How can you describe this man without describing those who decide
to let him go to his death? What happens every time we describe him as
an outsider, as dierent? The teachers were able to relate the problem in a
way that naturalised the violence: a dierent man arrived at a place where
he was not welcome.
The Island presents us with the epistemological problem of envisaging
a community as a group of “us”, and how it produces a “them”. Greder
obliges us to consider how we produce the foreigner as a stranger, while
making no mention of how the newcomer feels. The narrative voice does,
Figure 3.4 Description of the town’s inhabitants: “they are cruel, they bully him,
they are afraid of him because they don’t know who he is, they are very
naive.” Words around the man: “Someone. Why does he have clothes?
How does he arrived there? Indierence”. Child intervention on Armin
Greder’s The Island.
Source: Allen and Unwin, 2007.
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 47
however, present the villagers as surprised and scared. The visual narrative
shows us another perspective and we can see that the man looks far from
threatening. He is thin and he is naked. He is alone. The counterpoints
and gaps created between the visual and the verbal have been celebrated
by picturebook scholars for how they train our theory of mind. When
reading the responses and engagements of the dierent groups of children
and teachers with Greder’s double- spread I was struck by the aordances
of emotional reactions. Education, as we explored in the first chapter,
operates by separating emotion from reason, or rather by subordinating
the first to the second. The dierent responses to the instruction to
Figure 3.5 “Cannibal, diabetes, racists”. The man is dressed as a punk. Child
intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island.
Source: Allen and Unwin, 2007.
48 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
describe the person that comes, show us how the aesthetic vibrancy of the
picturebook may unsettle this order.
In one of the workshops with teachers, I asked them if they could show
their engagement with the double- spread to the other participants. One
teacher approached me doubtfully, “The truth is that I didn’t know how
to do it,” she confessed. “You asked us to describe this man, but we know
nothing about him. I could only imagine how he felt.” She was one of the
very few who did not write a single sentence to describe the newcomer,
but instead distributed words with arrows over the illustration. It was pre-
cisely this engagement and the fact that she expressed shame about it that
brought my attention to the importance of oering alternatives to literary
Figure 3.6 Emotions are sensed: “he is embarrassed, he feels like trash.” Child
intervention on Armin Greder’s The Island.
Source: Allen and Unwin, 2007.
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 49
conversations and approaches related to the linguistic code. She left me
pondering on how conversations about this book can replay exclusions,
while other renderings can make space for emotional forms of care and
repair.
Armin Greder’s second book addressing necropolitics explores pre-
cisely the potential of wordless stories. The Mediterranean is a wordless,
or silent, picturebook. The relationship between silent books, migration,
and refugees was explored in the international research project Visual
Journeys: Understanding immigrant children’s responses to the visual
image in contemporary picturebooks coordinated by Evelyn Arizpe at the
University of Glasgow involving researchers and fieldwork in Spain and
the USA. They worked with ethnic minority children who had recently
arrived in these countries as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. The
research showed the potential of silent books to integrate such children
because these texts present stories that are more open to interpretation
(Arizpe et al., 2014).
The Mediterranean begins with a brief text that serves as an epigraph,
“After he had finished drowning, his body sank slowly to the bottom,
where the fish were waiting”. This is followed by pages that show this
body surrounded by fish that are later captured in huge nets and then
sold. Another double- spread shows people eating fish in an elegant res-
taurant. Later we see those people storing rifles in crates and loading
them on to a large ship. One of those same people— a thick, bald man—
then appears leading a group of armed people and a double- page later
there are soldiers attacking and burning down a small town. The residents
walk in procession with their few belongings until they get into a truck.
Later we see them in a group that appears to be negotiating something.
A penultimate double- spread shows a crowded boat. It is an illustration
that we recognise from the images in the media. In the final picture only
the hull of the boat is visible; it is sinking with everyone onboard— and
so the cycle begins again: the harsh history of national borders and global
injustice.
The book tells this entire story without words, but is followed by a
text written by Alessandro Leogrande, an Italian writer and journalist,
which gives an interpretive framework to the story. Leogrande uses the
term “food chain” to describe the cycle shown in the book and thus
demonstrates the causal relationships it denounces. “What is the relation-
ship between Europe and the dictatorships from which people are fleeing
en masse? What are our responsibilities and what mistakes have been
made in so many of the wars that have torn apart Africa and the Middle
East? And, above all: why do we never talk publicly about any of this?”
(unpaginated). In The Mediterranean, Greder pushes criticism to a point
50 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
where it becomes impossible to talk about a fiction far removed from social
events. He produces a story in which we, as readers, occupy the place
of the accomplices who were evoked in The Island. There is much that
resonates with the previous title: the colours, the charcoal illustrations,
the large hardcover format, but what most links the books is found in
their reference to responsibility for the other. While The Island was a book
about xenophobia and how we are responsible for the lives of others, The
Mediterranean argues that Europeans must take responsibility for wars,
conflicts, and terror in Africa and the Middle East. Among the very few
linguistic references provided to anchor the visual aspects of the book,
Greder chooses the eloquent title The Mediterranean to highlight that it is
a criticism of Europe, firmly locating the drama in a sea that was once the
cradle of cultural and commercial exchanges, but today represents a des-
perate and potentially fatal means of escape for families such as Kurdi’s.
Greder tells a story that includes arms tracking and the geopolitical
relations by which the wars of others might be instigated, but by doing
so with images, opens up the story to other possible interpretations. His
authorial strategy is astute: Leogrande’s final words provide a reading
guide, but at the same time they preserve that distance that is implied by
text written by someone other than the author. The target of Leogrande’s
text is potential reading mediators, parents, teachers, or librarians who
are in a position to decide how much context should be given to the child
readers of the main body of the book. It trusts that the books will first pass
through the hands of an adult who can determine how much of the gaps
need to be filled and the extent of context that could be provided.
A few years after The Mediterranean, Greder published The Inheritance,
which in some ways acts as a final book in the trilogy. It is likewise a
large- format picturebook and the cover introduces us to three middle-
aged brothers in suits and ties with cigars and drinks to hand. On the first
double- page spread we learn that their father, an old industrialist, is dying.
With his last breath he turns to them and says, “All this will soon be yours,
respect what I have built and make it prosper”. With very little text and
a number of wordless double- spreads, we see the brothers working on
plans for development and expansion to implement their father’s wish,
“They talk about investment and profit margins and dividends, about o-
shore operations and Swiss Banks and the Virgin Islands” (unpaginated).
But then their sister who “had been travelling and had seen the world”
lists the disastrous consequences that would follow: disease, marine
pollution, deforestation, the destruction of the landscape, pollution of
skies and rivers (unpaginated). The images that follow show the future the
sister has prophesised coming to pass, and the book ends with the image
of a little boy wearing a gas mask for protection while he plays with a
remote- controlled car in a place where everything has been devastated.
Necropolitics in Picturebooks by Armin Greder 51
The Inheritance underlines the greed of those who hold economic power
and holds them responsible for the destruction of ecosystems. Yet it goes
a step further than the two previous books by predicting that privileged
children, the children of the powerful, will also suer the consequences of
planetary destruction.
The term necropolitics describes ways in which power produces precar-
ious lives. In The Island and The Mediterranean, Greder makes the sea a
powerful symbol of an inequality that kills as a result of the naturalised
necropolitics permeating dierent ways of knowing and doing in Europe
and other richer countries. In the later book The Inheritance, it is the
wealth of richer countries which is depicted at the heart of necropolitics. We
seldom see such a distressing critique in children’s books, but this is one to
which Armin Greder has been building over the years. His books challenge
the idea that books for young children should provide some sort of hope;
his aesthetic and political proposal, instead, is to depict how humans fail
to feel with others. In these three picturebooks, we may follow how his
attention to the borders of empathy, which starts with a rather small tale,
shifts to a more general critique about global inequalities and ends with a
call to recognise the Anthropocene. In these three picturebooks, he zooms
out from a community to a planetary scale, but also speaks of the tiny little
forces that are set into motion when we, humans, fail to listen and attend
to others.
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
4 Testimonies of Border Crossing
Children’s literature about migration is rarely shown as it is in Armin
Greder’s books. Most often, it is organised in narratives of hospitality, of
how welcoming we can be, of hope in Western societies. In my monograph
Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children About Immigration and
International Adoption, I analyse how Spanish books featuring characters
undergoing migration present narratives that are modelled by a home- away-
home masterplot (Nodelman and Reimar, 2003), in which the adventures
of the protagonists are resolved when they return to a secure place. The
final “home” is reached when the immigrant is granted a place in the com-
munity; while newcomers struggle to learn the local language and ways of
doing, they are granted a place in the community if they adapt to the new
place. Similarly, examining books published in the USA, Sung and DeMar
conclude that the USA is a “welcoming” country if immigrants work hard
to “fit in” (2020, p. 24). The stories about migration are permeated with
this idea of hospitality. Vassiliki Vassiloudi’s research on refugee narratives
confirms that in them the West is also presented as welcoming, yet she
points out to how the most widely recommended stories on forced dis-
placement present tales far removed from real struggles, obscuring how
global inequalities work (2019). Vassiloudi opens questions about whether
this reproduction of welcoming societies does not work as yet another
form of injustice to the reality of forced displacement.
In this chapter, I delve into real migration experiences by examining
testimonial narratives. I move away from the Mediterranean, to focus on
the border between Mexico and the USA, the one that Gloria Anzaldúa
famously described as an “herida abierta”, an open wound (1987). The
three books I analyse in this chapter have been published after the humani-
tarian crisis following the hardening of US immigration policies under the
first Trump’s government. In 2018, the government implemented the “zero
tolerance” policy, which led to the family separations at the border and
a year after they launched the “Remain in Mexico” programme further
54 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
stranding asylum seekers in dangerous border towns. In those years, the
publishing field was also mobilised by calls for diversity after the campaign
#WeNeedDiverseBooks for a wider demographic in authors of children’s
books. This campaign run close to a similar one, #OwnVoices, that sig-
nalled those books in which the characters shared a position of margin-
alisation with the authors. The premise for these two is that authors with
diverse and dicult life experiences should be invited to write about those
experiences in fiction and non- fiction for children.
The texts I examine in this chapter engage with testimonial narratives of
migrants, but in dierent formats and genres. I have selected a picturebook
by a Mexican illustrator, a book created with testimonies of detained chil-
dren and a yet a non- fiction narrative aimed at adults. They all have all
been published— simultaneously or almost simultaneously— in English and
Spanish: Dreamers, a picturebook by the Mexican author and illustrator
Yuyi Morales, was published in both languages by the American publisher
Neal Porter Books. Hear My Voice/ Escucha mi voz. The Testimonies of
Children Detained at the Southern Border of the United States, compiled
by the human rights activist Warren Binford and illustrated by Latinx
artists, was published by Project Amplify in a bilingual edition. The third
book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli
was initially published in Spanish as Los niños perdidos (Un ensayo en
cuarenta preguntas) in 2016 and swiftly translated into English the same
year. All three have received critical appraisal: Luiselli’s essay received the
American Book Award in 2018 and was a finalist in the National Book
Critic Circle Award (NBCC) the same year. Dreamers received many
recognitions and prizes, and Morales won the coveted Pura Belpré award,
given by the American Library Association (ALA), the year after its publi-
cation. While Hear My Voice is a project of a smaller publisher, Workman
Publishing Company (bought some months later by the Hachette Group),
Binford won the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award 2022 for non- fiction books.
The three publications deal with real migration experiences with a focus
on children and childhoods. The three also play with the limits of tes-
timonial texts. Dreamers/ Soñadores is the first book Morales authored
after a successful career as an illustrator. In the wake of the migrant crisis
of 2016, her editor asked her to write “her story”, and this book was
her response. She keeps the verbal text simple and evocative and lets the
illustrations expand the words; an author’s note at the end presents it as
an autobiography. Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, on the contrary, is not
presented as testimonial text but as an essay. The book is structured in
line with a questionnaire to which undocumented migrant children have
to respond when applying for asylum. Luiselli reflects on how tellable the
stories about migration are while sharing autobiographical vignettes of her
position as an interpreter for these children in New York, work she did as
Testimonies of Border Crossing 55
a volunteer as she waited for her green card to be approved. Finally, Hear
My Voice/ Escucha Mi Voz compiles testimonies by immigrant children
detained after arriving in the USA. The artwork of 17 dierent illustrators
accompanies short phrases that recount their experiences and feelings. The
book is presented as a tool to “better understand human migration and
children’s rights” (unpaginated).
In this chapter, I read each of these books in relation to their format and
genre, tracing the continuities and discontinuities between them to inquire
into the aordances of dierent formats and narrative traditions to tell
stories about the memory of migration.
I start with Dreamers if only because the enthusiastic reception of this
book by critics and scholars in the field of children’s literature caught
my attention and prompted the selection of the other two books (cf.
Collado, 2024; Stevenson, 2018; Day and Ward, 2019; Terrones, 2021;
Zelachowska and Marrón- González, 2023). The fact that the author and
narrator coincide makes it an autobiographical text if we follow the defin-
ition and limits established by Phillipe Lejeune (1989) in his seminal work
The Autobiographical Pact. Lejeune refers to the implicit contract between
the author and the reader, where the author promises that the narrative
presented is a truthful account of their own life. This pact is grounded in
the expectation that the author, narrator, and protagonist are the same
person. Lejeune’s theory also emphasises that the autobiographical pact
is not just about factual accuracy but involves a deeper commitment to
presenting the self as honestly as possible, even when the truth is complex.
This pact creates a bond of trust between the author and the reader, where
the reader approaches the text with the understanding that the author is
sincere.
In Dreamers, Morales describes the event of her own migration as the
defining event of her life. The picturebook narrates her migration with a
baby, the diculties adapting in the new place and how she discovered, in
the USA, children’s books and a professional calling: to become an author
and illustrator. Morales recounts the events from a position in the present
in which the troubles of the past have been left behind. This first- person
narrator cannot be translated fully to a visual rendering, but we can iden-
tify some eorts of reproducing her gaze in the text. Visual focalisation
has been a matter of discussion in multimodal semiotics for decades, with
arguments for and against the idea that images may represent a human’s
point of view (see Kress and Van Leuween, 2006; Horstkotte and Pedri,
2011; Halle, 2021). The concept of visual focalisation refers to the strat -
egies and techniques used to guide and focus the viewer’s gaze within a
visual composition presenting a perspective, which goes beyond the trad-
itional notion of visual perspective, aimed at influencing interpretation. In
their Grammar of Visual Design, a key text for visual semiotics, Kress and
56 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
van Leeuwen identify five main dimensions to direct the viewer’s gaze: the
salience of some aspects through size, colour, contrast, or placement; the
way in which these are framed isolating or grouping elements together;
the lines, vectors, or directional cues that can lead the viewer’s gaze; the
overall arrangement of elements within the visual field or composition;
and what they call the “modality”, the degree of realism or abstrac-
tion in visual representation (2006). Highly realistic images narrate as
if real events have occurred, while abstract or stylised visuals speak of
more subjective and emotionally laden memories of the events. Morales’
illustrations do not use images of high modality but deploy various strat-
egies related to the other four dimensions recognised by Kress and van
Leeuwen. Her arrangement of elements and the saliency of some empha-
sise that the narration is deeply intimate, a narration of feelings. Morales
uses vibrant colours and layered textures, altering perspective in what may
be a strategy to convey her point of view. The visual focalisation of the
story is achieved by depicting her from the back as if presenting the reader
with her own view of the situations. The illustrations blend personal mem-
ories with Latin American heritage elements weaving the autobiographical
aspects into a visual narrative of the broader collective. Such collectiveness
may be related to a position of otherness linked with the troubled post-
colonial identity and its hybridity. We find words in Spanish— most
of them handwritten and used as part of the illustrations— , as well as
Mexican and Latin American symbols related to migration, such as the
Monarch butterflies, which migrate from Mexico to North America every
year. In their comprehensive analysis of the multimodal metaphors in this
book, Żelachowska and Marrón- González note that the butterflies present
on all pages provide a contrast to the negative metaphorical depiction of
immigrants as insects in other media (2024). To them, Dreamers is to be
read as a “dignifying self- representation of migrants” that sits in oppos-
ition to the frequent representations of migrants as invaders, animals, or
natural disasters (p. 93).
The title, Dreamers, refers to the term used for the young, undocu-
mented migrants in the USA who are mobilising for their rights. The term
comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors
(DREAM) Act, a legislative proposal that sought to provide them with a
pathway to legal status. Although the act did not pass, the term became
widely associated with these individuals. The book, nevertheless, does not
delve into the diculties of the journeys for undocumented immigrants.
An author’s note included at the end explains that she crossed from Ciudad
Juarez to El Paso so that her son could meet his great- grandfather and so
she could marry the child’s father, a US citizen. She later adds that after-
wards, she “was shocked to learn that because of US immigration rules
and her status as a ‘permanent resident’ she was expected to remain in
Testimonies of Border Crossing 57
the United States” (unpaginated). An adult reader may bring contextual
knowledge to this phrase to understand that this woman applied for a
permanent residency and was, indeed, intending to stay there but had to
refrain from travelling back to her origin country for a period of time
while the status of resident was granted. A child reader may understand
that she was kept there against her own will. The journey to meet a great-
grandfather who was very ill may explain the trip, but certainly does not
fit into the much more painful narrative of crossing the very dangerous
border between Mexico and the USA. In the same author’s note, which
appears under the title My Story, Morales clarifies that her son was not
“a dreamer in the way the word is used today, to refer to young undocu-
mented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and
who have lived and gone to school here and know no other country than
this one as their own”. She and her son were not undocumented.
Morales’ autobiography intertwines her journey as a mother— where
the child’s father is conspicuously absent— with the narrative of her devel-
opment as an artist: these two journeys are as if embodiments of the larger
masterplot of migration as a journey to belonging. These two facets of her
life come together when they visit a public library for the first time. The
moment they enter the library, visually focalised on the narrator, with the
illustration depicting her from behind as she pushes the child’s stroller, is
rendered with a sense of grandeur.
The entrance into the library is preceded by a narrative that presents
the mother and child struggling to adapt to the new place, which appears
hostile to them. After they have crossed the border, we see the mother
trying to decipher the San Francisco metro map: “There were so many
things we didn’t know. Unable to understand and afraid to speak.” We
later see the mother holding the son’s hand while he splashes about in a
public fountain. A policeman appears to be reprimanding them. The visual
composition, where we see the policeman’s back, invites the reader to take
the view of this man, as if the perspective of the host society. The text
anchors the meaning in the struggle to adapt: “We made lots of mistakes.”
We later see the mother walking the stroller down a street, with a subtle
reference to a group protesting tucked into one corner. The image of the
protesters is tiny, but we can read their signs “Power to the people”, “sí se
puede”, “hear our voices”. The text creates a time ellipsis by mentioning
the passage of time: “thousands and thousands of steps we took around
this land until the day we found …” Morales has a knack for breaking
sentences in the middle, encouraging the reader to quickly turn the page.
The “until the day we found” is followed by the climactic moment of
entering the public library, with bookshelves on either side and a woman
at a reception desk with a computer. This space, which is easily recognis-
able as a public library, is new to our narrator: “a place we had never seen
58 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
before. Suspicious. Improbable.” The public library is depicted with awe
and the verbal text brings a new rhythm with its very short sentences. The
first double- spread portraying the library includes small reproductions of
recognisable picturebooks, such as A Mother for Choco, Lon Po, Home
to Medicine Mountain, and The Mud Flat Olympics, among others. In
the following pages, we see more of these while the narrator continues to
express the wonder of visiting a public library: “Unbelievable. Surprising”.
The moment peaks in one of the subsequent double- spreads when the
mother- artist- narrator hands over the baby, who appears to fly through
space, to the librarian. The librarian, in turn, reaches for a library card.
The text conveys a similar intensity, “Where we didn’t need to speak, we
only needed to trust. And we did!”. The word “trust” is highlighted with
a looser typography and bold letters.
The complexity of the “I” in memoirs and autobiographies has often
been related to how memory is inherently selective and subjective,
influenced by the author’s present circumstances and psychological state.
In the last two decades, autobiographies have been reimagined following
the rise of autofiction, a dominant trend in the publishing of contemporary
narrative prose. The term “autofiction” was introduced by French writer
and scholar Serge Doubrovsky (1980/ 2012) as a reaction to Philippe
Lejeune’s theory of the autobiographical pact. In his conceptualisation,
autofiction enables the author, both the narrator and the main character, to
recount their life in novelised form. The term emerged in the literary scene
but has been expanded to define similar narrative positionings in visual
arts, cinema, and theatre (Casas, 2018). Autofiction is based on the notion
that while the author and narrator are the same person, it is understood
that the use of fictional techniques means that any narration constitutes
a “reinvention” (Genon, 2007). Such an understanding is opposed to the
rather simple relationship of autobiography with its referentiality in which
the facts are claimed. Autofiction is a term that refers to the complex rela-
tionship with what is tellable, understanding that the writing multiplies
the possible narrations about the self (Gasparini, 2011, p. 15).
In Dreamers, Morales reinvents her immigration journey as a quest
for belonging and as a sort of Künstlerroman of how she became a
picturebook artist. The autofictional narrative, nevertheless, also draws on
a home- away- home narrative: Morales has found a home for her and her
child in the foreign country. The “I” of the narrator becomes a “we” that
belongs. Home is embodied by the public library and by the books that
are found there. “Books became our language. Books became our home.
Books became our lives. We learned to read”, is stated in the double-
spread that comes immediately after the one in which mother, baby, and
librarian appear to be bonded by a library card. When first reading this
book, I was struck by how, despite the dierent layers of Mexican and
Latin American symbols in the illustrations, the verbal text exuded this
Testimonies of Border Crossing 59
Eurocentric intensity in which reading (and books) had such a power in
producing belonging.
Books become a shared language between the mother and child at
the time that their Spanish mother tongue is being replaced by a new
language. Books appear as the means for feeling at home, a feeling the
mother was striving to achieve. The library functions as the welcoming
place. In opposition to the epiphanic moment of the library and the cele-
bration of books that follows, the moment of the breach of social con-
vention portrayed previously, when mother and child are reprimanded
for getting into a fountain, appears as a trace of a cultural background
to be left behind. The USA appears to be a welcoming place where you
learn a language and form of expression. At the same time, the origin
country is a place you leave behind as you unlearn some embarrassing
habits.
The host country of Hear My Voice/ Escucha mi voz is quite dierent. It
is not a welcoming place, but very much the opposite. This book is overtly
oriented to denounce the humanitarian crisis which Dreamers glosses over,
presenting a choral testimony of human rights violations and exclusions.
The illustrations, by 17 dierent illustrators of Latin American back-
ground, accentuate the horror (see Figure 4.1).
We learn in the book’s foreword, by Michael Garcia Bochenek of
Human Rights Watch, that the testimonies were collected at Clint, a deten-
tion centre established initially to hold adult detainees for a few hours, but
which after the migration crisis was used to keep children for weeks at a
time. The foreword explains that the centre could not even oer proper
sanitary conditions for the detained children. The testimonies gathered
denounce it:
“We are kept in a cage. It is very crowded. There is no room to move
without stepping over others.”
“We sleep stacked on top of each other, shoulder to shoulder. The big
kids sleep on the mats, so we have to sleep on the cement bench. It’s
cold at night, noisy, and the lights are on all the time.”
“Everyone can see me when I am using the toilets. At times I feel so
embarrassed because there are boys watching me. My sister and I hold
a blanket up for one another so no one can see us when we go to the
bathroom.”
“So many are sick. I got sick because it was cold. I had a fever, a head-
ache, a sore throat, and aches all around my body.”
My baby began vomiting and having diarrhoea. I asked to see a doctor
and they did not take us. I asked again the next day and the guard said
“she doesn’t have the face of a sick baby.”
Testimonies of Border Crossing 61
Hear My Voice/ Escucha mi voz portrays the harsh and cruel conditions
faced by undocumented minors travelling alone. The enunciative marker
of the “my” in the title is not to be related to the compiler but to these
children whose voices have not been heard. All double- spreads combine
dierent phrases that are organised in progression from the journey to
daily life in the centre and their hopes for the future. We learn about the
danger in their countries of origin, about the diculties of crossing the
border, about the family separations and about the fears in the detention
centre.
The testimonies are not to be taken as examples of autofiction, but rather
as authentic reports of a reality that is there to be attended, not for literary
purposes. In order to craft this, many authorships are entangled in this
book. The foreword is written by a human rights activist who participated
in the collection of testimonies, and Binford, the compiler, contributes
with a closing text. Two other activists are mentioned as having the ori-
ginal idea for the book. We may also consider the entangled authorship
of the 17 illustrators and, moreover, of the children that contributed with
their testimonies. How are these dierent authorial positions entangled?
Binford, who gets credited as author, says the book is “by” the children.
In her acceptance speech for the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, she ends by
thanking “everyone that contributed to the creation of Hear My Voice/
Escucha mi voz, especially the children who had the courage to share their
testimonies with us. This is your book; it is by you and it is about you”.
Her use of these pronouns evidences the complicated nature of us/ them
that gets entangled. In the foreword, Garcia Bochenek also sketches out
this figure of “by” and “about” as deeply connected:
Some hoped if they spoke out, other children wouldn’t have to suer
what they did. Some wanted children living in the United States to
know their story.
This book, a story for children by children, wasn’t easy to tell and isn’t
easy to hear. But it’s not only a story of adults’ cruelty and neglect; at
the end of the day, it’s also a story of children’s strength, courage and
hope.
(unpaginated)
The compilers aimed at putting together a text that would tell the truth
about the dramatic eects of the emigration of unaccompanied minors,
and detention centres. This is a book that was distributed to congress
representatives. By including real testimonies, the authors want to inform
as widely as possible about a reality we need to attend. In the postscript,
they do warn that this is a book that would require the mediation of a
62 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
“thoughtful adult”. The book is addressed to children, but adults are
expected to be there to answer questions and manage any distress the book
causes (Heggernes, 2023).
Garcia Bochenek and Binford present the testimonies as authentic. They
appear to be reluctant to acknowledge how they have been essential in
producing such voices: how they have oriented the interviews and have
later selected some fragments assembling them in the narrative order. They
appear to be unaware of how the picturebook, with its visual rendering
of the voices, also produces new testimonies. We find no further note on
whether the children got to see any draft of the publication or if they
would agree with how their testimonies are organised. Both Binford and
Garcia Bochenek stress that the book ends up giving a note of hope, quite
a predictable narrative arc. The note of hope here is linked to the children’s
hope to stay and be reunited with their families.
Tell Me How It Ends is also organised on the basis of the testimonies of
undocumented children. In this case, Luiselli, who interviews them, does
not present the text as being testimonial, but as an essay in which she is
very much aware of how she is part of an assemblage that produces the
authentic voice of the minor. The narrator that coincides with the author
in this text also tells us about her own life while working as an interpreter
for these children. The author- narrator is, therefore, also a protagonist of
this story even if the story is not about her, but about the children whose
stories are recounted. The text is framed by the literary conventions of
journalistic chronicles.
Luiselli’s essay began as a shorter version originally written in English
and published in Freeman in 2016. She expanded this version in Spanish
and published Los niños perdidos (Un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas) in
Mexico the same year. The English version of the book was published by
Coee House Press in 2017. For this edition, the author worked with Lizzie
Davis who translated the new sections in “consultation with the author” as
it states in the acknowledgements of the American edition (unpaginated).
Both book versions include an introduction by Jon Anderson. In this intro-
duction, some important aspects of the backdrop at the time of the pro-
duction of the book are highlighted: Trump’s anti- Mexican discourses (the
promise about the wall that was to be paid for by Mexico); his reference
to Mexicans as “criminals, drug dealers and rapists” (p. 3); how Luiselli
worked on this book while she was awaiting her own green card; and
that Luiselli had children that commented on the book. Indeed, Luiselli’s
daughter had provided the inspiration for the title when, after listening to
one of the sad stories, asked: “Mamá, dime, ¿cómo termina?” [“Mum, tell
me how it ends …”].
