Diffractive Reading of Children's Literature Through Critical Multicultural Analysis: Re-Turn to Culture

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Theories and Methods of Analytic Engagement With Children's and Young Adult Literature (Table 7)

Abstract

Multicultural children's literature has the potential to bring readers up close to cultural experiences. However, this literary category is often informed by a static and bounded understanding of culture. In this study, we put to work feminist poststructural and new materialist understandings of culture to deepen critical multicultural analysis of children’s and young adult literature. We draw on Fornas’s (2017) conceptualizations of culture as a thinking tool for this project. Using a diffractive reading methodology we look at “what phenomena do and how they are connected and co-constructed.” A diffractive reading across texts through critical multicultural analysis considers culture as an assemblage of discourses and materiality, with the potential to inform teaching and research of children’s literature with new insights.

Authors

• Maria José Botelho, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  Presenting Author

• Marsha Liaw, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  Presenting Author