"This Isn't Art...It's Our Life": Exploring Urban Settings in African American Teen Fiction

• In Event: Interrogating the Social Imagination: Examining the Renegotiation of Self and Others Through Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Objective
This paper describes a content analysis of the representations of urban settings in award-winning realistic teen YA books featuring African American youth published between 2000-2015. Specifically, our goal in this work is to consider 1) the geographies available to African American youth in the award-winning realistic teen fiction YA books in which they appear, and 2) the ways in which YA literature implicitly constructs “urban” settings.

Perspective
We draw on the work of Black scholars in the field of YA literature (e.g., Bishop, 1982; Brooks, 2006; Thomas, 2011) and on the Youth Lens (YL) framework to inform our work. The YL approach critiques the claims of classic adolescent psychology, and encourages the consideration of adolescence as a social construct that can hold negative material consequences for adolescents. An overarching question for our study, influenced by the YL framework, is: Where do stories about youth of color take place in award-winning YA literature, and how does setting influence the identities, social relations, and trajectories of youth of color?

Methods
Patton (2002) defines content analysis as “the process of identifying, coding, and categorizing the primary patterns in the data” (p. 381). We conducted content analysis as described by Patton, which is a recursive process of examining written texts and artifacts in order to draw inferences about recurring concepts in the literature without counting or searching for certain words or phrases. Using the rich data contained in the award-winning realistic teen fiction YA books, the inductive coding process Patton outlines enabled us to come away with thematic (rather than numerical) representations of the data.

Data sources
We define African American YA literature as literature “…written both by and about African Americans” (Brooks, 2006, p. 375). The book awards selected were the YA literature winners of The Coretta Scott King Book Awards, The John Steptoe New Talent Award, The National Book Awards, The Michael L. Printz Awards, The Newbery Medal Award Winners, and the Stonewall Award. A total of 28 books were identified. Each book was read multiple times over the course of one year, in addition to book reviews and other literary criticism; authors’ award speeches; and interviews with the authors.

Results
We suggest three categories by which we might identify representations of urban settings in YA literature: nostalgic/transformative (e.g., Jason Reynolds’ When I Was the Greatest), transitional/liminal (Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last), and symbolically challenging/incompatible (Traci Jones’ Standing Against the Wind).

Significance
Findings from this study suggest that while there is work to be done in representing multiple and varied “geographies” for youth of color in the books that win teen book awards, award-winning books featuring African American youth are providing representations of urban settings as empowering and supportive spaces that can be transformed by the youth who inhabit them. These findings have the potential to disrupt and counter overly-simplistic and negative representations that are too regularly scapegoated onto urban youth and settings rather than attributed to their economic and social causes.

Authors

• Susan L. Groenke, The University of Tennessee - Knoxville

• Kelly Bailes Wallace, The University of Tennessee

• Chonika Coleman King, University of Florida