Luiselli’s text starts by establishing the borders of her testimonial voice:
Testimonies of Border Crossing 63
Why did you come to the United States? That’s the first question
on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The
questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York
City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My
task there is a simple one: I interview children in court, following the
intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to
English.
But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of
children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesi-
tance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them
into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s
stories are always shued, stuttered, always shattered beyond the
repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is
that it has no beginning, no middle and no end.
(p. 7)
This start gives us a hint of what the book is about: not only the harsh
reality of undocumented child migrants in the USA, who risk being
deported, but of the diculties of translating these stories, of making them
tellable. Such an initiative involves much more than what we generally
understand as translation. It is not only finding a way from Spanish into
English, but also from the stories children may tell to adults who will
listen, and from the stories Mexican and Latin Americans might share to
those US- Americans who would not only read, but feel empathy for (and
feel moved to repair).
Dreamers refers to the diculties of translating. Morales shows how
she struggled to understand the visual coding of the San Francisco metro
map and demonstrates how she learnt new words that opened new pos-
sibilities while she needed to keep some in Spanish because they would
not have the same strength in English (such as lucha [fight]). Dreamers
scatters words in Spanish here and there, but surprisingly the book was
initially published in English and later translated into Spanish by a pro-
fessional translator, Teresa Mlawer. The author- narrator- illustrator, who
stresses the diculty of learning a foreign language, has decided to use it
in her creative expression.
In Tell Me How It Ends, the relationship between Spanish and English
takes on a dierent, and perhaps more complex, relationship. Luiselli
wonders how to translate what children say. What would these testimonies
require in order to make people listen to them? How could questions be
asked and the answers to them recorded? How could they be translated
without losing what matters? Ultimately, Luiselli’s task is to produce
64 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
convincing stories for the judges who have the power to decide whether
these children should be granted permission to stay. The author is under
pressure from reality: the task is not just about writing.
The Spanish version of Tell Me How It Ends puts much more emphasis
on the diculties of narrating the story than its English version. For
example, when explaining the lack of narrative order in Spanish, she
explains how children tell stories that: “llegan como revueltas, llenas de
interferencias, casi tartamudeadas. Son historias de vidas tan devastadas y
rotas que a veces resulta imposible imponerles un orden narrativo” [“They
come in a jumble, full of interference, almost stuttered. They are stories of
lives so devastated and broken that it is sometimes impossible to impose a
narrative order on them”] (p. 16). In the English version the literal transla-
tion “almost stuttered” is replaced by “always shued, stuttered” (p. 7).
Significantly, the narrator who translates and tells these stories presents
them, in English, as having a “beginning, no middle and no end”, while
the Spanish appears to express less authority on this, reflecting how impos-
sible it is to impose any narrative order on them.
In the English version of this text, therefore, the author is much less
hesitant and appears to claim more knowledge on the object of narration,
while the Spanish narrator appears to be more respectful and takes much
more time in qualifying things and feelings that cannot be assumed. When
reading and comparing the two texts, it struck me how the hesitancies in
the Spanish version appeared to be a form of caring for the children: telling
their story with a certain distance is a way of showing respect for their
individual experiences. The Spanish rendering of the testimonies appears
to be more aware of how dicult it is to know about other lives and
suerings: the hesitancies may be read as a form of feeling with the chil-
dren and their testimonies.
The book is structured by superimposing the chronicle of the children’s
answers to the 40 questions of the intake questionnaire on a more auto-
biographical and intimate text in which Luiselli tells us about her own
migration status and about a trip she makes with her stepson, husband,
and daughter to the southern states. In this trip, she is trying to find out
more about the US- territory and the humanitarian crisis in order to write
a novel. While they are in Arizona they are stopped by the police who
wonder what they, a family of Mexicans, are doing there. They say that
they are writers and they lie saying that they are writing a Western.
So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.
We know better than to contradict anyone who carries a badge and a
gun, so we just say:
Yes, sir.
Testimonies of Border Crossing 65
Because— how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you
to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do
you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that
is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so
we are also broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also
broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless
and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.
(p. 24)
Luiselli’s book is not meant to be read by children, but has children’s
voices at its heart and, perhaps more importantly, delves into the question
of how children are subjected to epistemic injustice. When and how
children are recognised as producing knowledge appears with dierent
inflections throughout the text. The author’s daughter’s commentaries and
questions about her mother’s work are picked up and presented as a way
of producing renewed awareness on the vulnerable position of children
and the cruelty of the immigration law.
A menudo mi hija se refiere a los niños indocumentados como “los
niños perdidos”. Se le olvidan, tal vez, las palabras más difíciles como
“indocumentado” o “migrante” o “refugiado”
[My daughter often refers to undocumented children as “lost children”.
She forgets, perhaps, the more dicult words such as “undocumented”
or “migrant” or “refugee”.]
(p. 51)
The term used by Luiselli’s daughter, “niños perdidos” [lost children],
is used in the title of the Spanish version and similarly her question “tell
me how it ends” was picked up for the English version. In English, she
went on to use the expression “Lost Children” as the title of a novel that
appeared soon after, focusing on a family of four— a mother, father, and
two children— travelling, as they did, from New York City to the US-
Mexico border giving rise to tension between personal stories and broader,
political realities related to immigration and border crossing. In the non-
fiction book, the fragments related to the family road trip and the migration
status of the Luiselli family get less space as the book goes on. The chron-
icle of the 40 questions and their answers allows us to get deeper into the
painful stories of the migrant children, and we follow some of them, such
as Manu, who moved from Tegucigalpa to Hempstead, Long Island. He
leaves Honduras because members of the Barrio 18 gang are threatening
to kill him, but his new school in the US is full of members of the MS- 13
and Barrio 18 gangs and he wants to drop out. His lawyers— for whom
66 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Luiselli does the volunteer interpreting work— tell him he cannot leave
school because his permanent residency would be threatened. We learn
that Barrio 18 members recently beat him up and that MS- 13 members
saved him, which means the latter now expect him to join them. By the
end of the book, Manu had joined a church and started attending events
organised by the nonprofit organisation founded by Luiselli’s university
students.
Luiselli uses the order of questions in the questionnaire to relate how the
migrants’ struggles go so far beyond these questions. She complements the
text with notes on media reports and legal discussions that give us a hint
of what is at stake with each of the children’s answers. As García- Avello
states, her “research oers an account that has been marginalized from
mainstream media, while exposing the threads that link nations, human
beings, political discourses, and legal structures across dierent times and
spaces” (2020, p. 150). Luiselli follows the questionnaire giving us hints as
to the function of the questions, as if revealing that the researcher is never
to be separated from what is researched. This approach contrasts with the
transparency that is claimed for the voices rendered in Hear My Voice/
Escucha mi voz. Luiselli appears aware that the answers will always be
determined not only by the questions, but also by the conditions in which
they are formulated, recorded and then transcribed. She is also aware that
younger children respond to questions quite dierently from older children
and adults. For example, one of the last questions is: “Did you ever have
trouble with bands of organized crime in your home country?” Luiselli
wonders how to unpack this: do you start with the dierence between
a musical band and a criminal band, or with the definition of a home
country?
The book is divided into four sections. The first three— Border, Court,
and Home— are organised in line with the order of the questionnaire,
while for the last, Community, Luiselli returns to a more intimate register
to bring some closure (and hope) with a final story about her univer-
sity students’ scheme to help undocumented migrants. This final section
proposes a way of stepping outside of the narration and intervening in
the real world, by telling us about their ideas for producing change. The
author’s figuration is, therefore, not just a narrative voice, but a human
who needs to tell about how it ends, who needs it to end better if only
because we take responsibility in the real world for the stories we tell.
In this chapter, I have woven together issues about authorship, life
writing, and translation to explore how real stories about migration,
forced displacement and feared deportation can be told. My reflection
departed with a critical examination of the optimist account of Dreamers.
Her story of migrating is meant to be positive, dignifying; it is to be
opposed to the Trumpian hate discourse and to the long lasting “Latino
Testimonies of Border Crossing 67
Threat Narrative” (Chavez, 2013) that suggests Mexicans are taking
back the territories that once belonged to them. Yet Morales’ story is very
dierent from the tragic stories about border crossing, deportations, and
marginalisations. The author migrated legally to marry an US- national
citizen, something the autobiography downplays focusing, instead, on her
diculties in adapting. Dreamers, therefore, appears to be yet another
narrative about how important it is to learn the language and the ways of
doing of the host place, and how to leave your past behind to become a
new citizen. Morales does not touch upon the geopolitical injustices that
facilitate the immigration of labour forces whose rights are not recognised.
In opposition to Dreamers, the other two books are written at the
borders of the conventions of life writing and at the borders of what we
take to be children’s literature. Hear My Voice is a sort of patchwork of
voices, explanatory texts, and visual testimonies. The book holds together
dierent styles, voices, and genre conventions in a claim about voices
that need to be heard. The tragic stories of unaccompanied children’s
migrations and the cruelty of US laws and protocols are brought to the
fore with using metaphors or any sort of evocative language. Binford, the
compiler, composes a children’s book, she says, but we may wonder if
children are, indeed, the first intended readers for it. The book is meant
to denounce the lives of detained children using a children’s book format.
The narrative is quite distant from the hopeful and cheerful narratives we
often see in picturebooks.
Tell Me How It Ends brings a very dierent format: a chronicle that is
meant to be a literary text for adults. I have read it as a form of life writing
in which the narrator is a reflective observer, a researcher. This book serves
as a diractive mirror of the previous two and allows us to trace how other
forms of life writing may be better suited to tell the stories of those that are
suering injustices and exclusions. The title Tell Me How It Ends invites
the reader to feel the hopelessness of these stories, the children’s pain
and fear, and moves the children in and out of focus as it reflects on the
geopolitical, legal and social systems that are complicit in this suering.
The narrator is not telling us her story, but opening reflections about our
ways of listening and telling in relation to her positionality in narrating
this story.
The stories about immigration laws, refugees, and deportations are par-
ticularly dicult to tell because they speak of the legacies of the colonial
order and global injustice. The children’s books about immigration are
most often addressed to children who may have migrated, but do not fear
deportation. The addressed reader is invited to feel with these stories, to
empathise with the diculties migrants face, but such diculties are most
often only superficially addressed and related to the cultural, yet not legal,
challenges they face. Most of the stories do delve into cultural heritage
68 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
and the new cultural codes, as in Dreamers. We find very few stories that
recount the violence of the border, the deportations, the dealings with
the coyotes that get people across the border, the increasing number of
migrant deaths. Hear My Voice does touch upon the suering of migrant
communities while it aims to end with a hopeful note.
On the other side of the road, Tell Me How It Ends, a book that is
not meant to be read by children, oers a more textured access to the
lives and misfortunes of children that migrate unaccompanied, allowing
deeper engagements of empathy to surface. How to tell the story of an
open wound that never stops bleeding? Are we trapped by understandings
of age- appropriateness that hinder our modes of attention and ways of
narrating suerings? I wonder what young readers would make of Luiselli’s
book. Perhaps we need to target children with more complex narratives—
not necessarily organised by the mandate of hopeful endings— to tackle
dicult themes. Do we need children’s books to explore other, perhaps
“more adult” emotional repertoires, to think about global injustices?
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
5 Memory and Dictatorship in
Children’s Fiction
The publication of children’s books that refer to traumatic national pasts
has become something of a moral imperative. We live in times of a con-
sensus about the need for collective remembrance to ensure no repeti-
tion. We have grown aware of how individual memories depend on the
recollections of those of a society at large and of how the individual prac-
tice of remembering is modelled by the possibilities opened up to a given
community by a determinate moment. If, for decades, atrocities such as
torture and mass killings were considered too upsetting to be narrated
to children, today they are considered subject matters that need to be
addressed (Kidd, 2005; Ulanowicz, 2013).
Memory studies— a transdisciplinary field of research in the human-
ities and social sciences— revolves around the question of how the past
is constructed and re- enacted for the needs of the present. Exploring
how traumatic national pasts are narrated for children sheds light on
the problematics of collective remembrance and the diculty of reaching
social consensus. As Valerie Krips (2004, p. 31) states, drawing upon Pierre
Nora’s Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire (1989),
children’s books are sites at which the collective memory of a group
becomes crystallised, making children’s literature on this matter specially
contentious. Lydia Kokkola’s research on narratives of the Holocaust in
children’s literature shows that most texts aimed at young readers suppress
important information; the responsibility for contextualising is left to the
adult reader (2002, p. 226). Research on children’s books dealing with
cultural memory, such as those on the Holocaust and other genocides,
dictatorships, and wars, reveals tensions between publishers who require
informative resources with clear pedagogic aims, and authors, who aspire
to produce works that are regarded as being of high aesthetic quality
(Martín- Roguero, 2008, p. 50; Ramos, 2010, p. 34; Kokkola, 2013,
pp. 168– 169).
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 71
This chapter discusses children’s culture that refers to Pinochet’s dicta-
torship in Chile (1973– 89) in a variety of formats: two picturebooks (La
composición and Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra), a book of poetry
(Niños), and a short film (Bear Story). All these texts have a rather elu-
sive approach since their delicate subject matter— killings, torture, forced
displacements, and other forms of state violence— are dealt with indirectly,
using metaphor and allegory. I explore them here as post- representational
artworks in which meaning is not just bound to the discursive sphere but
also has a materiality surplus that is manifested in the form of “inten-
sities”. I take this last term from aect theory. Brian Massumi refers to it
as an individual’s physical reaction to a stimulus when the body is “filled
with motion, vibratory motion, resonation” (1995, p. 86). The notion of
“intensities”, is associated with other terms like forces, flows, and desires
and used in order to depose language from what Maggie MacLure calls
its “god- like centrality” (2013, p. 660). In aect theory, such intensities,
feelings, and emotions are not seen to express a person’s interior state, but,
rather, a relational, collective force whose borders mark both the inside
and the outside (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p. 5). I propose to trace how
the diculties of rendering traumatic events such as state violence can
actually help in opening up spaces for an approach that escapes the domes-
tication of the merely pedagogical approach.
In this chapter, I explore how these texts operate by “deterritorialising”.
This term was coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to indicate a
blurring of borders, or a decontextualisation of something provocative
(1987, p. 9). I speculate about the aective flows and intensities these texts
may trigger in readers and viewers in terms of their material- semiotic com-
plexities. The emphasis, therefore, is not on how the past is represented,
but rather on what avenues these pieces open up to other possible aective
engagements. The spaces to which these avenues lead are not organised by
what we commonly understand as interpretation— linked to understanding
and coded in verbal language— but more to ways of experiencing, in which
a range of possible aects are opened up.
In the analysed material, we find gaps in information that appear to
prompt adults intentionally to fill in context and information. The qual-
ities of gaps have been amply theorised by scholars of children’s literature,
especially in relation to picturebooks. Clémentine Beauvais, for example,
uses the delightful image of a jigsaw puzzle that has visual and verbal
pieces waiting for an active reader to put together (2015, p. 1). In the case
of books about traumatic pasts, gaps appear to be left not only for the
reader to fill in, but also for an adult mediator who can decide how much
of the horror should be rendered. I propose here that these gaps can also
be regarded as spaces or silences that can spill over the boundaries of the
72 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
work and would therefore benefit from not being reduced by traditional
practices of reading mediation.
Overall, I am inspired by Ulrich Gumbrecht’s call to discard the peren-
nial quest for meaning and interpretation (2004, p. 2). Gumbrecht argues
that artistic productions impact on our bodies and senses. His philoso-
phies can be connected to the new materialist approaches in which matter
is not understood as being passive, but as having agency (Coole and Frost,
2010, p. 7). Both discourse and matter are seen as flows and intensities
that are mutually implicated and co- productive (Barad, 2003, pp. 821–
822). In this post- hermeneutic, new materialistic approach, the aective
dimensions and complexities of a text cannot be reduced to decodable
meanings. Maggie MacLure notes how language has its own materiality
in which bodies and matter are entangled (2013, p. 659). Our attention
to these entanglements oers a new reading of the collective practice of
remembering and may help us to understand better the silences and gaps
in children’s culture related to traumatic national pasts.
Before examining the texts, I will give some background about the
Chilean dictatorship, its politics of memory and the scarcity of children’s
media that makes reference to it.
Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship may well be the most well- known mili-
tary dictatorship in South America of the past century, imposed soon after
the democratic election of a socialist president, Salvador Allende, in 1970.
Pinochet instigated a coup d’état backed by the CIA in 1973. The regime
was characterised by the systematic suppression of political parties and the
persecution of dissidents: over 3,000 people were killed or disappeared,
30,000 were tortured, and 200,000 were forced into exile. Pinochet’s dic-
tatorship shaped much of modern Chile’s implementation of radical neo-
liberal economic reforms, which were in sharp contrast to Allende’s leftist
policies. The regime remained in oce for 17 years, after which power
was transferred to an elected president. Despite the return to democracy,
Pinochet maintained his position as commander- in- chief of the Chilean
Army and later became a senator, having stipulated this lifelong privilege
for ex- presidents in his self- penned constitution.
In 1998, Pinochet travelled to the UK for a medical operation and was
arrested by Scotland Yard after an international capture order for his crimes
against humanity. This was the first time a former head of government had
been arrested on the principle of universal jurisdiction, initiating a judicial,
political, and public relations battle. Pinochet was finally released in 2000
and returned to Chile on the condition that he would be put on trial there,
but he died in 2006 while criminal charges were still pending. The decade
after Chile returned to democracy is often described as a period of transi-
tion (“La Transición”), a time when the political parties made a pact with
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 73
the military to maintain the status quo. This gave impunity to repressors
and allowed for the establishment of a neoliberal economic system.
Slowly, however, the citizenry has sought restitution for their oppression,
using not only the legal and political systems but also what Elizabeth Jelin
describes as the “vehicles of memory” (2002, p. 37): books, museums,
theatrical works, films, photographs, and other artistic forms that shape
the collective memory of the past. Research on the representation of dicta-
torship in films— possibly the most visible medium in which this collective
remembrance has been articulated— shows that both documentaries and
fiction films have been shifting in the last decades from rather realistic
or naturalistic portrayals of violence to more allegorical depictions. The
Chilean journalist, Antonella Estévez, describes the latest approaches as
revolving around a “cinematographic melancholy”, drawing extensively
on metaphor (2010). Through such figurative representation there is an
attempt to explore the dilemma that Adorno articulates as the diculty of
expressing grief in a sociopolitical context framed by discourses of mod-
ernity and progress, where trauma and the need for justice have not been
properly addressed (1983).
For decades, children’s books were particularly silent on the issues
involved (González, 2014; Troncoso, 2015). While part of the reason
for this reticence might arise from a desire to “protect” children from
trauma and the representation of violence, there was also the fact that
people were themselves confused about the political implications of what
happened. A lack of consensus over past events was particularly prob-
lematic given that children’s literature, in its pedagogical role, depends
on straightforward narratives. Even terms like “dictatorship” were con-
troversial, but shortly before the commemoration of the coup’s 40th
anniversary in 2013— a moment recognised as the end of impunity for
criminals— a group of people involved in children’s literature started to
draw attention to the fact that very few publications dealt with this recent
history (González, 2014). As a result, new texts began to emerge, probably
encouraged by the anniversary itself, which inaugurated a new climate of
remembrance. The works discussed here emanate from this period, being
released between 2013 and 2015: Niños by María José Ferrada (2013),
appearing in English translation as Niños: Poems for the Lost Children
of Chile (Ferrada, 2021), Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra by Jairo
Buitrago and Daniel Blanco (2015), and the animated short film Bear
Story (2014) by the Chilean studio Punk Robot. All these texts have
received significant critical attention, not only within Chile, but also from
wider international children’s literature communities. Un diamante en el
fondo de la tierra was included on the White Ravens Honour List drawn
up by the Internationale Jugendbibliothek and received the Colibrí Medal
74 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
from the Chilean section of the International Board on Books for Young
People (IBBY). Niños received two major awards in Chile— the Premio
Academia and the Premio Municipal de Literatura of Santiago— and
achieved international circulation, since the author, María José Ferrada,
is a much- admired writer who often attends book fairs and other inter-
national literary events. Bear Story, probably the most widely known of
these texts, was awarded an Oscar for the Best Animated Short Film in
2016— and was later adapted into a picturebook.
Before focusing on these three texts, however, it is important to dis-
cuss a book that may have been the only children’s culture text refer-
ring to the Chilean dictatorship up until that time: La composición [The
Composition], a book published in 2000. This book was a project of the
independent publisher Ekaré, an initiative set up by Chilean exilees in
Caracas, Venezuela, which became an iconic book about Latin American
dictatorships (Yokota, 2014, p. 68; Llorens García et al., 2015). On pub -
lication, the picturebook garnered numerous prizes and special mentions.
It won the coveted Premi Llibreter, awarded by librarians in Catalonia,
Spain, and was included on the White Ravens Honour List in 2001 and the
Unesco Prize for Children’s and Young People’s Literature in the Service of
Tolerance in 2003.
The story is focalised on Pedro, a child growing up in a country in
which soldiers are suddenly seen on the streets. Pedro’s parents gather
with some friends to listen to a radio programme that has a very weak
signal. We, as adults, assume that it is the only station that broadcasts in
opposition to the regime. Pedro himself is passionate about football and
craves to own a proper ball. We see him playing football games with his
neighbours. But one day the game is stopped when they see the father
of one of the players being dragged out of his grocery store by military
ocers. No explanations are oered and none of the witnesses demand
any. The children stop playing and go home, except for Pedro, who awaits
his father at the bus stop. Pedro does not ask him why their neighbour
was detained, but he does ask whether the military might also detain his
father. He is assured that this will not happen because the boy brings him
good luck. This is the furthest extent to which the father acknowledges his
political position as an opponent to the dictatorship.
In the following days, a soldier comes to the school and asks the chil-
dren to write a composition about what their parents do in the evening.
Pedro has never spoken about politics with his parents, or, indeed, with
anyone. But he understands that listening to that radio programme could
be interpreted as seditious, so instead writes that his parents play chess,
thus ensuring a happy ending, both for Pedro’s family and for the story;
that is, if we ignore the fate of the man who was detained, of whom we
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 75
hear no more. Pedro’s “coming of age” is complete: he too is now an
opponent of the dictatorship and understands the importance of keeping
certain things secret. The German edition, illustrated by Jacky Gleich, is
even more emphatic in creating this happy ending, showing the father and
son setting out together to find a chess set (Skármeta and Gleich, 2003,
p. 61).
When La composición was published in 2000, the picturebook genre
was still a novelty in Spanish- speaking countries. It had first appeared as a
short story by Antonio Skármeta 30 years earlier, in 1981, under the title
Tema de clase [Classroom topic] without pictures. The editors envisaged
it as a picturebook and the illustrations were first commissioned from a
Chilean illustrator who was likewise an exilee in Venezuela at the time. The
project did not get o the ground, however, even though a film adaptation
came out under the name La pequeña revanche [The Little Revenge] which
the editors hoped might propel synergic publication. The project was later
proposed to other illustrators, and it was only some 15 years later that it
appeared with the visual narration of the Spanish artist Alfonso Ruano.
Ruano eventually produced some realistic illustrations which, using the
terminology of social semiotics, had “high modality” (Kress and van
Leeuwen, 2006, pp. 158– 163). Ruano’s illustrations give the story a tone
that diers from two other editions of the book, one from Argentina and
one from Germany, where dierent illustrators had been commissioned.
Interestingly, in the illustrations of María Delia Lozupone and the afore-
mentioned Gleich, the military is much more threatening (Skármeta and
Lozupone, 2006). For example, whereas Ruano depicts a man simply
leaving his house, escorted by soldiers, these other illustrators show him
being dragged out by force, just as the written text describes. More gener-
ally, these foreign versions use low- and high- angle shots to show, on the
one hand, the power asymmetry between the children and the adults, and,
on the other, that between the ordinary people and the soldiers.
It is interesting to see, in the original edition of La composición, how
Alfonso Ruano’s illustrations distil material evocations. Gleich and
Lozupone’s illustrations function by condemning the military, whereas
Ruano’s more neutrally evoke the people living under state violence and
control in which such power and control is successful because it is not
always visible. We are presented, for instance, with an illustration of a
massive brick wall, perhaps suggesting the impossibility of escape, while
an anonymous child is shown waiting for a bus. On this intimidating wall
we can discern that the word resistencia [resistance] has been gratied
then painted over; and several pages later the same message is discernible
again (Figure 5.1). Rather than focus on the threatening figures of the
soldiers, Ruano prefers to show how the oppressiveness of dictatorship
76 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
translates into the quotidian. Such a method of representation does not
work through the hermeneutic process of decoding meanings; rather, the
framing of certain objects and textures triggers a material evocation. For
instance, in representing the scene in which the children are asked to write
about what their parents do in the evenings, the illustration shows a desk
with a biro, a pencil, an eraser and the corner of a notebook (Figure 5.2).
The student has been biting the pencil and the eraser has a small hole in
the middle. Pedro, we realise, must have been boring through it with the
pencil, as tiny particles of the eraser are visible on the desk. The classroom
wall also displays some marks, which might have been made by pencils
or other implements wielded by bored or anxious children. There is also
Figure 5.1 The intimidating wall where we can discern the partially- erased word
resistencia.
Source: La Composición, Antonio Skármeta and Alfonso Ruano (2000). Reprinted with per-
mission by Ekaré.
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 77
a hole that could have been created in the same way, or it might indicate
the trace of a bullet.
Niall Nance- Carroll (2014, p. 275) highlights that La composición
troubles the aetonormative discourse of children’s literature, by narrating
how a child takes political action without receiving advice from adults
for his actions. As he points out, Pedro is a relatively average child, not at
all exceptional or heroic. La composición thereby suggests that children
are more politically aware than we, adults, suppose. It is interesting that
Pedro’s political awareness does not derive from the discursive sphere, for
no one has explained to him what dictatorship is about. Rather, it is some-
thing he has acquired from observing the way people act and the things
they fear. This knowledge is also derived from the way the story is situated
Figure 5.2 The student has been biting the pencil, and the eraser has a small hole
in the middle.
Source: La Composición by Antonio Skármeta and Alfonso Ruano (2000). Reprinted with
permission by Ekaré.
78 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
within the material practices of everyday life, such that the reader is not
positioned as a moral spectator, witnessing what Luc Boltanski calls “dis-
tant suering” (1999). Boltanski notes how this mode of witnessing is a
recurrent strategy in trauma narratives.
La composición is sometimes considered a rather old- fashioned form of
picturebook since the verbal and the visual are not quite in “synergy”, to
use Lawrence Sipe’s term (1998, p. 98). In Latin America, where the devel-
opment of the picturebook format is quite recent, it is often emphasised
that this art form takes the shape of written texts and images that have
an “equal” weight (Hanán Díaz, 2007). This conceptualisation of the
picturebook has become a template, with critics expounding on the various
categories of relationship that are permissible between the verbal and the
visual (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2001, pp. 23– 24). Such models are learnt by
teachers, librarians, and other mediators of children’s literature, who then
teach students the benefits of being able to “decode” pictures, a practice
that treats illustrations like puzzles, to be interpreted as part of an overall
semiotic system (Tabernero, 2011). I have met reading mediators who
claim that La composición is an illustrated book rather than a picturebook
as some information is repeated in the pictures and it does not exploit the
complementarity of visual and verbal narratives. I find this vision quite
reductive of the visual narrative and its aordances and consider that it
fails to understand visual narration as a means for plot development. In La
composición the relationship between the verbal and the visual is complex
and evocative and opts to represent dictatorship while skipping the most
recurrent visual tropes about authoritarian regimes.
The other three texts discussed in this chapter were published between
2013 and 2015 and reflect an intergenerational, crossover sensibility that
appeals to both child and adult audiences and, as such, provide places of
aesthetic and playful experimentation (see Beckett, 2008). All three were
produced at a time when the division between genres and disciplines had
become less rigid. Thus, the three texts described below borrow practices,
techniques, and conceptualisations from a broad range of contemporary
arts practices. When compared to these later texts, La composición
appears to have a rather “traditional” approach to its subject, not only in
its telling— it has a linear plot and consistent focalisation— but also in its
realistic depiction of a Latin American neighbourhood.
In Niños: Poems for the Lost Children of Chile, Un diamante en el
fondo de la tierra [A Diamond in the Ground] and Bear Story we can see
a common approach to the trauma through a range of material evocations
that help to elicit a particular mood. Objects, layouts, rhythms, silences,
textures, and gaps are key elements in these evocations. Kokkola comments
along these lines in her research on children’s literature and the Holocaust,
explaining that, “rather than examining how these books represent the
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 79
Shoah through the medium of words, I shall be arguing that a certain
absence of words— the silence itself— can sometimes work as a kind of
tactful communication” (2002, p. 214).
We can look at these three works within the framework of a contem-
porary sensibility that is frequently articulated in the visual arts. A key
distinction between modern and contemporary art has been the shift from
aesthetic beauty to an appreciation of the underlying concept of a work.
The end result then becomes less important than the process by which
the artist arrived there. For contemporary arts, the material conditions
involved in the production of a work are to be acknowledged— explicitly
or implicitly— and this acknowledgement brings to the fore complexities
that are not simply aesthetic, but also sensual, intellectual, and institu-
tional because art is no longer confined to the visual or to the arguably
obsolete concept of beauty. In contemporary arts, experience is not bound
to the representation itself but to all that is beyond what we “see” (Furió,
2002). A more productive approach to the three works mentioned above
would seem to be to view them as cultural and artistic objects framed
within this contemporary, post- representational sensibility.
Niños/ Niños: Poems for the Lost Children of Chile (2021) comprises
34 illustrated poems, each of which has the name of a child whose feelings,
hopes, and actions are described by the poet. For example, the first one
reads as follows:
Alicia
Of all the birthday presents she’s received
Her favorites are the balloons
That decorate the house for the party.
Because if they fly, if she opens the window and lets them soar,
It will be like giving the wind a present.
Because the wind must have a birthday, too.
Even if we don’t know when it is, it must have one.
All the poems refer to events that relate to the experience of
childhood: wondering about the sound of the sea, the blossoming of
spring, or learning how to speak. Only at the very end of this book does a
two- page epilogue resignify the poems by listing the full name and age of
each child at the last time he or she was seen. Of course, they are all chil-
dren who were disappeared during the Chilean dictatorship, having been
either executed or kidnapped. We know, then, that Alicia, the girl who
gives her name to the first poem, was Alicia Marcela Aguilar Carvajal and
that she was last seen when she was six years old.
The author— even if this is only something we learn by reading reviews
and interviews— had to search through the archives in order to compile
80 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
this list of disappeared children (Ruiz, 2014). Pablo, one of those origin-
ally listed, was later found alive, living under an adopted name with a new
family, by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Argentine Human Rights
organisation of grandmothers who search for and find children who were
kidnapped during the Argentine dictatorship) a few weeks before the pub-
lication of the book. At the time of writing, the Abuelas in Argentina have
identified 127 children who were kidnapped and illegally adopted; while
Chile has no such organisation of its own, it is plausible to speculate that
some of these children will now be adults living under other identities.
Propitiously, when Pablo was identified, his poem was placed at the very
end of the book, and the entire work was dedicated to him: “esperamos
que las estrellas brillen siempre para él. Y le dedicamos este libro” [“We
hope the stars always shine for him. And we dedicate this book to him”].
Niños is a complex endeavour. On the one hand, it is a collection of
poems that describes the seemingly trivial thoughts and actions of the chil-
dren as they observe and interact with the world around them. Children
are shown trying to solve the mysteries of life and posing questions. This
is the brighter side of the book, forming a stark contrast with the darker
side implied by remembrance. Contemporary arts practices provide a
framework in which remembrance can perhaps be better understood;
the term “practice” is, in fact, very common in contemporary arts, with
their emphasis on the processual rather than on object- making; the term
also moves us towards a posthumanist framework in which meaning is
always relational and, as such, unstable (Bourriaud, 2002). So it is that
the author of Niños, María José Ferrada, has delved into the archives in
order to come up with this list of names. She traces, names and inscribes.
The list of names that is given in the epilogue, therefore, becomes more
than a paratext: it is another poem, even if it is one addressed to a rather
dierent, ideal reader.
Artists and writers explore how archives produce means of narration and
remembrance. Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s book Mal d’archive [Archive
Fever] (1995), curator Okwui Enwezor (2008) presented the trailblazing
Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, showing how
artists could use archival material to rethink identity and loss. In a world
inundated by information and images, what matters is to bring these cru-
cial dimensions to light, to frame them. The list of names drawn up by
María José Ferrada and included as a last “poem” presents an aesthetic
approach to documents in which the authorial and the authentic interact
to bring to the fore the horror and the loss. In this list, then, the dictator-
ship is not “represented” so much as “presented” by a certain display of
documentation about missed and missing children.
Niños may be criticised for delivering a message not meant to be decoded
by children, but I prefer to approach it from a dierent perspective by
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 81
asking instead, what happens in that gap between the poems and the list of
disappeared children. How do we feel when reading the list? What phys-
ical reactions do we have? The text opens up a web of complexity that is
not only discursive, but material too: it brings to the fore the fact that we
are bodies that read; that reading does not occur in the mind alone.
The Colombian author of Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra, Jairo
Buitrago, also wrote an earlier picturebook entitled Camino a casa [Path
Home] (Buitrago and Yockteng, 2008). In this work, Buitrago deals with
state violence by portraying the problematic daily life of a child who, on
the last page, appears to be the daughter of a man who disappeared in
1985. The narration relates how this girl finds protection in the figure
of a lion that accompanies her on her dicult daily journey from school
to a marginalised neighbourhood. The only reference to state violence
occurs in the corner of the last double- page spread, where a newspaper
headline announces, “Familias de desaparecidos en 1985” [“Families of
the disappeared in 1985”] (unpaginated). It is interesting to note that this
book— with that single reference to the political context— has been used
to convey the nature of dictatorship and national trauma to children in
dierent Latin American countries (Blanc, 2017). His later picturebook,
Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra, published in Chile 11 years later,
with illustrations by the Chilean artist, Daniel Blanco, is more explicit,
referring to the 1973 coup in Santiago de Chile. The climate of remem-
brance may allow more direct treatment, even if words like torture, dic-
tatorship, and detenidos desaparecidos (the term for detained people who
are still missing) are avoided. This 11- year interval also helped to shape an
aesthetic approach in which a web of complex issues is brought to the fore.
Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra [A Diamond in the Ground] begins
when a schoolteacher asks the children to reach out to their grandparents
and bring their stories into the classroom. The exercise, therefore, is to
gather individual memories and connect them with a collective experi-
ence. The protagonist’s grandfather is rather a sad man who is presented
as someone who “no sabe nada de la abuela, ni de su país” [“has heard
nothing of the grandmother or their country”] (unpaginated). The child
then tells us his grandfather’s story, pieced together from fragments of
what family members have told him and from what he has perceived from
the ways in which they relate to what they tell. His grandmother was
detained and disappeared. His grandfather was detained, too, and still has
marks on his wrists that bear witness to this. On the last page, the boy tells
us his grandfather had said that marrying grandmother was like digging
up a diamond from deep in the earth.
The narration alternates this story with brief portrayals of the
grandparents of the other classmates. In the first pages, we are confronted
with the figure of a high- ranking soldier standing to attention, the written
82 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
text informing us that “El abuelo de Tania se tomó una foto cuando le
dieron una medalla” [“Tania’s grandfather had his picture taken when
he was awarded a medal”] (unpaginated). The image shows him standing
up straight in a dark room, wearing sunglasses, a reference to Augusto
Pinochet, who in the seventies was usually portrayed in uniform wearing
dark shades. On the following double- spread we see the protagonist’s
grandfather in his past life, “Mi abuelo Manuel pintaba murales, se
manchaba la ropa, y la abuela se la lavaba” [“My grandfather Manuel
painted murals, his clothes got stained and grandmother washed them”].
The image shows the man painting an iconic mural of the Chilean socialist
revolution (the copyright page acknowledges that it cites the work of the
Brigada Ramona Parra collective, a faction of the Communist Party that
developed a celebrated revolutionary mural art form) (see Figure 5.3). The
grandfather is shown taking o his t- shirt, surrounded by brushes and
paint buckets. These two double- spreads set the emotional tone of the
book. We are led to feel that medals are not always good and that it is
better to keep a distance from certain authority figures.
In Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra the visual narrative belies the
meanings presented by the verbal, demonstrating that memory is created
for the needs of the present. The artificiality of representation is persistently
Figure 5.3 The protagonist’s grandfather paints an iconic mural of the Chilean
revolution.
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 83
shown. Thus we read that, “El abuelo de Ana, cuando joven, escaló un
día una montaña y pudo ver la nieve” [“Ana’s grandfather, when he was
young, climbed a mountain one day and could see the snow”]. However,
the illustration shows a man at an amusement park in front of the card-
board scenery of a rollercoaster called Everest (Figure 5.4). In that same
picture, a boy is dressed as a bear and has removed the costume’s head.
He is sweating, for the day is hot. The contradiction between the verbal
and the visual, together with those ironic details, reveals how memories
are fictions of a past constructed for a present that has no real access to
experience.
It is not only in the interplay of the verbal and the visual that the book
produces these contradictions, but also in its more subtle material qual-
ities, such as its layout, binding, its use of texture and colour; we react to
the fact that the book has blue written text and black- and- white, pencil
illustrations. The book is also spineless, being bound with blue thread.
These features might lead us to experience the book as feeling like a hand-
made notebook that has been put together by an individual who has only
a pencil and a blue typewriter ribbon to hand. In other words, it gives
Figure 5.4 In Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra by Jairo Buitrago and Daniel
Blanco. The visual narrative belies the verbal.
Source: Reprinted with permission by Editorial Amanuta.
84 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
the appearance of being a very personal story that has not been ocially
published by the “gatekeepers” of children’s literature, but is more of a
fanzine or samizdat.
Finally, we turn to Bear Story, which is probably the most widely
known narrative about dictatorship for children today. This short film
won the Oscar for the best animated short in 2016 and was later adapted
into a picturebook, published in 2016 under the title Historia de un oso
(Herrera and Osorio, 2016). It tells the story of a bear who is captured by
a circus, then manages to escape but, sadly, never finds his family again.
The story could be interpreted as being about animal abuse, but, for a
Chilean audience, its allegorical implications are clear, especially as the
film’s director, Gabriel Osorio, has stated that the film concerns the exile
of his grandfather. This said, there is no explicit reference to the Chilean
dictatorship, which may also be a deliberate omission in order to ensure
the work’s broader circulation.
The bear is portrayed in solitude. He spends his days assembling a
tin puppet theatre which tells the story of his capture, but gives it a
happy ending in which he is reunited with his family. Stories are thus
shown to have the power to provide closure following traumatic events.
Moreover, it is demonstrated that they achieve this by creating a sense of
distance. So, through the Bear’s personal theatrical production we see the
animal tamers capturing the bear, each carrying a club, known in Chile
as a “luma”, which is metonymic of the repression experienced by the
people there.
It is Bear Story’s use of distancing techniques that makes it especially
valued by teachers, who prefer to deal with the memory of the past in a
more figurative manner (García- González, 2017). But Bear Story is par-
ticularly eective in that, at a discursive level, this distancing is combined
with the presentation of an intimate and textured world. We could ana-
lyse this by drawing on the aforementioned categories of visual modalities
sketched by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2006, pp. 158– 163),
where what they term a “higher modality”, or more realistic represen-
tation, is achieved through the use of various techniques, such as colour
saturation, colour dierentiation, colour modulation, contextualisation,
representation, depth, illumination, and brightness. Bear Story is not so
straightforward, however, deploying an interesting mix of high and low
modality. Thus the house and urban landscape are depicted with a veri-
similitude that is quite dierent from that used by mainstream animation
studios. This evocation of tactility, combined with the materiality of the
soundtrack— with analogue- sounding background noise— conveys us to a
specific time and place. Bear Story shows a neighbourhood that has not
been transformed by “progress”, an urban landscape that appears to resist
the new organisation of lives under a neoliberal regime. Things are not
Memory and Dictatorship in Children’s Fiction 85
new but rather worn out, walls are gratied. Bear Story can also be read
as the story of a man— who happens to be a bear— who makes up stories
as a way of resisting a world in which story- telling is not valued. The
depiction of the bear’s life and environment is saturated with feelings of
intimacy. For example, the depiction of the house includes a quick view
of unmade beds that still display traces of the body shape of the bear.
All this detail gives the work a sense of authenticity and intimacy as we
witness the bear’s personal craftsmanship. As others have noted, the visi-
bility of manual work in animation films is frequently associated with a
longing not only for that which is true and genuine, but also for things
lost and, therefore, with nostalgia and yearning (Tomkowiak, 2019). In
contrast to the detailed portrait of the bear’s present life, his past abuse
is distanced. This distancing is achieved on dierent levels. First, the use
of anthropomorphised animals performing in circus functions as a meta-
phor for the torture he experienced. Secondly, the scene showing the bear’s
capture has the lowest modality of any in the entire film. The capture is
rendered through images of Shadow Theatre, such that we see only the
bear’s silhouette, where he is hidden within an apartment building with
other animals, being beaten over the head and carried away by the police.
The scene even includes some humour with the figure of a girae taking up
three vertical window frames. The picturebook adaptation depicts his cap-
ture in a similar way, using silhouettes with no verbal text. The discursive
does not seem to have place here.
Most narratives dealing with the state violence of the Chilean dicta-
torship are modelled on the sort of material complexity outlined in this
chapter, where events are handled in elliptical, suggestive ways and the
losses themselves are mourned. Semioticians would focus more on what
these texts connote, using such words as dictatorship, torture, and
detenidos desparecidos, with executions being replaced by more meto-
nymic indicators, such as the allusions to “marcas en sus muñecas” [“marks
on his wrists”] in Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra. Images remain
powerful in the more open way they convey nuances of meaning, but, as
I have argued, in these texts their interplay is more complex, not merely
responding to the words but to the rhythm of the whole text: the turning
of the page, the sequencing of the illustrations, their layout, texture, the
binding and so on. Elizabeth Grosz argues that what distinguishes the arts
from other forms of cultural production are the ways in which artistic
production “merges with, intensifies, and eternalizes or monumentalizes
sensation” (2008, p. 4). These works elicit sensations that deterritorialise
discourses about memory politics by escaping the traditional paradigm of
representation. Hence none of these texts deals explicitly with matters of
justice; they avoid the established discursive way of ordering events, which
requires that the past be revisited in order for new generations to avoid its
86 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
repetition. These texts avoid the factual and (more explicit) pedagogical
approaches.
The texts discussed in this chapter are elusive in their manner of
narrating the horrors of the Chilean dictatorship, but in their elusive-
ness, they become entangled with less rational, non- discursive, material
complexities, and intensities. These dimensions are regularly neglected in
school contexts. Acknowledging this alternative way of reading would
make the classroom, and other spaces, into more democratic fora, one
where the adult would not feel the need to dominate by contextualising
material and filling in all the narrative gaps. While reader- response criti-
cism has long celebrated the multiplicity of answers that come from group
reading experiences and, in more recent approaches, has paid more heed
to performative and visual responses to texts (Styles and Nobel, 2009;
Arizpe and McAdam, 2011), I would contend that this could be taken fur-
ther by exploring the material dimensions of memory that this article has
discussed: the non- verbal and non- discursive, the intensities and emotions
that these texts may elicit. It is then possible that the gaps in these works—
if we may continue to use that established term— may then not need to be
picked up by adults, but, rather, could be filled with silence: a silence that
is not the lack of something but a mark of its presence.
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
6 The Happy Objectification of
Frida Kahlo
Children’s and young adult literature could, in many ways, be said to be
in its prime; the number of works published is increasing year on year
and sales were boosted by the pandemic lockdown, perhaps due to a need
on the part of adult carers to compensate for screen use by encouraging
children to read print books. According to the 13th edition of Fundación
SM’s Anuario Iberoamericano sobre el Libro Infantil y Juvenil 2021
[Ibero- American Yearbook of Books for Children and Young Readers]
2021, reader numbers had increased by 69% in comparison with 2019.
Within this, one of the fastest growing areas has been non- fiction books.
Clémentine Beauvais highlights the fact that these include a profu-
sion of biographies particularly targeted at children (2020, pp. 57– 79).
Biographical writing is in very good health today, despite being one of the
oldest genres of children’s literature, with its roots in the lives of saints and
other exemplary figures. Beauvais, nevertheless, argues that children’s lit-
erature scholars despise the genre, a disdain she attributes to the didactic
angle that was historically so typical of biographies aimed at children.
Another particular growth area in children’s publishing is books
that seek to educate with a gender perspective; this may be by introdu-
cing LGBTI+ themes and characters or stories that subvert traditional,
sexist roles, showing female characters in leadership positions and male
characters in less predictable roles. This is likewise a genre of literature
with a strong didactic slant, although not one that is such a focus for spe-
cialist critics, perhaps because it is deemed to represent a more progressive
type of educational approach. In this chapter we will look at the inter-
action of these two intensities of the publishing market by reviewing the
publication of women’s biographies in children’s collections, focusing on
someone who has been the subject of a plethora biographies over the last
decade, Frida Kahlo.
In terms of publishing trends, the publication of Goodnight Stories for
Rebel Girls (Cavallo and Favilli, Timbuktu Labs, 2017), heralded a surge
90 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
in short biographies for both girls and boys. This book emerged from
a crowdfunding project on the Kickstarter platform— a call for potential
readers to finance a publication for which support from publishers had not
been forthcoming. In a single week, more than 13,000 people contributed;
having set out to raise an already optimistic 40,000 dollars, the funds
poured in, to the tune of 675,614 dollars. This book, featuring 100 biog-
raphies of extraordinary women, illustrated by more than 60 artists, was
followed by a second and third volume, along with a wide variety of mer-
chandise: board games, T- shirts, posters, stickers, and other products
marketed at mothers and fathers wishing to educate their children— or,
rather, daughters— in a supposedly feminist discourse. Its commercial
success triggered a wave of biographies aimed at children, the vast majority
of them imitating the anthology format of Rebel Girls, namely short bio-
graphical stories accompanied by colourful illustrations (Cardell, 2022;
Calvo et al., 2021; Rensen, 2021).
The success of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls is an opportunity
for me to start this chapter by calling attention to the nuances of a fem-
inist branding and the demand for biographies. The overtly commercial
approach of the Rebel Girls series, as well as problematic elements such
as the inclusion of figures like Margaret Thatcher and Aung San Suu
Kyi, has made it a target of criticism among academics in the sphere of
children’s literature (García- González, 2020). In the case of Frida Kahlo,
questions have also been raised about the narrative choices made in the
telling of her life. Castro and Spoturno note, for example, that in the biog-
raphy of Frida Kahlo she is “relegated to a secondary position in com-
parison to that of her husband, Diego Rivera, “Mexico’s most famous
artist”” (2021, p. 243). They also criticise the fact that the short account
fails to mention the abuse Kahlo experienced during her marriage. The
biographies included in this book are no longer than 300 words, so any
omissions are justified by brevity, but how are these topics dealt with in
other Frida Kahlo biographies? How can this troubled life be recounted in
the form of a biography for children, when this genre appears so marked
by the pedagogical intensity of presenting exemplary lives? How is her
figure as an artist and the recognition that her life was lived in the shadow
of Diego Rivera presented in the stories?
Children’s literature has featured more biographies about Frida Kahlo
than almost any other person. According to the world’s largest library
database, WorldCat, she is second only to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani
activist who fights for the right to education for girls and won the Nobel
Peace Prize at the age of 17. As of December 2023, Yousafzai has 414
entries and Kahlo has 363 entries when filtered by biographies for children
and young readers from the last 10 years in the database that constitutes
this international catalogue. Some way behind Malala Yousafzai and Frida
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 91
Kahlo are women such as Marie Curie (47 entries), Cleopatra (30), Rosa
Parks (28) and Anne Frank (23). It is no surprise that Malala appears
at the top of the list; she is an obvious role model for the 21st century.
She is portrayed as a girl who has engaged in a struggle for social and
gender justice and has done so in a peaceful manner. Her fight is against
the Taliban and her aim is to be allowed to go to school.
Kahlo’s story seems more dicult to tell than Yousafzai’s, but is widely
recounted nonetheless. If we narrow our search to books published in
Spanish, we find that the WorldCat international catalogue lists the
same number of children’s biographies for Kahlo as for Malala— 65
in the last ten years, if we include entire books about their lives and
their appearances in anthologies. In this chapter, we will look at three
biographies of Frida Kahlo published originally in Spanish, pondering
how she is produced by authors in order to make her biographiable. All
three have been published within the last ten years, coinciding with the
boom in the publication of biographies for children and adolescents, and
have been distributed in both Latin- America and Spain. They could be
classified as picturebooks in which the words and the illustrations com-
plement each other to produce meaning. I have chosen these three books
precisely because they seem to be the ones with the highest distribution
on both sides of the Atlantic and because they have been much vaunted by
critics. Frida Kahlo para chicos y chicas [Frida Kahlo for Boys and Girls],
written by Nadia Fink with illustrations by Pitu Saá, was published in
Argentina in 2015 and in Spain a year later. Frida Kahlo, by María Isabel
Sánchez Vergara, was the first in the highly successful Little People, Big
Dreams series. After reviewing these two books, which are perhaps the
most commercially successful children’s biographies of Frida Kahlo, we
will appraise Frida Kahlo. An illustrated life, by the author María Hesse
published in Spanish in 2016 and subsequently translated into English
and other languages.
Needless to say, numerous biographies have also been written about
Kahlo for adults. We will broaden our discussion by contemplating the
most authoritative biography of her by Hayden Herrera (1983).
In recent years, the spotlight on how gender is narrated and what
constitutes women’s writing has become inescapable and is an increasingly
complex dimension of literary criticism (Amaro, 2010, pp. 273– 292). It
is a problem that not only encompasses analysis of textual representa-
tion but also the organisation and reorganisation of the literary field in
the wake of feminist movements of recent years: movements that expand,
multiply and diversify across digital networks that are removing traditional
institutions from the picture. The question of how this field is changing
has had a knock- on eect on literary production for children. Literature
for children and young readers is beset by pedagogical intensities within
92 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
which feminism appears to be deployed in dierent directions, while being
repressed in other areas.
In recent times, the most common way of presenting children’s books
as feminist has been to place the female characters at centre stage, identi-
fying them as strong characters and leaders, often in open rebellion against
the conventions of their time. In the introduction to Twenty- First- Century
Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature, Roberta Seelinger Trites
considers why this paradigm has failed to gain any further complexity in
20 years (2018). The author highlights a degree of regression from the
times when post- structuralist literary criticism, fuelled by second- wave
feminism, called for a re- signification of women’s roles in narratives. Trites
refers to the backlash that feminism has suered in the USA and proposes
to move away from a critique centred on linguistic aspects and the primacy
of discourse, towards one that can understand gender in its materialities,
on the basis that bodies are not solely discursive constructions. She argues
that if we analyse the materiality of bodies, objects, and environments, we
may gain a better understanding of the complex forms in which gender is
produced and reproduced.
Feminist critic Sara Ahmed is one of the leading thinkers when it comes
to the embodied practices by which gender is institutionalised, emphasising
how repetitive practices end up naturalising hierarchies (2004, 2017). She
argues that feminism should be a way of life that challenges dominant
norms and power structures, rather than simply a set of ideas about the
position of women. One of the terms she proposes to challenge this order
is killjoy feminism, which is a refusal to accept the status quo; a feminism
that disrupts, and that is allowed to disrupt, the smooth functioning of the
social norms and conventions that allow injustices to continue to operate.
She uses the term “killjoy” to describe a state of mind that spoils the enjoy-
ment of others. In the context of feminist politics, killjoy feminism is about
challenging the idea that certain behaviours or attitudes are normal or nat-
ural, as well as the idea that there could be some kind of breakthrough in
feminist consciousness that would lead us towards a hopeful future.
Another concept that can serve as a tool for analysis, especially when
it comes to considering biographical lives, is that of the “happy object”
which Ahmed uses to refer to those images or ideas that are associated
with positive feelings or emotions, such as happiness, pleasure, or content-
ment (2017, p. 21). According to Ahmed, the happy object is often used
as a tool of social regulation and control. The family, for example is a
“happy object” which serves to reinforce dominant norms and values and
to encourage people to conform to certain ways of thinking and behaving,
in exchange for a promise of some sort of happiness (p. 230). The happy
object also appears in commercial advertising, where products are cast as
being essential to our well- being. We can read biographies for children as
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 93
narratives of happy objects; the lives told oer us a template of how the
present can be postponed in pursuit of future happiness. If this is the case,
how do we narrate a life that appears to be one that was full of suering,
as is the case with the life of Frida Kahlo? Sara Ahmed’s concept of the
happy object allows us to think about how ideas of well- being, success,
and happiness represent exclusion for those who do not share the dom-
inant norms and values. Someone who does not find happiness in the same
objects or experiences as the dominant culture may be seen as abnormal or
deviant. In these biographies, what does Kahlo do with the happy objects
of her time?
Posthumanist feminism— that of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and
Karen Barad, for example— places special emphasis on decoding the pro-
duction of exclusions. This is based on an understanding that sexism is the
foundation of Western humanism and Protagoras’s statement that “Man”
is the measure of all things. Jamaican essayist Sylvia Wynter argues that
the world is tailor- made for a certain type of man: White, able- bodied
(no disabling conditions), cis- gendered, heterosexual and educated (in a
Eurocentric way) (2003, pp. 257– 337). Wynter views it as an ethnic class
that dominates the world, and opts to capitalise the word Man in order
to review how it is that historically, through the encounter with the so-
called “new world” and then through the 19th- century rise of the capit-
alist bourgeoisie, a particular group of men has become the measure of
the human race. Her historicised, intersectional reading provides a good
account of a stance that seems in line with how feminism is thought of
by Latin American activists and scholars, where the question repeatedly
arises of how gender is produced and reproduced in the literary field, and
how this must be understood as going beyond the mere question of the
representation of women.
Finally, the concept of post- feminism, outlined by Angela McRobbie
and Rosalind Gill, is productive when it comes to exploring the publishing
boom in biographies for girls (and boys) (2009; 2016). They use the
term to describe how the feminist demands of the 1970s and 1980s have
been integrated into discourses and social imaginaries that link ideas of
freedom and free choice to the figure of women capable of exercising
power in the world of men (Thompson and Ngaire, 2009, pp. 23– 35).
McRobbie and Gill highlight how this discursive configuration of the
existence of empowered women reproduces an idea of individualist power
that obscures the demand for better social justice and attention to struc-
tural injustices. Gill considers that this idea of a powerful woman with
agency has grown inextricably linked to an idea of youth (and beauty): a
woman able to exercise power is one who is young, who has time ahead
of her. She examines how feminism today has become an “identity” which
every young woman wishes to have: “it is stylish, defiant, funny, beautiful,
94 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
confident, and “champions” women” (2016, p. 625). Post- feminism is thus
a sensibility that does not cause any discomfort, which is easily reconciled
with individualism and neoliberalism, and which feeds this discourse on
freedom and choice.
Biographies written for children historically took the form of moralising
literature, predominantly in the form of tales of exemplary lives (Del
Olmo Ibáñez, 2015). Children may no longer be given lives of saints to
read, but the stories of other exemplary lives that are appearing on the
market are much vaunted in both formal and informal educational spaces.
Clémentine Beauvais arms that the ebullient publishing market for
children’s non- fiction biography is adding fuel to contemporary questions
about the act of reading and what reading means for children today. For
Beauvais, biography emphasises a condition of latency in a child reader
(2020). She defines latency as the intensity of being a reader in training, a
reader who can be influenced, who should be addressed with a degree of
pedagogical intent. Openly didactic and conservative biographies of his-
torical figures, accompanied by epitextual reference material provided by
the publishing companies, are being replaced by illustrated biographies
that demonstrate an adult faith in the agency and creativity of children. As
Beauvais highlights, contemporary biographies link personal and political
themes and are targeted at the child as a potential agent of change. These
texts anticipate that child readers may not only emulate, but also exceed,
the works of the people described.
Frida Kahlo, written by María Isabel Sánchez Vergara and illustrated by
Gee Fan Eng, is the most popular Kahlo biography in the world (2014),
even outselling the comprehensive version published by Hayden Herrera in
1983. The former has been translated into more than 30 languages, while
the latter, aimed at adult readers, appears in 15 (WorldCat, searched in
December 2023). Sánchez Vergara’s work was the second in the successful
series of biographies published by Alba Editorial, now comprising more
than 50 books, all written by the same author but illustrated by dierent
artists. These picturebooks follow a fairly simple formula: the person who
is the subject of the biography is introduced as a child, giving some hints
of how they are already a special, extraordinary person, followed by a
brief description of their success. In many cases, the children are already
sporting some detail or item of clothing by which they will be recognised
as adults; for example the Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes is a little girl who
wears the tie, which will subsequently become her trademark. In Kahlo’s
case, the child has a bushy monobrow and the ribbon with a flower
attached appears in all the illustrations of her.
The book is aimed at readers aged six to eight, who are invited to find
out about these lives with curiosity, “Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico.
Just by looking at her you could see she was special.” On the first double
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 95
page, the little girl is pictured with her mother and father. On the next we
read that “When she was at school, she got really sick. The illness made
her leg as skinny as a rake” (unpaginated). We see her with other little girls
in school uniform. She is soon a teenager, “But Frida did not complain.
She was dierent. She liked to dress dierently too”. She is shown wearing
a suit and tie (with a rose in her buttonhole). “Then one day, a bus Frida
was riding crashed into a car. Life as she knew it changed for ever,” says
the text under a picture depicting her as a child lying in a pool of blood
even though her clothing remains remarkably unsullied (unpaginated). She
is wearing the school uniform that we saw in the earlier illustration, even
though this accident happened when she was already a university student.
The text continues, describing the convalescence period as an essential,
formative time for the artist,
After her accident, Frida had to rest in bed. To help the hours pass, she
drew pictures of her foot. Then, even though she was still in pain, Frida
decided to draw self- portraits using a mirror.
Painting by painting, Frida – and her art – got better. It was time to
show her pictures to someone else.
She visited the famous artist Diego Rivera, who couldn’t believe his
eyes. He wasn’t sure what he liked more – her pictures, or her.
(unpaginated)
In the last two images, Frida is shown as a grown- up, as if that conva-
lescence had drawn her into adulthood. However, she appears again as a
child on the following page where we are told that Diego was captivated
by her and her art. The illustration is shown from the perspective of Diego
who is sitting on some scaolding as he paints a mural. We see his back
and some paintbrushes in his pocket; Kahlo, in the background looks
very small.
Analysis of the visual focalisation, as adduced by Silke Horstkotte and
Nancy Pedri (2011), highlights how this image invites us to see Frida how
Diego sees her— the reader eectively share his perspective. The second half
of the book is an account of Kahlo’s growing success; Rivera recognises
her talent and this is soon followed by widespread public appreciation of
her as an artist. Little is said of their troubled relationship, other to refer-
ence to their “ups and downs” which appear mitigated by his encourage-
ment of her painting.
Frida and Diego fell in love. They were so similar and yet so dierent.
But through their ups and downs, Diego encouraged Frida in her
paintings.
96 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Through her wonderful pictures, Frida spoke about how she was
feeling. In some she looked sad, but in others she smiled.
Eventually Frida decided to show everyone her work. Her pictures
caused a great stir in New York city.
When the exhibition came to Mexico, Frida was so sick she had to be
in bed. But it was clear that nothing could stop her from painting, not
sickness, pain or heartache.
(unpaginated)
This recognition of Kahlo as an artist appears in the visual narration as
an image of Frida occupying the centre of the page, surrounded by people
who are gazing at her admiringly. For the exhibition in Mexico, we are
shown a Kahlo dressed in the typical costume of Tehuana women, lying
propped up on pillows in a wooden bed. The self- portraits that we have
been told she used to draw using a mirror are displayed on the headboard.
She is smiling.
Then on the final double- spread she is on scaolding, painting
watermelons. She is once again wearing a traditional Tehuana costume,
and on one of the watermelons is written what is known to be her final
salutation: “Viva la Vida [Long live Life]. Frida Kahlo. Coyoacán 1954
México” (unpaginated). The text adds some moralistic teaching: “Frida
Kahlo taught the world to wave goodbye to bad things and say Viva la
Vida! ‘Long live life’ ”. As in other biographies of the artist, the book ends
with her last catalogued work: “Still life. Viva la Vida”. This work was
painted years previously, but the artist added her signature and the year,
precisely so it would appear as her last piece of work.
In 1954, Kahlo had already had one leg amputated and was living
with the strong side eects of painkilling drugs: she was barely able to
paint. According to the historian Gregorio Luke (2017), this painting
was a response to the fascism in Spain ushered in by the Civil War and
specifically, to the cry of “Long live death!” popularised by Millán-
Astray y Terreros, a major early figure in General Franco’s dictatorship.
But in this biography her song to life is not read in relation to her polit-
ical commitment— a commitment that is not mentioned— but rather as
a happy ending for the resilient artist. The end of the book depicts a
smiling Kahlo, allowing the previous episodes to be read as slight di-
culties that she managed to overcome in good spirits. In Vergara’s biog-
raphy, Kahlo is presented as a model for the celebration of luminosity
and goodness, who cast aside negative thoughts and anything bad that
happened to her. This approach, although with rather more details, is
likewise the one followed in many other biographies of the artist for
young readers.
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 97
Frida Kahlo para chicos y chicas by Nadia Fink and Pitu Saá (2015),
translated into English as Frida Kahlo for girls and boys in the same year,
forms part of a collection of biographies of people who are presented as
inspirational role models. In this case, it was the first book in a series that
went on to include key Latin- American writers such as Clarice Lispector,
Alfonsina Storni, Julio Cortázar, and ideological figures such as Rosa
Luxemburgo. Fink’s book follows a similar life- to- death narrative as the
one by Sánchez Vergara, although in this case the author includes more
factual details and is set out somewhat in the style of a reference book. The
text is arranged on the pages in text boxes, sometimes headed by questions
for the reader to consider, such as “Why do we like Frida Kahlo and all
her colourful art so much?” This fragmentary account implies that Kahlo
treated her own life as biographable. On the first page it says,
Frida was born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, a town in Mexico. But
she always said that she was born in 1910. Why? Because, that year a
great revolution was started by peasants in her country. She decided
that she and new Mexico had been born together.
(p. 5)
The story, nevertheless, is structured on the basis of the same events
that form the foundation of how Kahlo’s life is told in Sánchez Vergara’s
book: she had polio, she wore trousers to hide her leg, she suered the acci-
dent with the tram in which she almost lost her life, during her long conva-
lescence she devoted herself to painting and produced many self- portraits
because her mother placed a mirror facing her bed. It also mentions, like
in so many of the other biographies for children and adults alike, that
Frida dressed in an alternative way. On one page a little dog, whom we
later find out is a Xolotl, or Mexican Hairless Dog, asks, “And who is this
man?”, as he looks at a drawing of Kahlo (who can be recognised by her
eyebrows) in a suit and tie (p. 8) The narrator responds, “It’s Frida! … In
some photographs of the time, she was dressed in a suit and pretended to
be a boy when her father took pictures of her and her sisters. Rebellious
Frida defied her mother who scolded her for her daring” (p. 8, italics in
original). Fink’s book presents a rebellious, defiant Kahlo, a dimension
that does not appear, or is only briefly touched upon, in Sánchez Vergara’s
biography.
Ironically, this rebelliousness is also only briefly touched upon in the
short biography by Favilli and Cavallo in the story anthology Good Night
Stories For Rebel Girls. Kahlo dares to defy the norms of the time, but this
rebelliousness fails to establish itself as a distinctive feature of her person-
ality, perhaps because she meets Diego very early on and the rest of the
biography presents them as an artistic and romantic duo:
98 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Diego and Frida were married, not once, but twice. However they
had other loves, even when they were together. Like other things,
they shared this sentiment more than was customary for the time. So
they had many friends and lovers, and Frida found love reflected in
both men and women. Let us not forget that they lived in a country that
had been through a revolution, so everything had to be changed and
turned upside down.
(p. 14, italics in original)
Which “sentiment” they shared is not made clear, but the description of
them as forward- thinking for the time represents their relationship as an
open one when in fact it was not, as we know from Kahlo’s work.
Her painting A Few Small Nips (1935), painted after she found out that
Diego had cheated on her with her own sister, is a key work in denouncing
male violence: it shows a severely wounded woman lying on bloodstained
sheets next to a man holding a knife. The same painting has a caption that
gives the painting its title. This quote refers to a man who had killed his
wife and in court had defended himself by saying that it had only been “a
few small nips”. This picture has been read as a testimony of the suoca-
tion she felt in the face of Diego’s infidelity, an aspect that is censured in
the majority of biographies for children. To be a role model for today’s
young readers, Kahlo should not suer ill treatment from her husband,
or demonstrate dependency on him. The supposedly progressive ideology
of these biographies might, however, just about allow them to say that
the couple had an open relationship. However, neither of these two biog-
raphies mention how she suered as a result of her infertility. In Fink’s
work, we are told,
Frida did not have any children. She would have like to have done,
but her bones would not withstand a pregnancy because of so many
fractures and surgeries.
But she did have a niece and a nephew. They were the children of her
sister Cristina and the three of them lived with her and Diego in the
Blue House.
(p. 20, bold in original)
This text is accompanied by a reproduction by the illustrator, Pitu
Saá, of the famous painting The Broken Column in which her torso is
split and her nails and face pierced by nails. The text does not mention,
either, the suering her miscarriages caused her. However, it includes a
landscape photograph of Frida laughing, and above it the following text,
“When her niece grew up, she wrote a book about Frida, in which she
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 99
said, ‘Frida was a very happy woman who was always singing’ ” (qtd from
Pinedo Kahlo, 2014). On the facing page we can see two children running
around the terrace of the Blue House, while Frida looks on smiling. Frida
Kahlo compensated for her inability to have children with those of her
sister, Cristina, the same sister with whom Diego had a relationship and
was unfaithful to her. By the next double- spread, Frida is ill and dies
(Figure 6.1).
Her illness is fairly sparsely narrated, “She had been in bed again for
many months,” we are told, as if establishing a continuity with the time she
spent in bed after the tram accident (p. 22). “She had a serious infection in
her lungs and had to take many medications to dull the pain. It was very
Figure 6.1 Frida leading a march. Frida para chicos y chicas by Nadia Fink and
Pitu Saá.
Source: Reprinted with permission of Chirimbote.
100 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
risky for her to go out under these conditions,” it says in a text box. The
illustration shows her in a wheelchair, practically leading a demonstration
march by workers carrying signs with slogans such as “no more exploit-
ation”. We also read, “But there she was again on the move, marching in
the streets to be present when the workers were demanding better salaries”
(p. 22). As in the biography by Sánchez Vergara, we come up against this
contrast conjunction, the “but” that demonstrates her resilience and cap-
ability to do anything. Some final moralising also appears in the last text
box of Fink’s book: “Going out was not good for her, but Frida knew this
and that was also her decision: Her body was going to be like a banner
for the struggle. A few days later, she grew tired of fighting with her pain
and let death take her” (p. 22, italics in original). Here ends the narration
of Frida Kahlo’s life in this book. The next text box refers to the belief
that Xolotl dogs transport the dead on their back; the pet dog who has
appeared in the book’s pages is resignified as a Xolotl divinity, a figure
which introduces death. The original Spanish publication continues with
various suggestions for activities: painting your self- portrait, playing the
exquisite corpse, imagining imaginary animals. The back cover features an
introduction to the series:
We decided to set forth on the adventure of learning a little more about
great women and men in our history. We begin with one of the many
women who were not satisfied with simply doing what was expected
of them. This is why Frida Kahlo is our first anti- princess (or perhaps
Aztec princess): a woman who was proud of her body even though she
had a limp. She also painted the saddest and happiest days of her life
on canvas. In her physical pain, Frida searched for art and happiness,
and struggled for a better world not only for herself but for many other
people (bold in original).
As in other sections, the use of italics and bold is a little confusing,
but such formatting gives an idea of some of the emphasis placed by the
author or publishers. Here they could be highlighting Kahlo’s fortitude
and rebellion, and how this makes her biographiable. We are told that
she could be an Aztec princess and that being so is the equivalent of being
an anti- princess. It is not very clear what you need to oppose in order to
be a biographiable figure of rebellion. Kahlo had a particular fascination
with the Indigenous populations of Mexico, although not particularly for
the Aztec culture. This biography attempts to give an account of the cul-
tural context of Mexico as a determining factor in understanding the artist
(hence the prominence of the Xolotl dog), to which end this context is
reduced to a few clichés (the reduction of Indigenous cultures to Aztec, for
example). There is no mention of her divorce from Diego Rivera, perhaps
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 101
because by presenting them as a couple in an open relationship, the break-
up remains hidden. However there is a great eort to corroborate the art-
istic value of her work, mentioning that it fascinated André Bretón who
declared her part of the Surrealist movement. As a result, the figure of
Rivera is depicted as somewhat less influential than in other children’s
biographies about Kahlo.
I wanted to begin by reading these two biographies in order to have
some idea of the Frida who is oered to children as a role model. I am
interested in investigating how the reader’s attention is drawn to Kahlo’s
suering and trauma in order to explain why she has such poetic power.
Both biographies teach us that life and art are not only inseparable but
also, as in a good proportion of biographies of artists, life is art. In Frida’s
case, this life/ art is explained on the basis of suering which, read from
a gender perspective sounds certain warning bells. Chiara Malpezzi has
studied these Künstlerromans, or “artists’ novels”, which describe artists
growth to maturity in a manner which is presented as feminist, outlining
how many of the artist- heroines started out as young girls who had to
overcome multiple deprivations, including starvation (2020, pp. 89– 104).
In Frida it is her illness, her polio and wasted leg, the tram accident which
caused multiple fractures from which she never fully recovered, as well
as other, barely evoked suerings (infertility, Diego’s infidelities, chronic
pain, the shadow cast by her highly successful husband), which produce
the antagonistic force that the artist manages to overcome.
In the biography by Sánchez Vergara we also find a short text after the
end of the biography, a paratext included by way of context to be read,
or not, to children. This is a strategy that is very common in non- fiction
picturebooks that invite a more critical reading (Goga, 2021, pp. 174–
188). This text is accompanied by four photographs: Frida in 1919, 1939,
1942– 45, and 1944, respectively. This oers a new biographical telling
that compresses the events of her life: birth, polio, recovery, accident,
painting, famous Mexican artist, and indulges in some assertion about the
importance of her work: exhibition in New York, posthumous fame and a
body of work “recognisable because of [its] bright colours and symbols of
Mexican culture”. Finally, it explains the fusion of life and art: “Thanks to
her strong personality, fighting spirit and love of painting, Frida overcame
the accident that marked her life. She is an inspiration to many women
today”. The pedagogical intention is crystal clear. The fact that she is
viewed as biographiable is, therefore, not just because of her talent, or
exploration of artistic languages, or even her influence on other creators,
but because of her ability to withstand suering.
It is often said that Frida Kahlo’s art is also her autobiography. Her
work has been read again and again as a response to the events of her life,
in particular her dicult emotional states triggered by her relationship
102 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
with Diego Rivera, her disability, her miscarriages, and her illnesses. There
are approaches from the so- called medical humanities and from psycho-
analysis that attempt to read her work in relation to dierent diagnoses or
conditions (Courtney et al., 2017, pp. 90– 96; Martínez- Lavín et al., 2000,
pp. 708– 709; Androutsopoulou et al., 2022, pp. 270– 288; Twinberrow,
2022). The number of self- portraits has often been referred to as giving her
life an autobiographical dimension (Moriuchi, 1998, pp. 767– 782) and
the way she poses and dresses for photographs has been read as a series
of autobiographical tactics (Limón Serrano, 2019, pp. 277– 290; Vargas
García, 2022).
Renewed attention to Kahlo’s life and work, their fusion and the
narrative that juxtaposes suering and resilience, was sparked several
decades after her death by the publication of Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A
Biography of Frida Kahlo, in 1983, and the first retrospective of her work
co- curated by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen at the Whitechapel Gallery
in London in 1982. In both cases, viewers were invited to read her work
as the story of her life. Momentum gathered, and a few years later Frida
had become an international cult figure and people began to use the term
“Fridamania” (Lindauer, 1999, p. 152). In the 1990s, a facsimile edition
of her personal diary was published, with English translation. It was a
journal in which she had written, drawn and also painted from the mid-
1940s until her death in 1954. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes wrote
an introduction in which he said that he had only seen her once, at a con-
cert, and had been witness then to her magnetism and the fascination that
she provoked: “It was the entrance of an Aztec goddess, perhaps Coatlicue,
the mother deity wrapped in her skirt of serpents, exhibiting her own
lacerated, bloody hands the way other women sport a brooch” (Fuentes,
1995, p. 8). Frida Kahlo’s journal, which recorded the suering of her
last decade, was then published in Spanish with the same introduction by
Fuentes, aimed implicitly at American readers, if only for how it exoticises
the figure of the Mexican painter. As Silvia Molloy says in her book At face
value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America, such works usually
contain a bit of “petite histoire”, namely anecdotes and snatches of gossip
about the biographied figures in such a way that the texts become, to some
degree, a history of the countries of their protagonists (1991). Fuentes
stresses this in his introduction, presenting Kahlo as reproducing the myth:
Born with the Revolution, Frida Kahlo both mirrors and transcends the
central event of twentieth- century Mexico. She mirrors it in her images
of suering, destruction, bloodshed, mutilation, loss, but also in her
image of humor, gaiety, alegria, that so distinguished her painful life.
(Fuentes, 1995, p.10, italics in original)
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 103
Frida’s resilience is the Mexican resilience, the Latin American capacity
to party on despite everything.
In the diary, Kahlo confesses her devotion to Rivera. His name is
repeated in many places, as well as in a list that could be read as a poem,
Diego beginning
Diego builder
Diego my child
Diego my boyfriend
Diego painter
Diego my lover
Diego “my husband”
Diego my friend
Diego my mother
Diego my father
Diego my son
Diego = me =
Diego Universe
Diversity within unity
Why do I call him my Diego?
He never was or will be mine.
He belongs to himself.
Running giving out …
(Kahlo, 1995, p. 235,
italics in original)
Today, as we probe the discourse on children’s agency as never before,
using Frida as a model of resilience and also of a certain irreverence and
unsubmissive femininity, this dimension of how she is portrayed becomes
especially problematic. In the biographies for children, trouble is taken
not to show Frida as devoted to Diego. Instead, emphasis is placed on her
agency and the choices she makes: according to Nadia Fink’s biography,
the couple agreed to have an open relationship (no mention is made of the
betrayals, let alone that they divorced after she discovered he was having
an aair with her sister). Sánchez Vergara’s biography is even more succinct
and tells us that Diego encouraged Frida in her painting. Frida is presented
as a rebel when she refuses to be bound by what other people try and
make her do: when she is forbidden from getting out of bed, she has her
bed taken to the gallery in Mexico where a retrospective of her work was
being held. The rebelliousness attributed to her seems to be in tune with the
post- feminism emphasis of Gill and McRobbie, in which being successful is
having the ability to choose and acquire power without actually changing
104 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
its structures. Frida, we are told, chose an open relationship with Diego, she
chose Diego, and she chose to give a message of happiness and resilience
when life gave her suering and pain. Frida chose to succeed as an artist,
too, but these biographies do not tell us much about how she achieved
this, how she managed to have her work accepted as part of a canon from
which the majority of female artists were excluded, how she achieved rec-
ognition in Mexico only after she achieved it abroad. The critique of Gill,
McRobbie, and others is directed at the ways in which this idea of choice
and empowerment, this celebration of women being able to exercise their
will, hides the structural injustices and the negotiations that have to take
place in order to achieve what is then coded as success.
In the third biography that we analyse in this article, some cracks start
to appear in this model of an insubmissive and empowered woman. At
147 pages, this book by Spanish illustrator and author María Hesse, is
somewhat longer than the others. Hesse writes the biography alternating
a first- person narrator, a fictionalised Frida, with texts actually written by
Kahlo in her journal, which are indicated by the use of a calligraphic font.
She also provides versions of Kahlo’s works and photographs with lightly
drawn illustrations in gouache and Indian ink. The text is arranged on
the page sometimes in the form of bullet points or text boxes and some-
times as illustrations that act as a counterpoint to the written text. As
a result, the work is a little dicult to assign to a specific category of
multimodal text: although it is not a picturebook, or a graphic novel, the
illustrations do indeed tell part of the story, they are not merely a com-
plement. The story is again organised on the trajectory of birth to death,
but its additional length allows for the inclusion of more life events. The
narrator starts with a description of Frida’s father, who suered from epi-
lepsy, worked as a photographer, and who “loved my mother deeply, yet
she was never truly happy with him because she couldn’t forget her first
love, also German, who had committed suicide” (Hesse, 2018, p. 21). The
image shows a naked, childlike Frida connected to her forebearers with a
red ribbon.
This is an opening which already promises us a bare- all exposé, in the
form of sincerity and defiance of taboos. Later on, the narrator tells us
that she never suered from polio but instead had been born with a genetic
malformation that her parents hid because they did not know at that time
whether it was contagious. She tells us that it was because of this illness
that she was sent to school late, that her parents lied about her age and
that other children teased her because of her leg, which is why she hid it
with trousers. The tram crash is told over a double- spread depicting her
body as visibly bleeding and pierced by an iron bar— the handrail that
broke so many of her bones and vertebrae. Hesse’s biography does not
shy away from dimensions that other two choose to ignore: she tells of
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 105
how Diego cheated on Frida with her sister Cristina, how many fights it
took to convince him to return to Mexico when they were living in the
USA, how she suered through miscarriages, her love aair with Leon
Trotsky and what it meant to live in her husband’s shadow. Hesse’s biog-
raphy is certainly aimed at an older reader, if only because the text is
longer and more complex. However, perhaps it is better to understand
it as a “crossover text”, a term that the Canadian critic Sandra Beckett
uses to describe the publishing phenomenon in which works are produced
that appeal to readers of dierent ages (2010). Beckett demonstrates that
this is true both in youth fiction, especially fantasy, and in picturebooks
where artistic exploration and innovative page setting expand narrative
possibilities. Many so- called “crossover” picturebooks are also classified
by some authors as “challenging”: books that challenge what is commonly
considered to be child- appropriate, whether in terms of the way they deal
with topics such as death, xenophobia, or abuse, or in more formal aspects
such as the use of metafiction, more sophisticated graphics and the mixing
of genres (Ommundsen et al., 2021). Hesse’s book meets several of these
criteria but, above all, the author opens the door to a Frida Kahlo who is
not necessarily a role model, but is certainly a powerful artist. The tough
ending to her life is not sugar- coated and her life is recounted alternating
the use of a first person emulating an autobiographical voice and extracts
from Frida’s diary, in which the voice is likewise that of the artist herself.
Hesse’s Frida tells of the pain caused by Diego’s multiple infidelities as well
as the seven operations on her spine which she underwent in 1950. It also
relates how she was sometimes overcome with despair and barely able to
leave the house,
I continued painting, but I stopped making self- portraits and started
doing still lives. I think that my work changed because of a combination
of brandy, tequila, cognac, and analgesics, or maybe it just happened.
There were days when I got my strength back, but for the most part, I
would sink into a darker place full of monsters.
(p. 131)
Frida’s first solo exhibition in Mexico is also mentioned, “The doctor told
me I could not leave my bed, so I took it with me to the opening. I drank
and sang with all my assistants” (p. 133), it says, and in the picture the
artist lies unsmiling (not drinking or singing) in her bed. On the next page
she is in a wheelchair with her leg amputated and text telling us that “I
was losing the desire to live that had filled everything before” (p. 135).
Then it tells of her death. It says that she celebrated her birthday “singing
and laughing, I wanted to be remembered the way I had always loved
to live” and then, that only a week later, “all that was left on the bed
106 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
was the body that had turned into a prison for me” (p.137). Finally, fic-
tional Frida speaks to us from the far side, “Some say that I suered a
pulmonary embolism. Others say that after a fall in the bathroom, I hurt
my amputated leg and took more analgesics that I should have” (p.137).
The last page shows a Frida surrounded by the watermelons with their
legend (“Long live life”). Frida Kahlo. Coyoacán, 1954, México) and a
text quoted from her diary, “I hope the exit is joyous, and I hope to never
come back” (p. 139). Hesse thus also ends her book with the idea of joy
and celebration of life, perhaps because this is how Kahlo signed her own
farewell. However, unlike the previous biographies, Hesse does provide
cracks in the versions of Kahlo’s life that strive to make it a happy object.
In fact she even warns of this in the brief “introduction” written by the
author:
When so much has already been written about Frida Kahlo, why do it
again? It seems like we all know Frida Kahlo. Or at least we all have a
more or less definite image of her character and of her as an artist (…).
Frida embellished her stories, Frida invented, Frida told the truth, Frida
contradicted herself. She would change her version of a story from
letter to letter, according to the urgency of the moment in which she
found herself. (…).
This book isn’t about Frida’s real life or even the one she invented. It is a
blend of the two because I think some aspects of her real life were more
interesting than her fiction, but, at other times I would rather respect
the truth of the life she wanted to tell us.
That said, all that’s left for me to oer a bit of advice: If you want to
know the most authentic aspects of her life, immerse yourself in her
paintings, in which she left us brief messages about who she was. It is in
her paintings where the real Frida lives.
(p. 11)
In this introduction, Hesse endeavours to separate reality and fiction,
as well as life from art, in order to invite us to appreciate Frida’s art in its
own right. The author and illustrator are also aware of how this division
is complex and illusive. In this little introduction, Hesse draws a dividing
line between the falsehoods in Frida’s written texts, texts that Hesse herself
replicates in the book, and the truth of her “pictures”, which we assume
does not include those drawings that Kahlo made in her diary. Finally she
promises us a “real Frida”. We can read this promise in the short quota-
tion that appears at the start of the book, “To build a wall around one’s
own suering is to risk being devoured from the inside. Frida Kahlo”.
The Happy Objectification of Frida Kahlo 107
Despite this book’s more transgressive approach to both the conventions
of biography (in its collage of texts from dierent sources and images
with multiple intertextual references) and those of children’s literature (its
inclusion of frequently censored episodes and themes), the hybrid voices of
this biography produce a Frida Kahlo who is an artist using the expression
of her suering in order to achieve something. Acknowledgement? Being
devoured from the inside? Despite the watermelons and their joyful epi-
taph written by the artist herself, the end of this biography is much sadder.
Hesse avoids the killjoy sensibility propounded by Sara Ahmed, but allows
herself to evoke cracks and consider questions of who can tell a life story
and to what end.
In her article. “Clarice Lispector”, por Benjamin Moser: celebración y
misoginia en el discurso biográfico [“Clarice Lispector” by Benjamin Moser:
celebration and misogyny in the biographic discourse] (2021), Aina Pérez
Fontdevila reflects on Moser’s biography of Clarice Lispector (2009) as an
example of “misogynous literary criticism”. Pérez Fontdevila uses the notion
of mechanisms of “suppression of women’s writing”, coined by Joanna Russ
(2018), to analyse the ambivalent authorisation, or indeed withdrawal of
authorisation, of the Brazilian writer’s work when it is read as a reflection
of a collective context for which the author is the spokesperson, and the
subsequent pathologising portrait painted of her. In the process of “author-
izing” Lispector, Moser presents her as a housewife who wrote novels
and short stories. No attribution of genius may be granted to the author,
merely some extravagancy related to her Jewish background. This reading
of the biography of the Brazilian author allows us to shed some light on the
reading of these Frida Kahlo biographies for new generations of readers.
In these books, the life and work of the Mexican artist is celebrated, but at
the same time her exceptionality is whittled away in order to present her as
a role model for rebellion for post- feminist times. In these texts, the figure
of Frida Kahlo is somewhat distanced from her certainly highly commodi-
fied status as a queer icon (her distinctive unibrow, her bisexuality). Instead
the emphasis placed on the tribulations she suered from a young age and
how she managed to rise above them and exercise her right of choice, thus
oering the artist as an example of resilience. We are told little or nothing of
how her work was groundbreaking in its time, and marked a turning point
in terms of repertoires of works by women, autobiographical visualities,
and the appropriation and valuation of Latin- American Indigenous cultures.
Only Hesse’s biography dares to outline a little of the diculties she faced in
achieving recognition and the prevailing sexism of the art scene.
In all three of these autobiographies for children we can identify an
eagerness to put a happier twist on the suering that Frida Kahlo endured
by giving her a more hopeful ending, where the artist appears as a figure
with agency in her own life. Perhaps the very genre of biography makes it
108 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
dicult to introduce other intensities, especially if we think of biography
as an account of a human life lived with a notion of humanist, illustrated
agency, in which the subjects are the architects of their work on earth. In
these collections for young readers this humanist orientation appears even
more strongly in the intention to educate through role models. The aim
of bringing visibility to women who have not historically been depicted
as central figures, is combined with a humanist pedagogical intensity that
once again excludes women and the feminine in pursuit of a narrative that
slots comfortably into the canon. As a result, Frida becomes reduced to a
figure who redeems the emotional aspects of her life through her art, which
functions as an expression of suering. The power and originality of her
artistic language do not become part of the biographiable story; they are
left on the cutting room floor alongside the sexist structures, discourses,
and materialities that limited her work and her recognition.
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
7 Climate Crisis, Water Wars, and
Post- Anthropocentric Narratives
In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in the number of children’s books
about ecology and sustainability, as well as those aiming to tackle global
concerns on the climate crisis. While controversy rages over whether the
fact that human impact on the world’s ecological systems has reached
such dangerous limits that it should be referred to as the Anthropocene,
there can be no doubt that this is the landscape in which authors are cur-
rently working. Children’s books include various approaches to the cli-
mate crisis, ranging from non- fiction books about the environment and
its current challenges, to various fictional narratives in which children
become engaged in activities to restore ecosystems. Far too often, children
in these books are involved in restorative practices, while adolescents and
young adults appear to carry less of this burden.
Alongside my colleague Justyna Desczsz- Tryhubczak, from the
University of Wroclaw, Poland, I have contemplated how the Anthropocene
is narrated for children, exploring the hopeful spins that are generally put
on such narratives. In “Speculating about Post- Anthropocene Childhoods
with Donna Haraway’s The Camille Stories: A Response from Children’s
Literature and Culture Studies” (2025) we contend that while the dis-
course positioning children as the hope for the future has a long history, it
has become more acute in the light of ecological apocalypse. In our essay,
we use childist criticism to give a critical reading to Haraway’s notion
of the redemptive child, the Camilles, in decades of planetary devasta-
tion. We note how Haraway’s (2016) speculative fiction is connected to
a trend in the children’s literature in which young children are presented
as the hope for the future. Our field of research is becoming increasingly
engaged with recommendations for texts that have ecopedagogical poten-
tial (see McKee, 2015; Echterling, 2016; Goga et al., 2018; Guanio- Uluru,
2019; Sakrisson, 2020; Midki and Austin, 2021; Oziewicz and Saguisag,
2021; Campagnaro and Goga, 2022; Kerslake, 2022). We note how
these recommendations and guidelines do not give much consideration
112 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
to the adultist assumptions in relation to education about climate crisis
and the uses of fictional texts. In Children As Ecocitizens: Ecocriticism
and Environmental Texts, Clare Bradford and Geraldine Massey argue
that environmental books are strong on articulating the ecological crisis
but weak on promoting the political programmes or the collective action
necessary to address it eectively (2011). We have observed that books
that articulate the ecological crisis do little to question the anthropocen-
trism that has so far pervaded Western culture, and we question whether
this bears any relation to the identified lack of children’s books addressing
global and epistemic injustices.
Tackling anthropocentrism is not easy, if only because we are humans
trying to think about how we have made humans the centre of a planetary
order. Environmental humanities professor Timothy Clark notes how the
scale and complexity of the problem escapes our understanding and the
models of responsibility in which we have so long believed, on the basis
that “the greater the number of people engaged in modern forms of con-
sumption then the less the relative influence or responsibility of each but
the worse the cumulative impact of their significance” (2015, p. 150). The
very notion of a “carbon footprint” alters the distinctions between the
public and private spheres, which are an integral part of the modern liberal
state. Moreover, as Timothy Morton points out in his influential mono-
graph Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
(2013), global warming is a “hyperobject”, namely something that cannot
be seen directly, but which we know to exist and can analyse— a combin-
ation that in many ways defies human ways of thinking. Morton argues
that it is the fact that the casualties of global warming are so complex that
it makes so much space for deniers. Hyperobjects are globally ubiquitous
and both too large and too small for humans to sense or represent fully.
Climate change, as other hyperobjects, is approached in adult- led ways
missing the opportunity to integrate children’s owns ways of sensing and
representing it (Kraftl et al., 2022).
Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” allows us to visualise the tricky
temporalities caused by the complexity of the hyperobject in the form of
global warming and its unfairness (2011). Nixon refers to the violent
eects of toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and how the environmental
aftermath of wars occurs gradually, rendering them in many ways invis-
ible. Slow violence occurs in late capitalism with the graduality we also
recognise in the necropolitics that result in such precarious lives for those
who are disempowered and often involuntarily displaced: children from
marginalised communities appear to be the most aected if only because
such tricky temporalities block the possibility of reaction until it is too late.
Nixon emphasises how the slowness of this violence prevents us from iden-
tifying it, “By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 113
out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time
and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence
at all” (Nixon, p. 2). Depicting and representing slow violence is essential
for identifying it and for prompting political action. Nixon examines how
activist writers create literary portrayals that capture violence, extending
it beyond a single event or location.
What space may be left for engaging with slow violence and the cli-
mate crisis if so much of children’s literature is shaped by hope? Are the
educational intensities of children’s literature part of that slow violence in
which we are taught to postpone our desires and to learn to live without
demanding more? Are the recommended books on environmental issues
complicit in this slow violence when they gloss over or normalise environ-
mental damage?
In this chapter, I attempt to address the hyperobject of global warming
by examining narratives about water scarcity and the environmental crisis.
Environmental humanities have been casting ever more attention to water
as a key and often forgotten dimension of ecosystems. In The Water Wars,
Vandana Shiva asserts that the global water shortage is “the most pervasive,
most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of
the earth” (2002). She argues that such a crisis needs to be understood as
one of clashing cultures: while for some water is sacred and access to it
a right, others perceive water as a commodity with a good market value.
In the 20 years since this book was written, the water shortage and the
privatisation of the natural resource has become a matter of extreme con-
cern. A recent World Bank report warns that water scarcity will hinder
economic growth, spur migration, and spark conflict (2023). If we remain
on our current trajectory, by 2030 an estimated 700 million people will be
at risk of being displaced by drought (World Bank Group 2016). The quip
that water is the new oil is a familiar one, and yet one that should terrify
us: wars over the scarce supply of fresh water may well come to dominate
21st- century geopolitics. The data is alarming: decreasing aquifers, chan-
ging rainfall patterns, less snowmelt and thus less snow runo, dropping
reservoir levels, and competition for use between farming, electricity gen-
eration, and urbanisation, to mention just a few challenging scenarios.
These trajectories, coupled with climate change- driven system shifts such
as the contraction of the Asian monsoon and loss of snowmelt from the
Himalayas is leading to what the journalist Fred Pearce calls a “hydro-
logical holocaust” (2006, p. 222).
We find few narratives about the water crisis in children’s literature
and culture texts. A very popular one is the book Why Should I Save
Water? (2001), published by Scholastic in the USA and translated into
several languages. Written by Jen Green and illustrated by Mike Gordon,
it presents a simple story of a child learning various ways to save water
114 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
after water rationing rules come into eect. The child, who is Black, tells
us that in their family they used to leave the taps running when they did
the dishes or brushed their teeth “until Kirsty from next door came over”
(p. 9). The illustrations show a red- haired girl with an angry face telling
the Black child who is washing his bike, “Don’t you know there are rules
against using hoses?” (p. 9). Kirsty, the White child, explains the recent
lack of rain and how they need to ration in order to have water to live.
The two children discuss the importance of water with no mention of
ecosystems— only an image of a man who is trying to fish in an empty
pond. Why Should I Save Water? is a very clear example of an anthropo-
centric narrative about the crisis: a narrative in which the human is at the
centre and the crisis is only related to the scarcity of certain elements that
may make our lives more dicult. Moreover, the narrative produces a
solution— reduce your water consumption— which is bound to individual
actions and responsibilities, leaving no room for the discussion of possible
structural injustices.
More recent publications address the issue with a growing attention
to the context of the broader ecological crisis, emphasising the inter-
dependence of life, natural resources, and planetary cycles. One of these
books is Ohne Wasser geht’s nicht! by Christina Steinlein, illustrated by
Mieke Scheier (2020) translated into French, Polish, Mandarin Chinese,
and Spanish among others. This is a non- fiction picturebook that explains
where water comes from, why it is such an essential resource, and how
humans depend on it for everyday activities like drinking, bathing, and pro-
ducing food. The book also touches on more political issues, such as who
owns water and whether there are fundamental rights associated with it,
prompting readers to think critically about access to water and the dispar-
ities that exist globally. This book has received two important recognitions
in Germany: one related to the visual design (The “Schönsten Deutschen
Büchern 2020” to most beautiful books given by the Stiftung Buchkunst),
and one related to its educational value (the “Umwelt- Buchtipp März
2020”, Environmental Book of the Month, for children’s and YA litera-
ture). Another book that has received important critical attention and
may be related to narratives of water crisis is We Are Water Protectors by
Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade, a poetic picturebook
that tells a story related to the Indigenous- led movements to protect water.
Through the eyes of a young girl, Lindstrom highlights the spiritual and
cultural importance of water, portraying it as a life- sustaining force that
must be defended against harm, especially in the face of pollution. The
book, which has won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 2021, does not
delve into responsibilities or conflicts about polluted water.
Ohne Wasser geht’s nicht and We Are Water Protectors briefly touch
upon the fundamental rights associated with water avoiding to represent
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 115
any conflict on how water is treated as a commodity rather than as a public
good. These two books do provide advancement compared to Why Should
I Save Water? and to other titles that solely encourage young people to
engage in minor, everyday actions to “fix” the planet, yet are also shaped
by narratives of hope that skew over the conflicts. How to narrate the
pressing matter of increasing scarcity and unequal distribution of water
resources? How to talk about the two billion people that live in countries
with high water stress, with a severe shortage of clean drinking water. As
the world population grows and climate change exacerbates droughts and
extreme weather conditions, the availability of fresh water has become a
critical concern, particularly in regions where it is already scarce.
A dierent approach may be traced in the short film Abuela Grillo
(2009) and its adapted picturebook Abuela Grillo y la defensa del agua
[Grandmother Cricket and The Defence of the Water] (Chapon and
Michel, 2020). The film tells a story related to the water wars and water
scarcity in the Andean Region. In this chapter, I use this story to reflect on
other possible narratives to render the water and the climate crisis without
avoiding the conflict. I am interested in how Abuela Grillo deals with the
politics of hope that appear so pervasive and burdensome in children’s lit-
erature and culture.
Abuela Grillo, directed by Denis Chapon (2009) was produced by The
Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, and the Community of Bolivians
Animators supported by the Danish Embassy in Bolivia with the involve-
ment of the Bolivian writer Claudia Michel, who worked at the Yerba
Mala Cartonera publishing house between 2008 and 2013. The moving
voice that provides the background music to the animation is that of the
renowned Bolivian singer, Luzmila Carpio. The film addresses water scar-
city in relation to globalisation, corruption, and conservation. It is based on
the myth of Abuela Grillo [Grandmother Cricket], who some have seen to
be an embodiment of the Andean goddess Pachamama. In the film, Abuela
Grillo is a member of the Ayoreo people, an ethnic group from the Gran
Chaco area located between the Paraguay, Pilcomayo, and Parapetí rivers,
and shared by Bolivia and Paraguay. When the old lady sings, it rains.
The film is wordless or “nearly wordless”, to use a description from
picturebook scholarship (Arizpe, 2013). The most important verbally
coded text is found in the title— Abuela Grillo— , but there are also a few
words said during the film. The grandmother sings in the Quechuan lan-
guage, but when she reaches the city, La Paz, there are a few words in
Spanish. The story tells how the old lady is driven from the high plains of
the Altiplano, after being insulted and attacked by a young man who has
had enough of her singing. Abuela Grillo makes her way across the Andes
to a city, where shortly after her arrival she is captured by square- shaped
men in suits who have observed her using her gift to replenish an empty
116 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
fountain. These men put her on stage to sing, and when she tries to escape,
they tie her to a chair and subject her to physical violence in order to force
her to continue. As the rain falls, they bottle the water and sell it at abusive
prices to desperate citizens who can no longer aord to pay.
The visuals in Abuela Grillo are evocative and nostalgic. The animators
capture the essence of the city of La Paz through the depiction of familiar
objects and scenes, reproducing the very particular geography in which the
high plains give way to a city that is surrounded by mountains. This is how
you experience entering La Paz, as dipping into a secret city in the midst of
one of the world’s most impressive geological landscapes.
The film has a lot of singing, which is always in the native Quechua
language, a fact that may lead viewers to wonder if they are missing out
something. However, this may be one of the main points of the film: we
are always missing something when we think about the climate crisis.
Moreover, the only possible aesthetic and political way to think about the
climate crisis, and more specifically the water shortage, starts by changing
our ways of knowing.
Abuela Grillo is well suited to be read with an aective childist approach.
Childist criticism has gained followers in recent years (García- González
2022; Joosen 2022; Deszcz- Tryhubczak and García- González, 2023). The
approach was originally developed in children’s literature studies by Peter
Hunt, who in 1984 coined the term arguing for a more egalitarian rela-
tionship between adults and children when reading and interpreting texts
addressed to young readers. Hunt argued that young readers’ multiple
individual responses to literature should inform adults’ critical practice
as a way towards a more accurate understanding of “reading as a child”
in particular cultural contexts (1984, p. 45). He argues that literature
scholars and critics should make eorts to read texts from a children’s and
a childist point of view (1991, p 143).
Hunt’s call for a childist criticism is informed by an awareness of the pos-
ition of adult gate keepers in children’s literature publishing. As he notes,
children can only choose from what is available so we need to expand our
imagination when selecting and publishing texts to include considerations
of how multiple and actual children read and approach them. By com-
bining such a proposal with methodological guidelines inspired by new
materialist and aect theory, we can understand how reading and inter-
pretation is not only organised within verbal language, but also as a fluid
exchange of intensities (García- González, 2022). Childist criticism helps us
to shift how texts are read and how they relate to others. For me, childist
criticism is a guide to the “arts of noticing”, to paraphrase the notion of
Anna Tsing (2015, p. 37), and lies in being attentive to what is not coming
to our attention. If we start from an acknowledgement that our ways of
knowing are adultist, we may be more prepared for noticing what we
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 117
discard. An aective childist criticism invites reading alongside children
without dissecting how messages are decoded and negotiated, but tracing
and mapping how art provokes us and produces certain attachments, and
how it is entangled with our ways of feeling. I view childist criticism as
one of the many methodological devices that can be used to trace how the
vibrancy of artwork moves us and our empathic attachments.
In what follows, I will focus on the short film rather than on its later
book adaptation. The book has had a much more limited circulation and it
is clearly a derivative text. Furthermore, the inclusion of a textual explan-
ation of the story diminishes the material- semiotic complexity of the art-
work. The film, as introduced earlier, presents a fable that is based on an
Indigenous myth. The conflict over water that appears in the film is one
between corporations and Indigenous communities, a conflict that could
be perceived as epistemological. Miranda Fricker (2007) coined the con-
cept of “epistemic injustice” to illustrate how forms of wronging someone
are both epistemological and forms of injustice. Her term updates trad-
itional understandings of justice, rooted in ethics and political philosophy,
to take account of the fact that the resources we use to acquire knowledge
are unfairly distributed. The concept has been taken up in the academic
study of children’s literature scholarship with a view to appraising how we
know about children’s literature and whether children are considered to be
knowledge makers (van Lierop- Debrauwer, 2022).
My attention to this short film was triggered by the children’s reaction
to it in the framework of a research project called #EstoTbn, on which
I worked with my colleagues Soledad Véliz and Ignacia Saona in Chile.
In #EstoTbn, we explored how adults and children recommend literary
and cultural texts (music, film, art projects). We worked in collaboration
with children aged 10 to 14 and tracked their responses, preferences,
and modes of engagement. In previous research studies, we had identi-
fied a hyperfocus on books as the privileged media for literary educa-
tion and reading promotion and a rather adult- centric organisation of
what gets recommended to children (Garcia-Gonzalez et al., 2023). In
this project, we explored young people’s reading practices in relation to
intergenerational interactions and the impact of dierent media. We were
interested in exploring how children and adults are aected by cultural
productions and forms of recommending literary and cultural texts: what
gets to circulate and what does not.
Abuela Grillo was very popular among the young participants who often
referred to it as their favourite of the recommendations. It was likewise
often mentioned by the parents and library sta who also were involved
in the project. It was probably the recommendation that motivated the
most intense intergenerational engagement. In most cases, adults focused
on the educational value of the film and on how well it spoke about the
118 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
ecological crisis, even though it also gave rise to some negative comments
as, for instance, the stance expressed by a mother who decided not to share
the film with her child arguing that, “The criteria for what he watches is
that they will ideally show him the good side of life… but in the case of
Abuela Grillo it shows strong images of evil people and of protests… and
it pigeonholes the ones wearing suits”.
Some of the children sent us written reviews of this short film to be
published on our Instagram account:
“Grandmother Cricket is the whole planet when she is exploited, at the
same time that she is her own ability to heal.”
“The abuela represents our planet and how it is overexploited for
people’s own benefit.
I recommend it to everyone.”
“I like it because it explains that big companies or the government steal
water and sell it at a high price. Also that people are scared of the
unknown.”
“The concept of respect is very well explained from the beginning,
since if the village youth had not thrown the corn- on- the- cob at her,
the drought would not have come. So being disrespectful doesn’t lead
anywhere but karma.”
“The story is very beautiful. I like the animation and music a lot.”
“I like it a lot, but I find it too sad.”
I was interested in how their comments evoked a variety of engagements
that ran from a very didactic understanding of the value of artwork—
mentioning how well it depicts respect or environmental damage— to
more emotional responses that we may trace in references to the music,
the visuals, or the sadness of the story.
The children’s reviews quoted above may not be the most telling responses
in terms of understanding their engagement with the film, but they allow us
to trace some of the attachments to it. In the frame of our #EstoTbn project,
Abuela Grillo was often praised for being beautiful, yet sad. Sadness, anger,
and hope appeared to work well together. Towards the end of the study,
we invited the children to prepare some fanzines in which they engaged in
playful ways with the idea of recommending children’s cultures. The fanzine
workshops were led by Camila González Simón, who joined the team as part
of her research on alternative forms of publishing, as ways of inquiring into
the children’s preferences and aective engagements with the films, books,
and dierent artworks we had shared with them (2022). Many of them
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 119
would single out Abuela Grillo as a favourite in these fanzines. Figures 7.1
and 7.2 show two drawings created in these workshops in response to the
prompt “Draw a front cover or poster for your favourite #EstoTbn work”.
Many created images inspired by Abuela Grillo with the two shown here
depict Grandmother Cricket standing in the rain, and the other a close- up
of the iconic image of her tears. While drawing these they spoke about their
feelings for the pain the abuela had to go through.
Age plays a part in how we read and feel the film. An aective childist
approach opens space for our feelings about how age and generations are
entangled with our ways of knowing about who and what matters. The
complicity between children and elderly people that Vanessa Joosen iden-
tifies as frequent in children’s literature is also found here (2022). It is
certainly a common plot feature in children’s films: think, for instance, of
UP, the Pixar animated film in which a child meets an old man who does
not want to sell his lifelong house to a construction company building
high towers. They go on an adventure together that could be seen as a
“coming of age” for both of them. In Abuela Grillo, while children are
only briefly represented as naturally allying themselves with the elderly,
Figure 7.1 Child’s drawings in response to Abuela Grillo. The old lady standing
in the rain.
120 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
when at the start of film a little girl comes running to hug the nice granny,
the intergenerational entanglements are amplified by the film’s circulation
and reception. The film about this old lady is a children’s film that reacts
against the world of adults and their suits, industries, and injustices. This
became clearer to me when I read comments left on the YouTube account
of Denis Chapon, the film’s director, in which adults reflected on watching
and rewatching this film when they were younger.
I have used Abuela Grillo to think about aective childism as a means
to trace possible Post- Anthropocentric narratives. The story is structured
as a variation of a home- away- home plot, the most common trope and
plot organisation in children’s literature texts, in which the protagonist,
usually a child, leaves the safety of the domestic space to experience an
adventure that finds its closure in their return home (see Nodelman and
Reimar, 2003, pp. 198– 202). In this case, the protagonist is an elderly
woman, Abuela Grillo, who is expelled from her territory and community
to a place that represents a radical contrast in terms of her worldview and
tradition, where she has to face the evils of neoliberalism in which water is
Figure 7.2 A child’s illustration from the #EstoTbn project depicting a close- up
of Abuela Grillo crying, highlighting her tears as a central visual meta-
phor in the film.
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 121
not only a commodity, but where people with power are more than willing
to impoverish others to enrich themselves. The home- away- home story arc
is one in which the protagonist leaves a land and a way of worldmaking
(singing to make crops grow) for a place in which such worldmaking has
been overtaken by capitalism and individualism. The abuela can hardly
sing anymore. The story is only resolved when her home community
comes to liberate her: after experiencing severe drought, the communities
in the mountains flood to the city to demand water. The community and
the collective way of living to which the abuela returns is home.
Abuela Grillo presents an alternative to dominant narratives for chil-
dren about the ecological and water crisis because this crisis is presented
as a conflict, rather than something that can be swiftly resolved with a
hopeful narrative in which an agentive child takes the lead. The conflict
is framed as one between corporations and Indigenous communities, yet
it runs deeper than that: it is a conflict of epistemologies, and one which
avoids presenting hope in the form of a naive understanding of children’s
agency. The film may be empowering a child's perspective by displacing
it to focalise in the figure of an elderly lady: children and old people are
connected and need to resist the exclusions of younger, so- called pro-
ductive adults. The film ends when the Indigenous people of the Andean
Region walk protesting into the city and are attacked by military forces.
The abuela is imprisoned, but just hearing her community’s angry voices
gives her the strength to recover her voice. Her singing is more powerful
than ever and provokes a storm over the city. While clearly presenting ter-
ritorial, social, and political clashes, the epistemological conflict lies once
again in how people know what they know and who is able to have this
knowledge. The abuela is wronged both by the people in her own village
and by the men in square suits. They do so because they do not acknow-
ledge her key position in life and thereby also wrong Indigenous beliefs
and natural entities.
In a poignant article about critical approaches to environmental edu-
cation, Kate Cairns (2022) wonders whether Nixon’s slow violence can
be applied to pedagogical practices seeking to unearth the hidden forces
of injustice. Cairns reflects on Eve Tuck’s (2009) cautions over how even
historicised accounts of injustice can feed narratives of “damage” that
depict communities as “defeated and broken” (Tuck qtd. in Cairns, 2022,
p. 524). The relationships between representation, interpretation, and
action are quite complex, but Abuela Grillo seems to open a way to cre-
ating new narratives that are not constricted by the damage, but result in
collective action. Such collective action appears not to be driven solely
by recognition of the damage, but rather by a pride about other ways of
knowing (see Figures 7.3 and 7.4).
122 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Figure 7.3 Abuela Grillo enters the city of La Paz, after leaving her community.
Source: Reproduced with permission by Denis Chapon.
Figure 7.4 Abuela Grillo is forced to sing to bring water for profit.
Source: Reproduced with permission by Denis Chapon.
Climate, Water, Post-Anthrop Narratives 123
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8 Entanglements of Social
Marginalisation and Reading
Promotion
Reading- promotion initiatives and practices have been at the centre of
educational public policy discussions in Latin America. These discussions
are driven by the need to improve literacy rates and promote a reading cul-
ture in the region. These policies have taken the form of national reading
plans, the establishment of school and public libraries, the organisation of
book fairs and other cultural events as well as public support for dierent
sorts of independent initiatives aimed at promoting reading.
The concept of “reading mediation” has emerged as a central tenet. This
mediation refers to the process by which mediators such as schoolteachers
and librarians, as well as sta specifically employed for the purposes of
reading promotion and children’s literature, facilitate encounters between
readers and texts. Through activities such as oral storytelling, literary
gatherings and arts- based workshops, mediators are seen to play a cru-
cial role in awakening interest in reading and developing reading skills
(Véliz and García- González, 2022; García- González and Errázuriz, 2024).
In this context, literary mediation is not only limited to formal educa-
tional settings, but also extends to non- formal spaces, such as community
centres, parks, and the home. Children’s and young- adult literature has
been conceptualised and characterised by its intersection with the didactics
of literature and reading promotion, reflecting the strong influence of its
socioeducational context and the fight for social justice and inclusion
(García- González et al., 2024). According to Véliz et al., in adverse contexts,
literary mediation is configured as an ethic of care, where attention to the
emotional and self- knowledge needs of communities is essential (2022).
In 2018, I worked with the Chilean Ministry of Education on a project
called Biblioteca Migrante [Migrant Library] which delivers collections
of picturebooks to schools where a high number of foreign children
are enrolled. One of the sad diagnoses of school library policy in Chile
is that the material delivered to schools is rarely consulted by students.
In some cases, it is not even made available to them. For the delivery of
126 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
the Biblioteca Migrante book collections, the experts at the Ministry of
Education asked me to design a literary mediation training to ensure that
the teachers would use the material. I proposed combining sessions on
literary and narrative mediation with other sessions on anti- racist peda-
gogies. I proposed to present books as tools with which to disrupt ways in
which dierence and exclusion are produced.
This programme reached the ears of the sta of an NGO that works
with communities living in informal settlements across Latin America.
The main goal of this organisation is to help such communities move to
social housing, but they also have several parallel programmes including
the creation of non- formal educational spaces. In the framework of this
initiative, they invited me to develop a reading- promotion programme that
could also serve as a means of meeting the communities’ emotional and
self- knowledge needs. They were particularly interested in work related to
exclusions, as many of the new settlers were migrants who were not always
well received by the local communities in Chile. We agreed to develop a
project with the NGO and members of the communities in question, which
would, at the same time, be a research project on emotional repertoires and
reading. I worked on this project with Soledad Véliz, researcher on reading
promotion and literary education, and Jacinta Jímenez, an ethnographer.
We first visited one of the shanty towns known in Chile as campamentos
on a hot summer day in February 2019, a day on which the headline news
was of the wildfires that had wreaked havoc on 15 thousand hectares of
native forest. People living in the aected region had been forced to leave
their homes. At the campamento, we were welcomed by local residents
who took the role of educators in these escuelitas, a term literally meaning
little schools, which were non- formal educational spaces that served as
after- school facilities for the children. The NGO did not provide a salary
for the educators, who were mostly mothers wanting to engage with some
sort of work in the community, but covered related expenses and provided
some other forms of financial compensation.
As soon as we arrived, accompanied by a representative of the NGO,
the community members who were waiting for us asked him if knew any-
thing about all the bags of clothes that had been delivered to the facility.
Nobody seemed to know where they had come from.
We sat in a circle and shared with the educators and the NGO repre-
sentative some of the findings of our research with picturebooks and how
they can be very useful resources for working with groups of dierently
aged children. I had planned to say something about the experience of
the network for Children’s Literature in Critical Contexts of Precarity,
which works in Central America and Egypt, as well as with children living
in refugee camps. I was looking forward to explaining how these books
were easier to read to a large group because they are usually short and
Social Marginalisation and Reading Promotion 127
have attractive images. But I did not because we soon realised we could
do better by listening. We asked them about the school and the children
and whether they themselves liked to read. Some of them replied that they
loved reading, but when I asked them what they liked, “the classics,” was
the only answer we got. Then we asked about the various schools the
children went to. Some were very good, they told us, they did not let you
walk in with a dirty uniform. They also told us that the children were
embarrassed to admit that they came from the campamento. They said
that outsiders thought people living in the campamentos were dirty and
did not wash themselves. We talked for almost two hours, covering a great
range of topics, including the wildfire that had burnt down the native
forest in Patagonia. We talked very little about what I thought we would
discuss, namely the books, the kind of books they were and the form in
which we were proposing to establish a reading- promotion programme.
The space had shelves lined with all sorts of donated books as well as a
yellow cabinet containing picturebooks, colourful marker pens, and a var-
iety of stationery.
When I wrote about this meeting for the first time I realised how uncom-
fortable I had been; I was concerned about what to say and do, I was not
sure of the ethical way to act. It was also not clear whether we would
be working with all the community members who attended the meeting.
I was wondering whether it was my responsibility to bring the meeting
to an end when one of them, the person who appeared to be acting as
the host, brought in a bread- based cake and we had tea, which created a
natural break. I made what I assumed were some closing remarks about
how we looked forward to working together. But then they suggested
we take a walk around the campamento. Our host showed us where the
Chileans lived and where the “foreigners”, also referred to as the “Latin
Americans”, lived. There were some rickety old shacks, interspersed with
a few more solidly built houses, some of which had two storeys. Our guide
told us that the good houses belonged to people involved with “more
lucrative businesses”, namely the drugs trade. Apparently, drugs were rife
within the campamento, which was why it was better for the children
to always be inside and why the escuelita initiative was so welcome. We
were also told that on cooler days and at weekends, the streets were full of
people hanging around outside and drinking alcohol.
When we turned back to the escuelita, they once again asked the NGO
representative about the bags of donated clothes, they were anxious that
they should be taken away, as they liked to keep the place tidy. The bags
had arrived a few weeks previously for five families who had lost every-
thing in a fire. Our guide had rallied the community to provide them
assistance and they had set up a soup kitchen. She assured us that the fam-
ilies were doing well now.
128 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
That same day the NGO representative took us to visit another camp
where just one woman was in charge of the escuelita. It was once again a
friendly space, organised with themed corners, worktables for preschoolers
and thick, colourful rugs. Like the other one, the space provided a marked
contrast with the tin shacks outside, the dirty roads and the lack of trees.
The NGO representative explained that these spaces were highly valued
by the communities, that many of the neighbourhood meetings were held
in the escuelitas rather than the premises established by the community for
this purpose.
The NGO explained that the woman in charge of the facility in this
second campamento was somewhat overwhelmed with the responsibility.
She had no job and five children. The day we came she had one of them
with her, a three- year- old who was running amok. She told us she had been
obliged to bring him because the previous day she had gone to sell a few
items at an open market on the other side of the road, and the little boy had
managed to find his way there. She had no idea how he had managed to
cross the road between the vehicles hurtling along it at 65 miles per hour.
She was visibly distressed and told us that she was no longer prepared to
leave him with his older siblings who had not taken good care of him.
She had been forced to abandon all her goods there to take her son home.
Then she told the NGO representative that her eldest daughter was preg-
nant so she would shortly have one more mouth to feed. We also learnt
that the children’s father had a restraining order against them. She was the
only person providing economic, domestic, and emotional support to her
large family, and yet she had also volunteered to be in charge of the school.
We learned all of this from what she told us, but she was not asking us
to find solutions for her. She then started a conversation with the NGO
representative about the need to get paid for the work she did for the
community. We felt quite uncomfortable to be present and did not know
what else to do, so we started looking at some board games and playing a
few games. None of us mentioned the reading- promotion programme. The
board games had been contributed by a foundation seeking to stimulate
cognitive and social development through play. They had provided each
of these educational spaces with a large selection of board games and now
the next thing was the NGO wanting to introduce a reading- promotion
programme.
I feared that our book collection would be like those bags of clothes
that no one seemed to want and I contemplated whether it was really
worth going ahead with the project. Soledad and I discussed it, wondering
whether the priority was to cater to what seemed to be more urgent needs.
We finally agreed to work on two campamentos: one located in the out-
skirts of northern Santiago and the other further to the south of the city.
They were 60 kilometres apart and travelling from one to the other on
Social Marginalisation and Reading Promotion 129
public transport would take more than four hours, however this is not
unusual as the workers living in these areas mostly commute to more cen-
tral areas of the city, a journey of two to three hours.
We prepared a small collection of picturebooks for these two spaces,
based on our previous work on emotional and literary repertoires. We
selected books that moved away from the imagined, middle- class happy
family that predominates in children’s publishing and included some
books thematising migration, death, and violence, three topics the NGO
thought it might be important to tackle. The collection also included
some playful books such as those by Herve Tullet— Press Here (2011)— as
well classic picturebooks such as Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice
Sendak (1963), and more contemporary examples such as The Journey
by Francesca Sanna (2016), or Bandada by María Julia Díaz Garrido
and David Daniel Álvarez Hernández (2012). In addition to Tan’s (2006)
The Arrival, we included another silent picturebook, Floatsam by David
Wiesner (2006). We then added some recent translations of somewhat
challenging Danish picturebooks such as Pedro Pa by Oskar K and Dorte
Karrebaek (2013), La últhima obortunidad by Kenneth Bogh Andersen
(2013) and Abuelo (2012) by Lilja Scherfig and Otto Dickmeiss. Added to
the mix were books in which children or child characters become aware
of their agency and power, books for which schoolteachers in our pre-
vious projects had shown a preference. This group included biographies
of (young) activists with particular reference to their childhoods— books
about Malala, Iqbal, and Wangari— , as well as a book that referred to the
Chilean dictatorship, La composición by Antonio Skármeta.
For each of these titles, we developed activities aimed at triggering
possible relationships with the books. These activities did not respond to
any notion of traditional literary mediation but rather were aimed at pro-
voking connections, guiding readers in dierent directions and questioning
possible emotional and ethical repertoires. So we proposed, for example,
that after reading about Beegu, a small creature that comes to Earth by
accident in the eponymous picturebook by Alexis Deacon (2003), children
could imagine and draw Beegu arriving in the campamento. When reading
La composición, about a child who grows up under a dictatorship that
no adult dares to name, we asked children to write about “things that my
parents don’t think I should know.” In relation to Abuelo, about an abu-
sive father, we asked them to model the adults that they did not like from
plasticine. With Where the Wild Things Are, in which a mother punishes
her son by sending him to his room without his dinner, we proposed
writing or drawing about the worst punishment they had ever received.
Through these activities we sought to activate other ways of feeling and
being aected by our readings and the social practice of reading and open
up other ways of encountering books.
130 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Our aim with this project, based on both our research and the vision
shared with the NGO professionals, was to free reading from the forms
that limit it, especially in relation to how it is understood in schools. The
project focused on exploring other ways of approaching reading and lit-
erature; ways that would allow us, researchers, to search for aections and
attachments instead of training readers into a form of detachment, as lit-
erary education usually does. As scholars in the children’s literature field,
we also wanted to rid reading of notions of taste, understanding this to be
a form of class reproduction. We sought, therefore, to do something with
books that would also complicate the book culture, which Margaret Meek
defines as, “the aspiration that through reading you would access culture
and achievement” (2004, p. 160).
Reading is often oered as a promise to improve the conditions of
existence. People associate reading with a desire for education, especially
during early childhood: those who learn to read for pleasure are expected
to have a more auspicious future ahead of them than those who avoid (or
are not interested in) books. Enjoying reading books is closely linked to
the notion of overcoming social marginalisation and year after year the
OECD reminds us, when the PISA (Programme for International Student
Assessment) results come out, that children who read for pleasure do
better than those who do not. PISA test analytics highlight that reading
for pleasure, that is, volitional reading is associated with overall academic
achievement (OECD 2019; Mullis et al., 2023). They also recognise it as
a mediator of gender and socio- economic status and argue that it can help
leverage social change (OECD 2021, p. 28). Evidence on the benefits of
reading has motivated a number of reading- promotion initiatives.
The NGO with which we worked is a well- known humanitarian organ-
isation in Latin America. In Chile, where it was founded, it works pri-
marily with people in social exclusion and chairs a variety of social- housing
initiatives. After more than 15 years working with these communities, they
came up with the idea of developing educational spaces, which would be
open after school and during the school holidays. Supported by sponsor-
ship from a bank, they were able to build or renovate suitable premises,
equipping them with modular furniture, a blackboard wall, and shelves.
The types of books that went on these shelves were not, it seemed, what
mattered. The libraries themselves were donated by another NGO, which
collects donations of used books. On my first visits I had a look through
these collections to find out what books there were and who their poten-
tial readers might be. However, when I interviewed children and adults
in the campamentos about their lives, hopes and routines, none of them
had ever read a book from those shelves. The books were not particularly
attractive as they were second hand. Yet, when we came with a much
smaller collection of recently bought picturebooks, the women in charge
Social Marginalisation and Reading Promotion 131
of the educational spaces were very enthusiastic. They claimed that the
children would love them as they were all very keen on reading. However
when I asked the children, things were less clear. None mentioned a
favourite book. They would not even remember the ones that they had
supposedly read in class. The children liked coming to the educational
space in the afternoons, because for most of them, going out alone was
forbidden as the neighbourhood was considered a dangerous place. In the
interviews, I also tried to garner an idea of the pervasive emotions in the
campamento: I asked how they would describe the atmosphere, the tone
of relationships, what the feeling of the place was. They referred to sev-
eral, but one stood out for me: envy. I was expecting anger or sadness to
be more prevalent, but they referred to envy and how to cope with the fact
that they would rather have someone else’s life.
The book collection arrived at the campamentos in late March and
by April we were already holding weekly sessions in which the books
were read aloud and children were then invited to draw, write or do
something in relation to the book. The community volunteers at the
escuelita, had named our project “Rincón Libre” (Free Corner) saying
that it sounded like Rincón Libro (Book Corner), but that they would
not dare to put the word book in the title because then children would
not want to come.
The first book they selected was Vamos a ver a papá [Let’s go see Papá]
written by Lawrence Schimel and illustrated by Alba Marina Rivera, a
beautifully illustrated picturebook that tells how a girl gets ready to migrate
to rejoin her dad, leaving behind her grandmother and friends (2010;
transl 2011). The illustrations provide an intimate texture with a meticu-
lous record of details of the Latin American country before the flight. One
of the community volunteers was keen on following our proposed activity
for this book, precisely because this book had reminded her of her own
migration. Yet no children came. Seven adult women were present, all but
one because they wanted to volunteer to be an educator at the facility, and
two of them had brought their own children. After half an hour, when they
realised it was unlikely that any more children would come (“perhaps they
don’t know we have this space open yet”) they decided to do the reading
and the activity among themselves. They read the book, passing it from
hand to hand, each of them reading aloud one double spread. The girl in
the story was not only leaving behind family and friends, but her dog and
many of her possessions. There was only space to pack a few things in her
suitcase. The illustrations of the fruit trees and the grandmother’s house
showed a Caribbean setting. The last double spread shows the girl on the
plane writing a letter to her grandmother. Now she will have to get used
to growing up far away from her, just as she had previously got used to
growing up away from her father.
132 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
For this book, we had proposed that the follow- up activity should be
writing a letter to someone they missed and had not seen for a long time.
After the shared reading, the adults were keen to do the activity. They sat
at the small tables and each concentrated on writing their letter. A member
of the research team, the ethnographer was there, and they asked whether
she would write one too. She agreed. They wrote to relatives who were in
other countries, or who had died, to relatives they missed, telling them how
much they missed them and what life was like in this other place. When
they finished, the community member who had been chairing the session
suggested that they read them aloud. Some refused, but most agreed. They
took turns to read and as they did some of them became emotional and
had to stop reading for a while, often with tears rolling down their cheeks.
Everyone was moved by the experience and there had been a discussion
about creating a reading club for adults.
From April through October, children from the campamentos did
come and had weekly sessions as part of our reading programme. Despite
being a non- formal educational space, the volunteers preferred to work
in organised sessions, as in schools. In the first sessions, the books were
read aloud by everyone present and passed from hand to hand so that
everyone could participate. Later, to make the reading experience more
fluid, the educators read the books out loud to the children who were not
a homogeneous group that listened in silence, but rather one that boister-
ously interrupted and commented on what they heard. We proposed other
possible initiatives such as silent reading moments, dierentiated activities
for groups of dierent ages, and a home loan system. But none seemed to
be as attractive as the shared reading which they all agreed was the best.
This was what the escuelita was about: sharing an experience all together.
We had designed the activities trying to represent the tastes of all the
people involved, endeavouring to present opportunities to be aected and
to feel, but at the same time stripping away the obligations to express one-
self politely and adhere to perceived good taste which, as Cristina Rivera
Garza says, are “frankly classist notions that belong, without a doubt, to
the realm of the proper: where behaviour is always appropriate; where
everything is always appropriate.” (2019, p. 268). We wanted to give space
to the inappropriate precisely by appropriating these texts to read as we
pleased, transgressing the assumption that what matters is understanding.
We thought that these stories, which fascinated us, would win over some
readers …
At first the programme seemed to be going well. Week after week we
received the ethnographer’s report with her impressions and copies of the
drawings and other work done by the children. She told us that from time
to time the children dared to say things that they otherwise would not
have said. For example, after reading La madre y la muerte we proposed
Social Marginalisation and Reading Promotion 133
the activity of writing “who or what you would bring back from death
and what you would give in exchange.” A girl asked to bring her dog
back from the dead and oered to give her brother in exchange. He was a
burden. The educator asked her if she was serious about this and she was.
For us, who were interested precisely in exploring the limits of what is tell-
able and non- normative ways of feeling, the response appeared as an indi-
cator that the books selected were managing to vibrate with their readers.
After a few months, enthusiasm began to wane. The ethnographer
reported how the reading at the beginning of the sessions became predict-
able and the children did not seem to enjoy it. They set up a rule for each
weekly session in which they would first read, then do the activity and
once it was all done, they could use the board games and have the meal.
“Maybe there are five children who are interested in the activity,” said
one of the educators, “the rest come to get the meal we give at the end,
and are always asking what time we are going to eat”. At first, we had not
assigned much importance to the snack given at the end of each session but
for many children this was all they had to eat until the following morning.
The NGO did not finance these snacks, but volunteers managed to raise
funds for them within the community. After a while we understood that
this shared meal was the most important thing for all of them.
Not long after, one of the volunteers confessed to us that she hated
reading. She hated reading as much as the children did: “What stupid
mind could have thought that children should read every month!”, she
said. She was referring to the obligatory readings mandated by the schools,
but also to our programme. This woman was in charge of reading to the
children. The only redeemable feature, she admitted to us, was that the
books they read opened interesting conversations.
We had designed a programme meant to challenge normative ways of
reading and feeling with books, but as weeks and months went by, we
realised that we still had a normative orientation towards it. I realised
that I too had been seduced by that promise of hope and happiness
through reading. We wanted books that were aesthetic agents capable of
deterritorialising ways of feeling but proved to be incapable of escaping
the force that still produces social hierarchies and exclusions.
At the end of that first year, we had a meeting with the community
volunteers to assess the programme and plan its future. We brought all
the books from the original collection as well as a few ideas about how
to continue with what we had sought to achieve. We had all these books
that aorded ways of feelings and avoided the easy happy endings, but
they did not seem to be interested in them. They said the activities we had
suggested for after the readings were good and that we could continue
with them, but perhaps we could work with films instead of books the
following year. I wondered if we had not spent too much energy choosing
134 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
out those books and believing in an almighty force of literature. Perhaps
books were not meant to matter in the ways we expected, as literary texts,
but rather as some sort of social agent that produced what Evelyn Arizpe
and her colleagues call a “safe space” (2025). They relate this “safeness”
to an art of hospitality, to a certain power of books in producing comfort,
conversations, and meaningful ways of caring for each other. The agentic
force of books may not be related to the stories they tell, but to the ones
we weave with and around them.
The community volunteers also told us that at the end it did not matter
much how we continued as long as they had electricity. If they had one
wish it would be to have guaranteed electricity in winter for the escuelita
because without electricity it was just too dark to run a proper session.
It would also be good to have more support for the food provision.
They spent all their energy raising funds for the food, because none of
these NGOs would provide money for it; they only wanted to provide
education…
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This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND International license.
9 The Arts of Noticing Children’s
Writing
Recent years have seen a markedly increased interest in studying and
identifying the creative contribution of children to children’s literature
(Cumming, 2017; Deszcz- Tryhubczak and van Bergen, 2021). When
we talk of children’s art, we think of art created by children, but when
we speak of children’s literature, we immediately think of adult authors
who tailor their writing to the enjoyment of young readers. Yet recent
publishing initiatives and research inquiries are making the dividing line
between “for” and “by” children more porous. In this chapter, I reflect on
some initiatives related to child- authored writing with a view to opening a
discussion on how these texts should be approached.
In Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature,
Victoria Ford Smith examines the collaborative nature of creating children’s
literature during the Victorian era (2017). By analysing letters, manuscripts,
and other historical evidence, she demonstrates that children’s input was
often integral to the development of many works, and she proposes that
children and adults functioned as creative partners. Ford Smith contends
that adult authors not only valued children’s imaginative contributions but
also encouraged them, often incorporating their ideas into their published
works. The collaboration unveiled by Ford Smith shaped the genre and has
broadened our understanding of how children influenced literary creativity.
Ford Smith’s interest in such collaborations is inspired by Marah Gubar’s
conceptual framework of the “kinship model” for analysing shared capaci-
ties between children and adults. In her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving
the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Gubar oers a critical analysis of
Victorian children’s literature and challenges traditional perceptions of the
genre (2009). She argues that contrary to the dominant idea that children
were primarily portrayed as pure and innocent, Victorian authors often
depicted children as active, imaginative, and complex participants in their
own right. Gubar explores how writers like Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, and
others created works that gave children agency, allowing them to subvert
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 137
adult authority while navigating social norms. She continues by suggesting
that to approach adult- child power imbalances, we need to move on from
what she calls the “deficit model” in which the child is in need of adult
knowledge and guidance, to the “kinship model” that is founded on the
recognition that children and adults are not so dierent, but “fundamen-
tally akin to one another” (2016, p. 299). Gubar and Ford Smith provide
an inspiring view of how children’s literature during the Golden Age was
not an adult- centric endeavour but rather a dynamic field where adults and
children worked together in creative partnerships.
This growing interest in what some scholars would term child agency
in the making of children’s literature (Christensen, 2021) is shedding new
light on child- authored writing, a neglected dimension of children’s litera-
ture studies (Arizpe et al., 2010). A scholar who has been calling attention
to this neglected dimension for a number of years, is Peter Cumming. In
What Children’s Writing? Read by Whom, How, and To What Ends?, he
argues for looking at these texts as literature (2008, pp. 195– 215). He
references Sebastien Chapleau’s call to pay more attention to children’s
writing while warning against oversimplifying, and invites us to con-
sider whether all children’s texts are of interest (2007). If they are not,
how do we decide which of them are? And what constitutes the signifi-
cant aspects of such texts when it comes to approaching them as objects
of literary studies research? How do we read them without being (too)
adultist? A decade later, Cumming edited a special issue of the children’s
literature journal Bookbird, featuring creative writing authored by chil-
dren and young adults (2017). This special issue included articles on the
juvenilia of children’s literature authors (O’Neill, 2017; Twomey, 2017),
on fanfiction (Duggan, 2017), and on Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in
Sarajevo (1995), written by Zlata Filipović, the diary of an eleven- year- old
child that has been translated, edited, illustrated, and published by adults
as a valuable testimony of the Bosnian War (Todorova, 2017). The article
on Zlata’s autobiography by Marija Todorova argues that adult involve-
ment in editing, translating and framing the diary silenced and repressed
the voice of the young author. The rest of the special issue includes art-
icles on various initiatives that foster children’s creative writing, remarking
that creativity is being missed in this area and opening some questions as
how to account for children’s creative voices (Branley, 2017; Kenny et al.,
2017; Kett, 2017; Klemenc, 2017; Marshall and Rogers, 2017).
This special issue was the starting point for a number of articles
exploring children’s and young- adult writing as a space that could open
the way to a dierent understanding of child- adult power relationships.
In Researching Child Authors: Which Questions (not to) Ask, Elisabeth
Wesseling (2019) directly addresses Marija Todorova’s 2017 critique of
138 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
adult involvement in the publication of Zlata’s Diary, arguing that while
adult mediation certainly exists, it does not necessarily result in the repres-
sion of children’s voices. Instead, she sees such interventions as providing
necessary context and facilitating broader understanding, particularly
when bridging cultural or linguistic gaps. She parallels these editorial
practices with classic philological work, which often uses introductions,
footnotes, and commentary to make older texts accessible to contem-
porary readers. Wesseling ultimately calls for understanding how children
and adults can benefit from working together rather than starting with
the assumption that all adult involvement is detrimental. Vanessa Joosen’s
work (2021) on the juvenilia of Bart Moyaert and his debut novel Duet
met valse noten (1983) elaborates further on the delicate balance between
preserving the authenticity of young voices and ensuring that a text meets
market norms. She argues that while some scholars see adult intervention
as compromising authenticity, others note that all authors receive editorial
guidance.
In this chapter, I seek to extend this conversation using a relational
ontologies approach (Spyrou, 2023) and some insights from authorship
studies (Bennett, 2005; van Eechoud, 2014; Pérez Fontdevila and Torras,
2019). The key new materialist thinker Karen Barad argues that human
and non- human matter do not interact, but intra- act: things do not exist
prior to their encounters, but are constituted by them; we both are and
live with ontological relations (2007). Spyrou, Rosen, and Cook propose
using the lens of relational ontologies to examine how children and adults
are produced through intra- actions and the British geographer Peter Kraftl
proposes reimagining childhood studies by bringing children in and out
of focus “through circumspect and fastidious arts of not noticing, or of
temporarily suspending our notice, or of (also) directing our attention
elsewhere” (2020, p. 53). He borrows this notion of the arts of noticing,
which I have used as the title to this chapter, from Anna Tsing (2015). In
The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing explores how attention
to marginal, often overlooked interactions and collaborations between
various species (including humans) can illuminate alternative ways of
understanding and engaging with the world. The “arts of noticing” are
about recognising the value in non- central, heterogeneous, and unex-
pected forms of living and organising. This approach calls for a more
nuanced and detailed observation of the living world. Tsing grounds this
invitation to a new art of noticing in acknowledging how diverse life forms
adapt and thrive in the ruins of capitalist destruction. The mushroom of
the title of her book is the matsutake mushroom, which thrives in human-
disturbed forests, particularly in places where industrial progress has
altered landscapes.
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 139
A relational ontologies approach helps us understand how the child is
produced in the intra- action with the adult and other more- than- human
agencies and shifts our attention from the deeply ingrained habit of
reading literary texts as autonomous and closed in themselves. A rela-
tional ontologies approach understands that our categories of analysis and
concepts are part of assemblages that are produced by— at the same as
they coproduce— our research practices.
Authorship studies stress that texts are open to contextual meaning
and that a driving force for them to exist can be found in what Foucault
called the author- function, namely “the praxis or pragmatics of author-
ship: the social, historical, institutional and discursive limitations on, and
conventions of, the author” (Bennet, p. 5). Literary theory decreed the
death of the author in the 1960s, with Roland Barthes’ homonymous essay
published in 1968 and Foucault’s What is an Author? that followed in
1969. These two essays have dominated literary criticism since then, setting
the terms of a debate with regard to the implications of holding a trad-
itional notion of authorship, suggesting that such a notion is constructed
through power relationships rather than expressions of human creativity.
This perspective shifts the focus from the author’s intentions to the reader’s
interpretation, emphasising the role of the reader. The Death of the Author
challenges the notion of singular genius and gives rise to new questions
about the relationships between language, power, and identity.
A relational ontologies approach helps us to understand how texts
are not authored by literary geniuses but by the entanglement of forces
that produce the authorisation for a certain semiotic- material language.
Understanding authorship on the grounds of relational ontologies
worldmaking leads us to acknowledge how several forces are at play to
produce our attention to them. Such a conceptual approach provides us
with new conceptual tools for noticing how children’s literature becomes
an ontology only in its relation to market niches, bookshops, literary
prizes, book covers, sizes, colours, and public policies, list of recommended
readings, recommendations, and other adult intensities organised around
the need to encourage children to read and the borders of what we deem
as appropriate for them.
How dierently do we conceptualise cases where the child is the writer
and the adult the reader, such as, for example, in writing competitions?
What other possibilities might we imagine for literature created by chil-
dren or by children collaborating with adults and/ or with other more-
than- human forces, such as, for example, artificial intelligence? How
are certain aective repertoires of children’s innocence and future hope
attached to what we term children’s literature and what eect do other
intra- actions have on these repertoires? Is censorship an aective force
140 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
that works in tandem with other non- human forces to prevent certain
books from reaching children’s hands?
Texts are authored by people, but also by institutions and multiple
forms of authorisation. In what follows, I tackle some of the questions
set out above in the light of three initiatives that promote or are related
to children’s writing. These initiatives have all received public funding,
albeit from dierent sources and institutional frameworks: one is related
to a programme funded by the Chilean Ministry of Education to promote
creative writing in schools (the Plan Nacional de Escritura); the second
is a literary prize awarded in Chile for adult and child- authored texts En
cien palabras [In a hundred words], supported by both public and pri-
vate funding; and the third is a research platform called #EstoTbn that
I established with research funding (subsequently run in partnership with
an NGO), which does not directly promote children’s creative writing, but
seeks to engage with it in various ways.
In this chapter of the book, I propose that a children’s literature in
which children may become writers is one in which the aesthetic ideal
of deterritorialising language and creating new worlds is brought closer.
I do not mean to say that child- authored writing should be at the centre
of children’s literature— the hallmark of worldmaking using relational
ontologies is, indeed, that no human is at the centre— but that children’s
creativity should be considered as a powerful agentic force. My attention
in this chapter is focused on those intra- actions that push children to
write and to the position of being authors and how do they resist or not
the meddling forces of standardisation. I provide a few examples of this
approach providing possible line of flight to the crisis of the paradigm
of aesthetic autonomy and the singularity and condition of genius of the
author, namely the “grand writer” (Pérez Fontedvila and Torras, 2016).
The Chilean National Writing Plan was developed in Chile as a
response to the low scores in writing skills that Chilean students were
getting in international standardised tests such as PISA. The pro-
gramme seeks to complement the Chilean National Reading Plan, which
comprises a myriad of reading- promotion initiatives and which started
out as a programme for schools, but now involves other cultural and
public institutions. Under this programme, children receive a notebook
with prompts inviting them to write short texts. Some of the prompts call
for fictional stories, while others for testimonial writing; an initial study
into these notebooks showed that students preferred to engage in testi-
monial rather fictional writing (Concha and Espinosa, 2022). When first
reading these notebooks, I was particularly interested by the responses of
adolescents (aged 15 to 18) to one of the prompts that called for fictional
engagement: “Write a story in which you are the villain”. Schoolteachers
did not instruct students to respond to particular prompts but rather
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 141
allocated certain time slots, during the week, in which they could write
freely. This particular exercise about villainy seemed to have struck a
chord. Alongside my fellow researchers, with whom I was working on a
project on emotional repertoires in children’s writing (García- González
et al., 2023), we examined all the notebooks filled out as part of the
pilot programme and found that two- thirds of them had responded to this
prompt, making it the most popular. What aects and intensities came
into play with this particular option?
As we read the dierent stories, we realised we were each approaching
them from dierent angles. Soledad Concha, for example, who had been
involved in the development of the public policy and the creation of the
notebooks, was interested in why this prompt had been successful, and
why it had particularly seemed to connect with the students. Valentina
Errázuriz, whose work is heavily related to political repertoires, analysed
how the figure of the villain in these stories was connected to the particular
moment in which children had written these texts, which was during the
social outburst of 2019 in Chile, a revolt seeking to improve social rights
and the political and economic system, which was heavily repressed by the
government. She, for example, pointed out to the revolutionary morals of
some of some of them:
“I am a villain, but I help all poor people and kill the richest ones. So,
I was a good person.”
(young writer 1, 2019)
“Feelings only limit you from achieving your goals, you are weak. You
lack hate.”
(young writer 2, 2019)
“Goodness is relative to the eyes of those who were raised with morals.”
(young writer 3, 2019)
Ignacia Saona and I, both researchers in children’s literature, on the
other hand, seemed to be more interested in reading these texts as literary
texts by and for children. I was particularly drawn to the ones that were
beautifully crafted in the form of very short stories as they reminded me of
examples of flash fiction. For example:
“The Bad Guy in the Story.
Tired of always being the bad guy in stories, the wolf got up that
morning ready to resign his position.”
(young writer 4, 2019)
142 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
“When I was a little girl, I was afraid of spiders. I was told that they
did not have feelings, that their hearts never beat. But I know the truth.
When it comes to the time to kill, they feel more full of life.”
(young writer 5, 2019)
In Latin- American schools, we often read the very short story by
Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso entitled El Dinosaurio [The
Dinosaur] (1959). It is a story that resonates a bit like a poetic joke: “Cuando
despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí” [“Upon awakening, the dino-
saur was still there”]. Monterroso’s flash fiction permeates Latin- American
culture: this particular example was often aimed at the PRI, a Mexican
political party that was called a dinosaur for having remained in govern-
ment for more than seven decades. Today we find it as an intertextual ref-
erence for memes and social media postings (see, for example, numerous
examples posted on the blog Humor inspirado en ‘El dinosaurio’ de
Monterroso [Humour inspired by Monterroso’s The Dinosaur]).
Short stories are key in writing promotion and literacy training in Latin-
American schools. How helpful is it to recall Monterroso when reading
these stories about villainy? One could argue that 60 years after this short
story was published in a short- story anthology, child writers are more
influenced by modern flash fiction than by canonical literary traditions.
But when we woke up, the canon was still there.
“The Bad Guy in the Story” has all the elements of an eective example
of the flash fiction genre: a title that remarks the intention, a character that
is briefly presented and, after a comma, the conflict and resolution. The
story engages with metafiction, namely bringing a reflection on the craft of
fiction, specifically the canon of fairy tales for children that feature wolves
and traditional understandings of wickedness. It does so by subverting
our conventions of what it is to be a villain, unsettling the instruction our
author has received. The child who is writing is not to be coupled with a
villain and will not play the villain; instead, villainy is produced by our
ways of telling and repeating stories for children. This is a story about
refusal.
Literary criticism of flash fiction emphasises how brevity is made pos-
sible by the interaction of dierent semiotic codes (Calvo Revilla and
Álvarez Ramos, 2020, p. 9). I have mentioned the Latin- American trad-
ition of very short stories and its relation to the literary forms that emerge
in social media. We may also wonder how those gaps that are receiving
attention in children’s literature scholarship work here. In an article by
Clémentine Beauvais, she analyses what she terms the “readerly gap” in
picturebook theory, arguing that picturebooks gain additional aesthetic
quality and sophistication when they leave gaps that invite readers to fill
them (2015). She notes how children’s literature scholars— such as Sylvia
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 143
Pantaleo (2004, 2012) or Lawrence Sipe (2011)— often assume that
children are better “gap- fillers” than adults, and how children can, on
occasions, become the teachers, showing adults how such gaps may be
filled. Beauvais views this appreciation of children’s interpretative skills
with a certain suspicion, arguing that, in the end, “gaps” are controlled
by adults who use them to transmit pedagogical premises with the expect-
ation that children will “get” them. The gaps, therefore, are not there to
open up interpretative dimensions, but rather to conceal adult pedagogical
intentions. How open are the gaps that these examples of flash fiction
oer? What do we bring to them when we read them? What do we do
with our assumptions about these texts being authored by children? Do
we get special pleasure from reading texts written by the authors of what
we might term “real” children’s literature?
In his introduction to the special issue of Bookbird featuring writing
authored by children, Peter Cumming addresses the question of whether
children’s literature should be written by children (2017). He examines
Hélène Cixous’s concept of “écriture féminine” to question whether we
need an “écriture enfantine” (p.6) even though this concept of “women’s
writing” has been challenged in recent years by feminist criticism that is
keen to distance itself from biological imperatives.
When our research team on the paper “ ‘An Evil Text’: Chilean National
Writing Plan and Students Becoming Writers with Villainy” analysed these
texts, we explored how they transgressed traditional moral patterns,
showing, for example, how being a villain was, very often, quite pleas-
urable (García- González et al., 2023). We also analysed them in relation
to suppressed repertoires about violence in fiction for adolescents and the
growing erasure of villains in children’s literature. We highlighted some
ironic twists, but saved for a future occasion analysis of these stories as
possible refusals, as the creation of an authorial voice that decides not to
do what is expected yet adheres to certain expectations in order to be read.
The fact that these very short fictional texts grabbed our attention and
triggered our art of noticing seemed to imply they are a particularly useful
medium for presenting young authorships.
The second foundation stone of this chapter, is the short story prize
En cien palabras [In a hundred words], organised yearly by the Plagio
Foundation. As the name suggests, it is a prize for short stories with a max-
imum word limit. The competition is organised across dierent cities: it
started in Santiago de Chile in 2001, and soon spread internationally to
cities in Mexico, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, the
USA, Poland, and Argentina. The competition usually includes specific
prizes for young authors, in most cases, has two categories of awards: one
for writers under the age of 13 and the other for those between the ages
of 14 and 18. The prize- winning stories are then published on big posters
144 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
displayed throughout the city and in tiny little books, anthologies of
short stories, that are freely and extensively distributed. After each of the
competitions has been judged, an award ceremony is organised where all
the authors— adults and children— receive their prizes. For most of them,
this will be the first time they are referred to as authors.
Soledad Camponovo, the competition’s project manager highlights
that “creativity and writing capacities are evenly distributed, we get good
stories from all sorts of places”. When I interviewed her, Camponovo
explained that for the most recent competition they had held, in the city
of Santiago, they had received 44,000 entries. How to judge them? How
to start assessing which stories to even consider? As in similar initiatives,
there is a team who preselects stories before they are put before the jury.
This team is made up of humanities university students who are tasked
with narrowing down hundreds of short stories to just 10% of entries.
This 10% will then be read and assessed by a jury formed of well- known
writers. “Do you have children participating in this selection process?”
I asked. “No”, she admitted, “I haven’t even thought of it”.
The prize- winning stories are published with the author’s name, their
age, and the city or municipal area where they live. Let me share one tale
written by a very young child, who received a Young Talent Award:
Infinito
Tres cosas no se van a acabar nunca: las estrellas, los números y las
arvejas en el plato.
Ángel Reveco Salazar, 7 años,
San Miguel.
[Infinite
Three things will never come to an end: stars, numbers and the peas on
your plate.
Ángel Reveco Salazar, aged 7,
San Miguel.]
I find this poem particularly agentic in its interplay with the author’s
age. The title, short narration, and author sparks the image of a 7- year-
old who will not eat his peas. It is no surprise that this story has been
selected for a prize: it fulfils all our adult expectations about what a well-
constructed text by a 7- year- old should be, but I wonder if the stories that
are awarded prizes would be dierent if children were doing the judging.
Who does the pun in the story impress the most? While the stories quoted
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 145
previously about becoming villains impressed in terms of how they ran
counter to our expectations, this one perhaps conforms to the adult idea of
what we would expect work by a child author to be. What else might we
find if we trace young authorships in relation to what they write against?
When is the breaking of expectation recognised and authorised?
The award machine that is In a Hundred Words brings us back to
the question about selection, endorsements, and awards, and how these
expand and shrink the literary field. The third initiative referred to in
the introduction to this chapter is not a writing- promotion initiative, but
instead relates to selections and awards made in order to promote writing
aimed at children. I was deeply involved in this project which makes me
read it in certain ways while obscuring my view of other ways of doing so.
In 2020, myself, Ignacia Saona and Soledad Véliz, at the time researchers
at the Chilean Center for Educational Justice, created a collaborative plat-
form aimed at challenging adultist (and humanist) mainstream channels
of cultural recommendation for young people, the platform #EstoTbn, a
hashtag for esto también, meaning literally “this too”, a gesture towards
the cumulative ethos of social media. #EstoTbn explores how children and
adults are aected by cultural productions and forms of recommending
literary and cultural texts. We operated in two overlapping dimensions: in
one, we organised activities that may be described as related to reading pro-
motion, while on another we probed and reflected on the intergenerational
assemblages that made the circulation of certain cultural materials possible.
We remained vigilant to our adultist ways of knowing in order to gain as
much understanding as possible of how mainstream channels of cultural
recommendation might be complemented. We worked with children and
school librarians from dierent cities, towns, and villages in Chile.
The modus operandi was, most of the time, very simple: children and
librarians were invited to share, produce, and critique recommendations
of children’s literature and culture in whatever format they found suit-
able. Children sent voicechats or short texts about their cultural
recommendations, aware that these would be read by adults before
being published on our social media account. Within the framework of
the #EstoTbn project, we also shared dierent pieces authored by chil-
dren: films, short stories, and photo projects. We posted a selection of the
short stories about villainy as well as some of the flash fiction that had won
prizes in the In a Hundred Words competition.
I use this third initiative to densify the question of which children’s
writing deserves our attention. I purposefully use the term “children’s
writing”, which may refer to both writing by and writing for children,
with the intention of remarking that we should not draw a distinct
line between these but rather allow some porosity. What other critical
approaches are possible when we invite other children to read and judge
146 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
writing by children? Worldmaking through relational ontologies keeps at
bay our desire to make children representative of children. Reading with
children in more- than- human entanglements shifts our modes of attention
with regard to the literary text. In the #EstoTbn project, we searched for
ways in which the child participants could bring insights and new angles
to us as the researchers, as well as the other adults involved (parents and
librarians). We were playing with forms of challenging what circulates and
what does not in recommendations for children. The child participants in
our project had quite diverse approaches to the concept of authorship and
why age mattered in all this.
When, for example, we shared short stories about villainy with our
child collaborators, their responses included a number of comments that
surprised us. Some of them noticed a certain “innocence” in the narrator’s
voice. David, one of the children who participated in our project for two
years, claimed that he liked the short stories about villainy “because they
show the innocence of children”. Another child, who wished to comment
anonymously, wrote, “I liked it for the innocence of children being evil: it
reminded me of Red Riding Hood when the wolf is mentioned. I would
recommend it to people of all ages”. The children involved in the project
who were presented with these texts knew that they had been written in
schools and assumed that the authors were younger than them. We were
surprised to note how when the child participants were invited to become
the person that decides what should be recommended, their opinions
became more like those of adults.
The #EstoTbn project came to the attention of the local division of the
International Board of Books for Young People, IBBY. They approached
us wondering if children could participate in their annual literary prize.
Some other IBBY sections, such as the Argentinian, the Belgian, and the
Catalan have been working for decades with children’s juries. We invited
children participating in the #EstoTbn project to take part in the jury and
organised a series of meetings in which they discussed books that had been
submitted for the award as well as the most fair ways to give such a prize.
Their meetings bore surprising similarities to the experiences I have had
with adult juries. They would talk about the literary texts with varying
degrees of eloquence, they would refer to other texts that they liked or
disliked and use all sorts of contextual dimensions to evaluate the books.
Just like adults, they were quick to engage in the pleasurable process of
saying what was not to be valued. Many of them would invest more in
banning certain books for winning than in defending the value of their
favourites. More impressively, however, they also engaged in reflections
about the ideal/ imagined child reader to whom the books were addressed.
One of the jury members announced that she was assessing the books
using two separate rankings: one involved the value the dierent books
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 147
had for her personally, while the other the value set them in a hierarchy
related to the value that these books may have “for the children” (García-
González et al., 2024).
The deliberative process was long and had plenty of iterations. They
decided on a short list to which some books were added later. They
discussed their engagement with the stories, the illustrations, whether the
themes were particularly ones for children, what they had found surprising
about particular books and, also, how children would value certain books.
They were able to persuade each other at times, but we also noticed that
the conversation often reached an impasse. After one of the meetings, we
asked them to send us written reviews of all the shortlisted books before
they held the next meeting. The task was similar to what they were used
to doing as part of our #EstoTbn project. When they met again, many
would refer to their written reviews as better expressions of their critical
assessments. In the midst of a discussion, one of the boys called for the
talking to stop and asked the adult in the room to read aloud what he had
written about one of the books. His review read as follows:
For me, I stress, FOR ME, this is the best book of all, I like that it is
centred on the history of life on the planet in general, not just the life
of human beings, and that it shows how we have advanced from being
a tiny particle to the developed beings with complex minds that we are
now. It also discusses the dinosaurs, the species; it talks about reptiles,
lizards and things like that; it talks about the planet a long time ago,
about how it was populated by gigantic volcanos and had a surface that
was extremely hot. In conclusion, I love this book, and it is the best of
all for me.
After the reading of this short review, a brief silence ensued, leaving
the children visibly impressed. Although no decision was made at that
moment, it was clear that the text had made a significant impact. During
the next meeting, the jurors concurred that the prize “could” be awarded
to the book favoured by this child. He later volunteered to write a speech
for the award ceremony.
This experience in the framework of the #EstoTbn project gives rise to
yet more questions: what if we had not asked them to write down their
opinions? What if these written critiques had been sent to a set of adult
juries that would have been in charge of deciding on the award? What
if we asked adult jurors to write reviews of shortlisted books and give
these to child juries to decide? What is the agentic force of writing when
discussing and/ or persuading about artistic value? What is the writing
doing? I set out these questions in order to consider how we might use
relational ontologies to approach the ways in which we recommend and
148 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
select children’s literature and the ways in which dierent literary voices
are authorised. Noticing children’s authorial voices may not only be
connected with promoting creative writing in the curriculum and creating
awards for texts authored by children, but with finding how to activate
dierent agentic forces that allow us to notice what we might not have
noticed and for facilitating new ways of knowing.
Agustín, the 11- year- old author of the quoted review, appears to be
very aware that he is not representing the other children when he writes
about his favourite book, but has crafted a persuasive text for his fellow
jurors. Interestingly, his text emphasises how we humans are just one of
multiple forces and agencies in planetary life. He advocates for the book
by bringing up reflections about his attachment to it and the book’s factual
relationship with the planetary order.
What assemblages of children’s literature come to mind if we take
writing by children as our object of study? I propose thinking of children’s
writing as a term that would indicate writing by children, while leaving
open a certain semantic porosity to refer to writing addressed to children,
writing for children. Children’s literature is an established term, linked
to a publishing industry in which adults create texts specifically for child
readers; children’s writing is a term closer to the ambiguity of the expres-
sion “children’s art” which refers to art done by children, and which can
achieve cultural and artistic recognition.
I am tempted to propose that to notice children’s writing we should
start by thinking of it as movements “for” and/ or “against”. The
authorial voices in the texts I have shared move away from normative
understandings not only about what is good and evil, as in the first
example, but also about what matters and what can be considered a valu-
able story. Current trends seem to express a growing interest in children’s
writing and an increased awareness of children’s creative contributions
to culture, but we, as adults, lack deeper engagement with the power
structures that authorise certain voices and texts. We lack critical questions
that challenge us for romanticising children and childhoods. For a literary
text to exist, we need a process of authorisation of such a text and with
this comes an entanglement of power relationships. In order to challenge
the prevalent adultism in our field, it may not be enough to promote and
understand child- authored writing. What is required now are new con-
ceptual developments aimed at carrying out research with child- authored
creative work and children themselves with a view to defying child-
adult power dynamics and opening up new modes of intergenerational
partnerships. We need conceptual and methodological intensities to probe
children’s writing and readings, and to try and decentre our adult ways of
understanding creativity.
The Arts of Noticing Children’s Writing 149
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Final Thoughts
In this book, I trace the borders of empathy in children’s fiction by
following how dicult matters are narrated to children, and how dierent
formats, genres, and tropes are used to address violence, injustices, and
exclusions. I depart from the claim that children’s books are a privileged
means to foster empathy development to inquire into how we, adults, use
books and other media to tell stories about things we prefer not to talk
about. I follow how new formats such as picturebooks and short animated
films are used today to educate ways of feeling with others. Stories, as we
all know, have been used since the beginning of times to produce commu-
nities and shape our desires.
This book is very much in debt to the long- held debate triggered by
Jacqueline Rose’s monograph The case of Peter Pan, or, The impossibility
of children’s fiction, published in 1984, where she argues that children’s
literature is impossible because it is always determined by adult fanta-
sies about what the child needs or wants. Rose’s diagnosis has been
largely discussed (see, for example, Rudd and Pavlik, 2010) and has led
to innovative conceptual frameworks about the child/ adult power imbal-
ance. Maria Nikolajeva, proposed the notion of “aetonormativity” to
suggest that to become an adult is the norm and being a child is deviant
(2009); Clementine Beauvais responded with the notion of the “mighty
child” to argue that no matter how oppressed the child is, they bear a
future power (might) that adults do not because adults will age and die
earlier (2015); Marah Gubar proposed the “kinship model” arguing that
children and adults are more akin than dierent and that we should trace
this akinness and collaborations (2016). This book is indebted to this dis-
cussion because of its critical and sceptical approach to how we produce
the image of the child as a reader who needs to be educated. I also work
inspired by childhood studies’ critical approaches to growth and devel-
opment, wondering how our notions of age- appropriateness are blinded
by our adult ways of knowing about childhood (García- González et al.,
Final Thoughts 153
2024). The borders of empathy in children’s fiction seem to be sketched
after those child/ adult power imbalances that are particularly cruel in
reproducing certain logics about where to spend our capacity to feel and
act for others.
In this book, I have dealt with various topics, many of them still contro-
versial in relation to children’s cultures, such as death, xenophobia, state
and domestic violence, illnesses, forced displacements, family separations,
social marginalisation, and the planetary crisis. The critical discussion
on the uses of children’s and young adult literature runs through all the
chapters. I trace how cultural artefacts are put forward for educational
purposes, trying to avoid the maniqueist division between literature and
education to instead propose that the aesthetic and the pedagogical are
entangled and hold transformative power. This is an argument I make
drawing upon critical analysis of texts and from empirical research with
books and other materials in various settings. This research has shown
me that the uses given to the books are often very dierent from those
intended by the adult mediators; I have tried to show some glimpses of
how stories get attached to non- normative feelings that grow in various
directions. In other words, I tried to follow the agency of books (and short
films) in their teachings of emotional and ethical repertoires. I have aimed
to remain critical of the uses of literature that domesticate and simplify
conflicts, proposing a body of works that narrate these emotions dier-
ently and may be more suitable to open up ways of thinking about what
is dicult and elusive.
Through the lengthy process of writing this book, I have grown increas-
ingly aware of the agency of concepts. One concept that has grown in me
while writing this book is that of childism and the aordances of childist
criticism. I use this term following the positive formulation defended by
John Wall and colleagues (Wall, 2013; Wall, 2022; Biswas, 2023). Wall
relates childism to other “isms” that are forms of activism, such as fem-
inism, anti- racism, and environmentalism, rather than to the forms of
discrimination they tackle: sexism, racism, extractivism, and ageism, to
name a few (2022). Of these forms of activism against discrimination,
Wall stresses the comparison with feminism highlighting how childism
is linked to a promise of transformation. Childhood studies have often
been compared with gender studies, which signals a certain failure of
childhood studies to mainstream the generational order as gender studies
have achieved with the gender order (Punch, 2020). For example, we are
often required by funding bodies to describe how the proposed projects
deal with gender, while nothing similar is required for age or generational
relations.
Wall stresses the relationship between childism and feminist scholar-
ship, proposing that childism is also an armative perspective related to
154 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
the “ambition for systemic normative transformation” (2022, p. 263).
He calls for a scholarship that not only seeks to understand and describe
children’s experiences but also criticises and transforms the adultism of
scholarly theories, practices, and social structures. Wall describes how
gender studies took o from early women’s studies to eventually encom-
pass a broad project of social transformation. He sketches what such a
change would look like for scholarship focused on childhood and proposes
to move the poststructuralist critique that considers childhood a socially
constructed category towards what he calls a “childist reconstructionism”
(p. 267). A childist reconstructionism would not focus on understanding
children’s lives, or on deconstructing hegemonic discourses that margin-
alise them, but on “reconstructing interdependent social relations as more
radically and imaginatively dierence- responsive” (p. 267). Research,
thus, would be oriented towards the creation of a “dierence- inclusive
social imaginations” (p. 267).
My colleague Justyna Deszcz- Tryhubczak (2023) and I have reviewed
our field’s tradition in childist approaches, starting from the work of Peter
Hunt (1984, 1991) who called for a childist criticism in which scholars
would work close to children to understand texts. With Deszcz- Tryhubczak,
we argue for a new materialist understanding of childism in which this
perspective is taken to explore the intra- actions of the social, the political,
the biological and the aesthetical. I have further developed this conceptu-
alisation related to aective ways of knowing about generations and age
(García- González, 2022). In “Towards an Aective Childist Criticism”,
I reflect on how our understandings and analysis of children’s fiction
require that we revise our (adult) epistemologies. I claim for involving
child perspectives and actual children in our research practices to decentre
our deeply ingrained humanist habits, opening other temporalities and
alternatives to the hegemonic discursive order.
Addressing adultism does not follow any standardised recipe.
Traditional participatory approaches which seek to centre children’s
voices are tricky as adults retain nevertheless the power of defining what
are those authentic child voices. In this book, I have addressed adultism
tracing how certain understandings about age- appropriateness appear to
be reducing the aesthetic and political agency of texts. Childism has been
a concept growing in the writing of this book as it has helped to not only
to question notions of adulthood and maturity, but also our position as
researchers that know about their research subjects. Childism appears,
therefore, as a tool for bringing a new “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015)
children and childhoods.
In this book, I have traced how while we are becoming more critic-
ally aware that children can deal with dicult subjects, the paradigm of
children’s innocence still haunts us. I start noting how in the last years,
Final Thoughts 155
death has become a rather popular subject in children’s books and pre-
dominantly in picturebooks. I contend, nevertheless, that death is seldom
presented in challenging ways and most often narrated with a certain dis-
tance in stories that teach about the natural life cycle and about bear-
able ways of dealing with loss and mourning. We do not find death to be
related to killings, to gender violence, to the lack of access to health ser-
vices, or to ongoing genocides around the world. Death is something that
happens to other people. Death comes as a skull and dressed crossbones
to accompany Duck’s passing away (in Death, Duck and Tulip by Wolf by
Erlbruch) or takes the form of a blossoming tree that remembers the long
and beautiful life of a fox for his friends in the forest (in The Memory Tree
by Britta Teckentrup).
Death is often related to the emerging category of “challenging
picturebooks”. I use this category as an indication for books that challenge
our notions of age- appropriateness and of childhood as an innocent period.
I contend that child readers are able to deal with our darker chapters.
A question I come back to again is what counts as children’s literature,
what can have the status of a children’s text? I am interested in how the
notion of children’s fiction is related to narratives about hope when we live
in a hopeless world.
What do we tell about ongoing wars and mass killings? How do we
narrate about children looking at the sky without knowing whether the
planes bring food or bombs? And about the loss of biodiversity and how
life on the planet is threatened? How do we speak of sexual and physical
abuse to children and the multiple forms in which it is normalised? How
do we tell the story of slavery while dealing with its legacies? Do we only
narrate historical experiences of injustice or are we prepared to tell about
their ongoing eects?
I contend that our emotional repertoires— the range of feelings and
aective responses that we have at our disposal— are part of the entangle-
ment of our political and ethical positions. Who are we able to feel with
and feel compassion for? How can we expand our regimes of sensitivity?
Literature tells us about other lives, suerings, ways of knowing and
making sense and beauty in the world. Children’s and YA literature and
arts tell us about worlds with a generational dimension that opens yet
more modes of engagement with those lives and stories. How would a
childist approach to research and practices with children’s literature work?
If we take approaches to be forms of worldmaking— rather than critical
analysis tools— , they can move things around and create other possibil-
ities. A childist approach may bring us to play around with traditions
and opening what counts as literary. Being childist requires us to remain
attentive to our desires for idealised childhoods and how we project them
into the future.
156 The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction
Lee Edelman recounts how the child is an icon of futurity, whose pre-
sent needs are supplanted by the perceived future needs of the citizen- to- be
(2004). Tanu Biswas extends this critique contending that the production
of children’s future child through Western education is deeply rooted in
philosophical racism and complicit of a global epistemological loss, as
children are educated to be employed in the capitalist order. Our work
with children and our narratives for children are haunted by the needs of
these citizens- to- be, needs that appear to be particularly complex when we
acknowledge the Anthropocene and ongoing planetary destruction.
Throughout this book, I have aimed to challenge the notion of age-
appropriate rendering of dicult topics as a way of rethinking the
child’s position in society. How to propose childist futures and childist
organisations of the social? These are too broad questions to be answered
here, but through the writing of this book, I have searched for other stories
about loss and otherness, hoping they provide some openings. To consider
alternative paths towards our ways of knowing and of creating sustain-
able futures, we need to find new stories and time for them to get lost,
to escape from the normative telos of progress. If we are to refresh our
understandings of children’s fiction and what agentic power it may have,
we need to explore other notions of what counts as a text and what counts
as reading. How to get there? We need to refresh children’s literature criti-
cism by working with actual children and young people, but also produ-
cing other research objects such as jokes, memes, short animated films,
adaptations, podcasts, read- alouds, and textual productions of participa-
tory cultures. We may need to look into other stories that are not aligned
with our telos for progress and hopeful futures to find, perhaps, other
possible futures to trust for.
References
Beauvais, Clémentine. (2015). The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s
Literature. John Benjamins Publishing House.
Biswas, Tanu. (2023). Becoming good ancestors: A decolonial, childist approach to
global intergenerational sustainability. Children & Society, 37(4), 1005– 1020.
Deszcz- Tryhubczak, Justyna and García- González, Macarena. (2023). Thinking
and doing with childism in children’s literature studies. Children & Society,
37(4), 1037– 1051.
Edelman, Lee. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke
University Press.
García- González, Macarena. (2022). Towards an aective childist literary criti-
cism. Children’s Literature in Education, 53(3), 360– 375.
Garcia-Gonzalez, Macarena, Saona, Ignacia, Arriagada, Agustín, and Saintard,
Mika. (2024). When a children’s literary jury imagines other children as poten-
tial readers: A case of collaborative research. Childhood, 31(3), 451– 470.
Final Thoughts 157
Gubar, Marah. (2016). The hermeneutics of recuperation: what a kinship- model
approach to children’s agency could do for children’s literature and childhood
studies. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 8(1), 291– 310.
Hunt, Peter. (1984). Childist criticism: The subculture of the child, the book and
the critic. Signal, 43(1), 42– 59.
Hunt, Peter. (1991). Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature. Blackwell.
Nikolajeva, Maria. (2009). Theory, post- theory, and aetonormative theory.
Neohelicon, 36(1), 13– 24.
Punch, Samantha. (2020). Why have generational orderings been marginalised in
the social sciences including childhood studies? Children’s Geographies, 18(2),
128– 140.
Rose, Jaqueline. (1984). The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s
Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Rudd, David and Pavlik, Anthony. (2010). The (im) possibility of children’s
fiction: Rose twenty- five years on. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly,
35(3), 223– 229.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. (2015). The Mushroom as the End of the World: On the
Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Wall, John. (2013). Childism: The challenge of childhood to ethics and the human-
ities. In Anna Mae Duane (Ed.), The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and
the Humanities (pp. 68– 84). University of Georgia.
Wall, John. (2022). From childhood studies to childism: Reconstructing the schol-
arly and social imaginations. Children’s Geographies, 20, 257– 270. Special issue
on society and social changes through the prism of childhood.
Index
Note: Figures are shown in italics in this index.
Abuela Grillo (film) 10, 115– 116,
117– 121, 119, 120, 122; and
aective childism 120– 121; and age
119– 120; children’s reviews of 118;
and water crisis as conflict 121
Abuela Grillo y la defensa del agua
(book) 115
activities, and relationships with books
129
adult anxieties 26– 36, 29, 30
adult gate keepers, in children’s
literature publishing 116
adult- child power imbalances 137,
152, 153
adultism 6, 7, 10, 31, 32, 112, 137,
148, 154
adultist ways of knowing 116– 117,
145, 152– 153
aesthetical potential 33
aesthetics 3, 5, 7, 47– 48, 70, 78, 79,
80, 81, 142, 154; and climate crisis
116; and deterritorialising 133, 140;
and the pedagogical 3, 153
aetonormativity 6, 31, 152
aective childism 7, 116, 117, 119,
120, 154
aective childist criticism 7, 117, 154
aective repertoires 3, 10, 139
aective turn, in the humanities 2, 7
age: and Abuela Grillo 119– 120; and
childist criticism 154; coming of
74– 75, 119; in contemporary
childhood studies 6, 10; in emotional
engagement with books 27; and
#EstoTbn project 146; of ideal
reader 22; seealso aetonormativity;
age- appropriateness
age- appropriateness 1, 31, 68, 152,
154– 156
agency: of books 26, 32, 134, 153;
child 94, 103, 121, 129, 136– 137,
140, 144, 148; of children’s
creativity 140; of children’s fiction
7, 156; of concepts 153; of Frida
Kahlo 103, 107– 108; of Infinito
144; of institutions 13; of matter 72;
of objects 13; of picturebooks 26;
political 154; of a powerful woman
93; of structures 13; of texts 154; of
writing 147; of younger generations
in relation to ecological crisis 9– 10
Ahmed, Sara 8, 18– 19, 21, 39, 92, 93,
107
allegory 71, 73, 84
altruism 21
anger 16, 17, 19, 65, 118, 131
animation 84, 85, 115, 118
Anthropocene 51, 111, 156
anthropocentrism 10, 112, 114;
post- 111– 121, 119, 120, 122
anti- racism 41, 126, 153
anxieties 16, 18, 76, 127; adult 26– 36,
29, 30
Anzaldúa, Gloria 53
Archive Fever 80
Arispe, Nicolás 1, 2, 16
Arizpe, Evelyn 49, 134
Artful Dodgers 136
Index 159
artists’ novels 101
arts of noticing children’s writing 10,
136– 148
asylum seekers 49, 54
attachment 26, 117, 118, 130, 148
authorial voices 143, 148
authorisation 107, 139, 140, 148
authoritarianism 9, 78
authorship 10, 61, 66, 138, 146; and
relational ontologies 139; studies in
138, 139; young 143, 145
Autobiographical Pact, The 55
autobiographical pact, theory of 55,
58
autobiography 101– 102, 105,
107– 108, 137; and border crossing
54– 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 67
autofiction 58, 61
bad guy in the story 141, 142
Barad, Karen 6, 93, 138
Barthes, Roland 139
basic emotions 8, 17; theory of 17– 18
Bear Story 9, 71, 73, 74, 78, 84– 85;
adaptation as picturebook 84; as
allegory of desaparecidos 84; use of
distancing techniques 84
Beauvais, Clémentine 71, 89, 94,
142– 143, 152
bestsellers 3
Biblioteca Migrante 125– 126
Binford, Warren 54, 60, 61, 62, 67
biographies: auto- see autobiography;
of women in children’s literature 9,
89– 108, 99; written for children 94
biopower 39
Biswas, Tanu 156
Blanco, Daniel 9, 73, 81, 83
Boltanski, Luc 78
Bond Stockton, Kathryn 32
border crossing
Broken Column, The 99
Buitrago, Jairo 9, 28, 73, 81, 83
Burman, Erica 32
Cairns, Kate 121
Camino a casa 81
campamentos 126, 127, 128– 129,
130, 131, 132; working with non-
governmental organisation (NGO)
126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134
case of Peter Pan, or, The impossibility
of children’s fiction, The 152
challenging picturebooks 1– 2, 8, 26,
27, 28– 29, 42, 105, 129, 155
Chapon, Denis 10, 115, 120
child agency 94, 103, 121, 129,
136– 137
child readers 50, 57, 94, 146, 148, 155
child- adult power relationships
137– 138, 152, 153
child- authored writing 136, 137, 140,
143, 148
childhood 2; adult fears about 32; adult
ways of knowing about 152– 153;
and childist reconstructionism 154;
early 8, 17, 130; emotion in relation
to 18; idealised 155; and innocence
155; romanticising of 148; studies in
6, 31– 32, 138, 152, 153
childism 7, 10, 153, 154; aective
7, 116, 117, 119, 120, 154; and
art of noticing 154; and feminist
scholarship 153– 154; and reading
18; and worldmaking 155
childist criticism 7, 111, 116– 117,
153, 154; aective 7, 117, 154
childist reconstructionism 154
children: biographies written for 94; as
hope for the future 111; innocence
of 139, 146, 154; protection of 2,
20, 39, 73, 81; voices of 10, 32, 61,
62, 65, 137, 138, 148, 154
children’s books 3, 5, 6, 68; and
cultural memory 70; death in 155;
and diversity 54; about ecology 111;
as feminist 92; happy endings to 26;
about immigration 67– 68; about
sustainability 111; about things
adults prefer not to talk about 152;
and traumatic national pasts 70, 73
children’s writing, arts of noticing 10,
136– 148
Chile: dictatorship in 9, 71, 72, 74, 79,
84, 85, 86, 129; National Writing
Plan of 140– 141; school library
policy in 125– 126; shanty towns
126, 127, 128– 129, 130, 131,
132; solidarity in 22; seealso Bear
Story; campamentos; escuelitas; La
Composición; Niños; Un diamante
en el fondo de la tierra
160 Index
Chimal, Alberto 1, 2, 16
cinematographic melancholy 70
climate crisis 10, 111, 112, 113, 115,
116
cognitive criticism 4– 5
Collaborative Authorship in the
Golden Age of Children’s Literature
136
collective memory 70, 73
collective remembrance 70, 73
collective suering 22
Colour Monster, The 8, 16, 17, 19, 20
colours 56, 83, 84, 101; for emotions
and feelings 17, 19– 20; seealso
Colour Monster, The
coming of age 74– 75, 119
community 53, 70; in Abuela Grillo
120– 121, 122; moral 22; racialised
44; sense of 40; as “us” and “them”
46– 47; volunteering in 126, 127,
128, 131, 132, 133, 134
compassion 2, 20, 22, 155
Concejo, Joanna 1, 39
concepts, agency of 153
conflict 8, 18– 19, 41, 50, 142, 153;
epistemological 121; and water wars
113, 114, 115, 117, 121
contemporary arts 78, 79, 80
contemporary sensibility 14, 79
controversy 1, 8, 26, 33, 73, 111, 153
Covid pandemic 14, 39, 89
creative writing 10, 63, 137, 140, 148
creativity 94, 136, 137, 139, 140, 144,
148
critical feminism 9
cultural diversity 41
cultural gaps 138
cultural memory 70
cultural texts 9– 10, 117, 145
culture of happiness 19
culture wars 5
Cumming, Peter 137, 143
cycle of life 31, 33
death 1, 2, 8, 16, 27, 28– 31, 29,
30, 34– 36; seealso La madre y la
muerte
deficit model 137
Delicado, Federico 28
democracy 3, 4, 5, 41, 72– 73
deportation 9, 66, 67, 68
desaparecidos 81
Deszcz- Tryhubczak, Justyna 154
detention centres 61
deterritorialising 71, 85, 133, 140
developmental psychology 32
dictatorship: Chilean 72, 74, 79, 84,
85, 86, 129; seealso Bear Story;
campamentos; escuelitas; La
Composición; Niños; Un diamante
en el fondo de la tierra
didactics 3, 89, 94, 118, 125
displacement 28; forced 9, 53, 66, 71,
153
distancing techniques 84
distant suering 78
distribution of the sensible 19
diversity 54, 103; cultural 41
domestic violence 1, 14, 153
double- spreads 1, 30, 43, 48, 49, 50,
58, 61, 82, 96, 99, 104
Doubrovsky, Serge 58
Dreamers 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63,
66– 67, 68; public library in 57– 58
Duck, Death and the Tulip 1– 2, 16, 27
Duet met valse noten 138
early childhood 8, 17, 130
Echeñique, Raquel 1, 2
ecological crisis 10, 111, 112, 113,
114, 118, 121
ecopedagogy 111– 112
Edelman, Lee 156
El Dinosaurio 142
Eloísa y los bichos 28, 32
emotional breakdown 22
emotional engagement 5, 27
emotional literacy 16, 19
emotional reactions 2– 3, 47
emotional repertoires 2, 7, 8, 10, 26,
34, 126, 141, 155; for death 36; and
ethical positioning 20; of justice for
children 21; more adult 68
emotions: basic 8, 17– 18; and
childhood 18; colours for 17,
19– 20; desire to control and limit
18; picturebooks about 16; political
culture of emotions 19
Empatía. Guía para padres e hijos 14,
20, 21
empowerment, of women 9, 104
En cien palabras 140, 143– 144
Index 161
end of life 2, 27
endings: happy 26, 28, 30, 74– 75,
84, 96, 133; hopeful 17, 30, 68,
107– 108
engagement 26, 48– 49, 118, 147, 148,
155; emotional 5, 27; fictional
140– 141; intergenerational 117– 118
enjoyment 15, 16, 92, 136
environmental crisis 9, 113
environmental education 122
environmental justice 10
Enwezor, Okwui 80
epistemic injustice 6, 65, 112, 117
epistemology 6, 8, 32, 117, 121, 154,
156
Erlbruch, Wolf 1– 2, 16, 27
escuelitas 126, 127, 128
#EstoTbn 117, 118, 119, 120, 140,
145, 146, 147
ethics 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 16, 20, 22, 117,
127, 129, 153, 155; of care 30
ethnography 10, 22, 126, 132– 133
exclusion 59, 67, 93, 121, 126, 133,
152; dynamics of 44; intersecting 8;
and necropolitics 40, 45, 49; social
2, 130
facial expressions 17
family separations, at US- Mexico
border 8, 53, 61, 153
fanzines 84, 118, 119
FCE (Fondo de Cultura Económica) 13
fear 16, 17, 19– 20, 34, 63, 67, 77– 78;
of strangers 28, 39, 40
Felski, Rita 6– 7, 26
feminism 19, 90, 91, 92, 93– 94, 101,
143, 153– 154; critical 9; killjoy 92;
politics of 92; post- 93– 94, 103– 104;
posthumanist 93; second- wave 92
Ferrada, María José 9, 73, 74, 80
Few Small Nips, A 98
fiction: auto- 58, 61; flash 141– 142,
143, 145; non- 3, 5, 9, 54, 89, 94,
101, 111, 114; reading of 15
fictional engagement 140– 141
Filipović, Zlata 137
Fink, Nadia 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103
flash fiction 141– 142, 143, 145
focalisation 78; visual 55, 56, 95
Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) 13
forced displacement 9, 53, 66, 71, 153
Ford Smith, Victoria 136, 137
Fortes, Antón 1, 39
Foucault, Michel 39, 139
Fricker, Miranda 6, 117
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
102
Frida Kahlo (Sanchez Vergara) 91, 94
Frida Kahlo para chicos y chicas 97
Fridamania 102
frustration 10, 16
Fuentes, Carlos 102
Gallaz, Christophe 1, 39
gaps 78, 81; cultural 138; in
information 71– 72; linguistic 138;
narrative 86; readerly 142– 143;
between visual and verbal 47– 48
Garcia Bochenek, Michael 59, 61, 62
gate keepers, in children’s literature
publishing 116
gender 89, 91, 92, 93, 101, 130, 153
gender justice 91
gender norm, in children’s literature 9
gender studies 153, 154
gender violence 2, 155
generations 10, 78, 117– 118, 119,
120, 145, 148, 153, 154, 155;
younger 9– 10
generosity 21, 22
genocide 2, 39, 70, 155
geopolitical injustice 67
Gill, Rosalind 93– 94, 103– 104
global epistemological loss 156
global injustice 49, 67, 68
global warming 112, 113
Goade, Michaela 114
Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls
89– 90
Gordon, Mike 113– 114
graphic novels 13, 104
Greder, Armin 1, 9, 28, 38– 51, 43, 44,
45, 46, 47, 48, 53
Green, Jen 113– 114
group readings 27, 43, 86
growth 32, 101, 152
Gubar, Marah 136, 152
Gumbrecht, Ulrich 72
happiness 17, 19, 34– 35, 92– 93, 100,
104; culture of 19; politics of 8, 10;
promise of 19, 22, 133
162 Index
happy endings 26, 28, 30, 74– 75, 84,
96, 133
happy object 92– 93, 106
Haraway, Donna 93, 111
Hear My Voice/ Escucha mi voz 54, 55,
59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68
herida abierta, US- Mexico border as
53
Hesse, María 91, 104– 105, 106,
107
hierarchies 7– 8, 18, 92, 133, 147
Holocaust 1, 40, 70, 78– 79
home- away- home narrative 58, 120,
121
hope 19, 28, 31, 38, 41, 51, 79, 115,
130, 133; in Abuela Grillo 115, 118,
121; in children’s literature 9, 113,
155; in Western societies 53
hopeful endings 17, 30, 68, 107– 108
hopeful futures 7, 18, 22, 61, 62, 92,
111, 139, 156
hopelessness 22, 23, 67, 155
hospitality 53, 134
human rights activism 54, 61
human rights violations 8, 9, 59
humanism 5, 10, 108, 145, 154; post-
3, 6, 7, 10, 26, 80, 93; Western 93
Hunt, Peter 7, 116, 154
hybrid voices 107
hydrological holocaust 113
hyperobjects 112, 113
IBBY (International Board on Books
for Young People) 74, 146
Ícaro 28, 30– 31, 32
idealised childhood 155
illness 8, 14, 35, 85, 99– 100, 101,
102, 104, 153
Illouz, Eva 8, 18
immigrants 38, 44– 45, 46, 53; child
49, 55; undocumented 56, 57;
seealso migration
inclusion 4, 21, 32, 125
Indigenous communities 2, 10, 100,
107, 114, 117, 121
infidelity 98
Infinito 144
Inheritance, The
injustice 19, 21, 53, 92, 152,
155; epistemic 6, 65, 112, 117;
geopolitical 67; global 49, 67, 68;
structural 9, 22, 41, 93, 104, 114;
and water wars 117, 120, 121
innocence, of children 139, 146, 154
Innocenti, Roberto 1, 39
Inside Out 8, 17– 19
intake questionnaire, of Tell Me How
It Ends 54, 63, 64, 66
intensive parenting 15
intergenerational engagement 117– 118
intergenerational interaction 78,
117– 118, 120, 145, 148
International Board on Books for
Young People (IBBY) 74, 146
interpersonal skills 4
intersecting exclusion 8
Island, The 9, 28, 31, 32– 33, 39– 49,
43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51
Journey, The 28, 32, 129
Kahlo, Frida 9, 89– 108, 99; agency of
103, 107– 108; pain of 95, 96, 99,
100, 101, 104, 105; paintings of
95– 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105,
106; resilience of 9, 100, 102, 103,
104, 107; suering of 93, 97, 98,
101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108
killjoy feminism 92
kinship model 136, 137, 152
Kraftl, Peter 138
Künstlerromans 1
Kurdi, Aylan 38, 39, 50
La Composición 9, 71, 74, 75– 79,
76, 77, 129; and aetonormative
discourse of children’s literature
77– 78; awards for 74; film
adaptation of 75; illustration of
75– 77, 76, 77; as old- fashioned
form of picturebook 78; short story
basis of 75
La madre y la muerte 1, 2, 16, 28– 29,
29, 30, 31, 32– 33, 36, 42, 132– 133
La partida 1, 2, 16, 29
Laiseca, Alberto 1, 2, 16
Latino Threat Narrative 66– 67
Lejeune, Phillipe 55, 58
life writing 66, 67
Lindstrom, Carole 114
literacy 3, 8, 15, 16, 125, 142;
emotional 19
Index 163
literary criticism 6, 91, 92, 107, 139,
142
literary mediation 125, 126, 129
literary reading 3
literary studies 3, 4, 137
Llenas, Anna 16– 17
loss 10, 28, 80, 85, 102, 155, 156
McRobbie, Angela 93, 103– 104
male violence 98
“Man” 93
Marina Rivera, Alba 131
materialism: new 3, 26, 72, 116, 138,
154; vibrant 26
matter, agency of 72
maturity 6, 32, 101, 154;
socioemotional 22– 23
Mbembe, Achille 9, 38– 39
Mediterranean, The 1, 9, 40, 49, 50,
51
memorialisation 9
memory 31, 35– 36, 55, 58; collective
70, 73; and dictatorship 70– 86, 76,
77, 82, 83
memory studies 70
Memory Tree, The 16, 31, 34, 155
metaphor 17, 56, 67, 71, 73, 85, 120
methodology 26, 32, 45– 46, 116, 117,
148
Mexican resilience 103
Mexico- US border 9; family
separations at 8, 53, 61, 153
migration 9, 28, 32, 41, 45, 46, 49,
53– 68, 113, 129, 131; seealso
immigrants
modality 56, 75, 84, 85
Monterroso, Augusto 142
moral community 22
moral imagination 3, 10
Morales, Yuyi 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63,
67
more- than- human 2, 139, 146
Morton, Timothy 112
Moue, Chantal 41
Moyaert, Bart 138
Mushroom at the End of the World,
The 138
naive moralism 22
narration: verbal 28; visual 28, 75,
78, 96
narrative gaps 86
narrative voices 47, 66
narratives: home- away- home 58, 120,
121; Latino Threat 66– 67; post-
anthropocentric 111– 121, 119, 120,
122; testimonial 53, 54
national trauma 81
necropolitics 38– 51, 43, 44, 45, 49;
normalisation of 38– 39
neoliberalism 8, 72, 73, 84, 94,
120– 121
new materialism 3, 26, 72, 116, 138,
154
Nikolajeva, Maria 6, 14, 152
nineteenth- century realist novels 4
Niños 9, 71, 73, 74, 78– 81
niños perdidos 54, 62, 65
Nixon, Rob 112– 113, 121
non- fiction 3, 5, 9, 54, 89, 94, 111;
picturebooks 101, 114
novels 4, 5; artists’ 101; graphic 13,
104; nineteenth- century realist 4;
polyphonic 4; social realistic 3
Nussbaum, Martha 3, 4, 5
objects 76, 78, 79, 92, 116, 137;
agency of 13; happy 93; hyper- 112;
research 156
Ohne Wasser geht’s nicht! 114– 115
ontologies, relational 10, 138, 139,
140, 146, 147– 148
open wound, US- Mexico border as 53
other lives 5, 64, 155
otherness 5, 56, 156
others 21, 22, 40, 41, 50, 51;
fear of 39
pain 38, 57, 65, 67, 119; and Frida
Kahlo 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105
paintings 42, 82; of Frida Kahlo 95– 96,
97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106
pandemic, Covid 14, 39, 89
pedagogical intensities 7, 90, 91– 92,
108
pedagogy 3, 14, 70, 71, 94, 101,
121, 143, 153; anti- racist 126;
eco- 111– 112
Pérez Fontdevila, Aina 107
philosophical racism 156
photography 38, 73, 97, 98– 99, 101,
102, 104
164 Index
picturebook publishing 13, 15
picturebooks: aective attachments to
26; agency of 26; challenging 1– 2,
8, 26, 27, 28– 29, 42, 105, 129, 155;
about emotions 16; non- fiction 101,
114; radical 26
Pikinini 1, 2
Pinochet, Augusto 9, 71, 72, 82
PISA (Programme for International
Student Assessment) 15, 16, 130,
140
pleasure 16, 31, 92, 130, 143; reading
for 3– 4, 15, 18, 130
poetry 9, 103, 144; seealso Niños
political agency 154
political art 18– 19
politics 19, 74; feminist 92; of
happiness 8, 10; of hope 115; of
memory 72, 85; of recognition 41
polyphonic novels 4
post- anthropocentric narratives
111– 121, 119, 120, 122
postcriticism 6– 7
post- feminism 93– 94, 103– 104
posthumanism 3, 6, 7, 10, 26, 80, 93
posthumanist feminism 93
power imbalances, adult- child 137,
152, 153
precarity 39, 40, 51, 112, 126
Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA) 15, 16, 130,
140
Promise of Happiness, The 19
promise of happiness 19, 22, 133
protection, of children 2, 20, 39, 73,
81
public library, in Dreamers 57– 58
Punk Robot 9, 73
“quality” literature 3
questionnaire format, of Tell Me How
It Ends 54, 63, 64, 66
racialised community 44
racism 8, 44, 153; anti- 41, 126, 153;
philosophical 156
radical picturebooks 26
Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie 4
Rancière, Jacques 18– 19
rationality 3, 5, 7, 18, 86
readerly gap 142– 143
reading: and conditions of existence
130; for duty 18; of fiction 15;
group 27, 43, 86; as highly regarded
activity 27; for pleasure 3– 4, 15, 18,
130
reading mediation 6, 8, 16, 30– 31, 32,
33, 42, 43, 50, 72, 78, 125
reading programme 132– 134
reading promotion 2, 5, 10, 13– 14,
117, 140, 145; and social
marginalisation 125, 126, 127, 128,
130
reason 18, 47– 48
Rebel Girls series 90
rebelliousness 97– 98, 103– 104
refugee crisis 38, 40
refugees 9, 38, 39, 40, 49, 53, 65, 67,
126
relational ontologies 10, 138, 139,
140, 146, 147– 148
remembrance 73, 80, 81; collective
70, 73
representation: artificiality of 82– 83;
problem of 18– 19; traditional
paradigm of 85– 86
research objects 156
Researching Child Authors 137– 138
resilience: of Frida Kahlo 9, 100, 102,
103, 104, 107; Mexican 103
respect 14, 20, 50, 64, 106, 118
Rivera, Diego 90, 95, 100– 101, 102,
103
role models 91, 97, 98, 101, 105, 107,
108
Rose, Jacqueline 5– 6, 152
Rose Blanche 1, 39
Ruano, Alfonso 9, 75, 76, 77, 129
Saá, Pitu 91, 97, 98, 99
sacrifice 35
sadness 17, 18, 20, 34, 118, 131
safe space 134
Sánchez Vergara, María Isabel 91, 94,
96, 97, 100, 101, 103
Sanna, Francesca 28, 129
Scheier, Mieke 114
Schimel, Lawrence 131
school library policy, in Chile 125– 126
second- wave feminism 92
self- help 20
selfishness 21, 22
Index 165
sense of community 40
sensibility 78, 94, 107; contemporary
14, 79
sexism 89, 93, 107, 108, 153
shanty towns, in Chile 126, 127,
128– 129, 130, 131, 132
Shiva, Vandana 113
short stories 16, 75, 107, 141– 142,
145, 146; prize for 143– 144
silences 34, 71– 72, 78, 79, 86, 132, 137
silent books 49
Skármeta, Antonio 9, 75, 76, 77, 129
slow violence 112– 113, 121
Smoke 1, 39
social exclusion 2, 130
social justice 91
social marginalisation 130, 153
social norms 19, 22, 92, 137
social realistic novels 3
social reproduction 2
social taboos 2
socioemotional education 7, 8, 16, 17,
31
socioemotional maturity 22– 23
solidarity 21, 22
state violence 2, 71, 75, 81, 85
Steinlein, Christina 114
strangers 39, 46– 47; fear of 28, 39, 40
structural injustice 9, 22, 41, 93, 104,
114
structures, agency of 13
suering 20, 61, 64, 67, 68, 155;
collective 22; distant 78; of Frida
Kahlo 93, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104,
105, 106, 107, 108
suppression of women’s writing 107
sustainability 111, 56
taste 130, 132
Teckentrup, Britta 16, 27, 31, 155
Tell Me How It Ends 54, 62, 63– 64,
65, 67, 68; questionnaire format of
54, 63, 64, 66; sections of 66
testimonial narratives 53, 54
testimonial voices 9, 62– 63
testimonial writing 4, 5, 9, 53, 54,
62– 63, 140
texts, agency of 154
theory: of autobiographical pact 55,
58; of basic emotions 17– 18; of
mind 3, 14, 15, 47
Think dierence dierently? Knowing/
becoming/ doing with picturebooks
45
Todorova, Marija 137– 138
tolerance 21, 40, 41, 42, 53, 74
torture 70, 71, 72, 81, 85
translation 20, 63– 64, 66, 137
trauma 15, 70, 71, 72, 73, 78, 84,
101; national 81
traumatic national pasts 70, 72
travelling concepts 22
Trump, Donald 42, 53, 62, 66– 67
Tsing, Anna 116, 138
Un diamante en el fondo de la tierra 9,
71, 73– 74, 78, 81, 82– 83, 83, 85
unaccompanied child migrants 61, 63,
67, 68
undocumented migrants 54– 55, 56,
57, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66
unjust relations 41
US- Mexico border 9; family
separations at 8, 53, 61, 153
Vamos a ver a papa 131
Varas, José Miguel 1, 2
Véliz, Soledad 26, 45, 117, 126, 145
verbal and visual 78, 83
verbal narration 28
vibrant materialism 26
viewer’s gaze 55– 56
villainy 141– 142, 143, 145, 146
violence: domestic 1, 14, 153; gender
2, 155; male 98; slow 112– 113, 121;
state 2, 71, 75, 81, 85
viralisation of the image 38
visual and verbal 78, 83
visual focalisation 55, 56, 95
visual narration 28, 75, 78, 96
voices 67; authorial 143, 148;
autobiographical 105; of children
10, 32, 61, 62, 65, 137, 138, 148,
154; hybrid 107; narrative 47, 66;
testimonial 9, 62– 63
Wall, John 153– 154
wars 14, 28, 32, 50, 70, 112, 155;
culture 5; water 8, 113, 115
water consumption 114
water crisis 113– 114, 121
water rationing 114
166 Index
water scarcity 9, 113, 115
water shortage 113, 116
Water Wars, The 113
water wars 8, 113, 115
ways of knowing 18, 51, 119, 121,
122, 148, 154, 155, 156; adultist
116– 117, 145, 152– 153
We Are Water Protectors 114– 115
welcoming country, USA as 53
#WeNeedDiverseBooks 54
Wesseling, Elisabeth 137– 138
Western humanism 93
What Children’s Writing? Read by
Whom, How, and To What Ends?
137
Why Should I Save Water? 113– 114,
115
women’s empowerment 9, 104
women’s writing 91, 143; suppression
of 107
wordless stories 49
worldmaking 10, 121, 139, 140, 146,
155
writing: agency of 147; arts of
noticing children’s 10, 136– 148;
child- authored 136, 137, 140, 148;
creative 10, 63, 137, 140, 148; life
66, 67; testimonial 4, 5, 9, 53, 54,
62– 63, 140; women’s 91, 107, 143
Wynter, Sylvia 93
xenophobia 8, 9, 27, 28, 105, 153;
and border crossing 39, 40, 41, 42,
45, 50
Xolotl dog 97, 100
Yockteng, Rafael 28, 81
young authorship 143, 145
Zlata’s Diary 137, 138
