Author Archives: Jenn Polish

About Jenn Polish

I am an enthusiastic instructor of first year composition at CUNY Queens College while pursuing my PhD at the Grad Center. My research interests include affective whiteness in writing classrooms and the intersections of dis/ability, race, and trauma in children's literature and media. I am currently working on my first novel, a queer YA fantasy.

Primary — Erasing Second Generation Memory

Since Sarah has done such an excellent job laying out Ulanowicz’s methodologies and arguments, I don’t feel the need to belabor them here. To quote Sarah’s fabulous gloss, “[Second-generation memory] isn’t a passive reception of memories, but an active integration of the past into one’s present life – a critical awareness of how the memories of past generations can affect one’s own interpretation of self.” With this awareness in mind, I’m going to turn both briefly to The Giver and then, more substantially, to Veronica Roth’s Allegiant, the last installment in the Divergent trilogy.

First, however, I want to offer a brief foray into moments in my teaching where I’ve used ideas drawn from Ulanowicz and other scholars dealing with transgenerational trauma (which is a term more often used in explicit studies of race-based trauma, and I found myself wondering in Ulanowicz’s text about the need to create a completely separate term for her ideas). This gifset (also embedded below) was an excellent, excellent conversation-starter to explore transgenerational trauma and the denial of this trauma in both popular culture and dominant educational systems.

http://firey-rising-demon.tumblr.com/post/130812811929/mmmmmick-micdotcom-watch-a-texas-mom-called

Analyzing this gifset in class opened up a plethora of opportunities for exploring both agency and oppression in the creation of history and the ways that this history affectively (to say the least) impacts people’s day-to-day lives.

And now… to The Giver! A brief note — I was disappointed by Ulanowicz’s lack of centralizing racial oppression in The Giver. As Mary J. Couzelis’s “The Future is Pale” essay in Carrie and Kate’s book discusses at length, the central memory issues are kind of meta-textual: everyone seems to be white in this future that Lowry creates, and this goes unquestioned both in the text and in many popular reader responses. The biggest memory issue, therefore, is one of racial violence: unacknowledged white supremacy has erased the history of racism that is absolutely central to the kind of oppression that The Giver supposedly critiques in the first place. Erasing racist violence in the narrative re-enacts this violence, and I was surprised that this was not the central feature of Ulanowicz’s analysis here.

This leads me to my “primary” analysis, of Allegiant.

In brief, the plot of Allegiant centralizes a conflict of memory versus the forcible erasure of memory. (The details are… quite muddy, because, well… it wasn’t, perhaps, the best planned out book in the history of the world. But, happily, the major details aren’t too necessary right now. The basics: The city that Tris, the protagonist, comes from [Chicago] has been subjected to a massive memory wipe, generations before, so that the dystopian U.S. government can experiment on the population in an essentially country-wide eugenics project. The experiment isn’t going as planned, so the government wants to wipe out the memory of Chicago’s inhabitants, which Tris equates to killing them. Then she… well, she — SPOILERS — does it to the government. *deep breath* Okay.)

Thus, the entire premise of Allegiant is that massive amounts of people have forcibly had their memories removed ‘for their own good.’ Inter-generational memory, for Tris, is therefore based on both brutal realities, passionate joys, and historical lies.

However, when she encounters people who still know U.S. history, race is never brought up. Though the novel has very strange and unsettling racial dynamics (I have a book chapter on it that’s in the works for publication, and I’m presenting on it at MLA — who else is gonna be in that hell hole?), race — moreover, racism — itself is never explicitly discussed in the narrative. Never.

So… the characters have literally had their memories of racism erased, and the narrative — the part that readers interact with (meta!) has also erased race. The generation of fictional children that Tris belongs to have literally been born into a self-contained city whose history is based on memory-altered lies, and the generation of real-world children that read about Tris are also having racism erased from their minds vis a vis the disturbing erasure of it in the narrative.

What, then, does second-generation memory mean when the refusal to transmit full memories (in this world and in future Tris’s world) actually perpetuates transgenerational trauma through erasure? What of the ways that transmission of transgenerational trauma by interpollating second-generation memories into generations who have not experienced such oppressions re-creates new oppressions (I’m wondering here about many things, including the potential hierarchicalization involved in needing to mediate Zlata’s Diary through Anne Frank)? What of ethics when memories inflict trauma? Thinking of the gifset above, what of ethics when memories are contemporary and transmitting knowledge across generations provides young people with tools to (try to) survive?

Over the (Homo, Of Course) Rainbow: Method

Often hailed as the first of its kind — a book-length treatment of queerness in children’s and YA literature (that will both put the song in your head and blow your mind about the things you never realized were queer… but are… all for the [not] low cost of $45.99!) — Kidd and Abate’s Over the Rainbow offers an interdisciplinary framework for queerness in kid and YA lit. However, the book still retains a damaging structure that operates on a distinctly non-queer platform, and I will spend much of the post discussing why/how that is.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading Over the Rainbow in a quite piecemeal fashion: I first took it out a few summers ago for the sheer pleasure of Tosenberger’s chapter on Harry Potter slash fanfic, and was immediately seduced by the piece on Nancy Drew and, of course, Tribunella’s piece on A Separate Piece (because when has the intersection of queerness and trauma not seduced me?).

That experience, for me, is part of the excellence of this book overall: it’s like a candy shop wrapped up in book binding, there for when you need an article on anything (unless you want a sustained treatment on race, for example, which seems to be a common theme across the cannon).

That expansiveness is, however, also a bit of weakness for me: divided almost awkwardly into “Queering the Cannon” (Part the First), “After Stonewall” (Part the Second), and “Queer Readers and Writers” (Part the Third). Though I won’t go into my gripes about using Stonewall as a violently inaccurate buzzword for “when [white cis] gay history began”, I want to call attention to both the strengths and potential weaknesses of organizing the book into these particular sections.

I absolutely love the idea of the first section: taking purportedly cishet, cannon texts like Harriet the Spy, Little Women, and The Wizard of Oz — which often have large, explicitly queer followings — and excavating them for their queerness is a brilliant way to start this groundbreaking collection. It lets the authors of these chapters proclaim, ‘we do not need to examine books where two women (for example) are making out in order to find queerness.’ This is a phenomenal move, and one that I am perpetually pleased to see right up front in Over the Rainbow.

However, I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the third and last section, as I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the last section of many anthologies (and syllabi, for that matter). These last sections — like this one, which covers not only fan fiction but computer games, and trans issues — are often reserved for more ‘risque’ items, more unconventional material, things that the authors/editors may in fact value quite highly but someone along the way — the anthology editors, the publisher’s editors, etc. — decides that in order to establish credibility for the text, these works must ‘go last’, ‘go speculative.’ A tendency both in academic anthologies and in many, many, many (once more for emphasis) MANY course syllabi — which, for example, include race and/or queer stuff and/or dis/ability stuff last, as almost an afterthought — Over the Rainbow succumbs to this temptation to lump a bunch of ‘suspect’ material in under the vague section heading of “Queer Readers and Writers” (have they not been discussing us the entire time?).

I am most disturbed by this, not only because of the implication that studying fan fiction and computer games is less ‘legitimate’ than studying straight-up (or not!) Harriet the Spy, but because two of the articles here foreground issues of transness. Is transness, then, also ‘suspect’ and somehow less legitimate, like fan fiction and computer games? I’m very nervous about this, though I am not finger pointing because I do not know at what point in the process these essays were relegated to the “last section” which seems, as I said, to be perpetually reserved for things the anthology largely doesn’t want to deal with upfront, like… race! Again, where is that here? It’s not ‘even’ foregrounded in the “last section” section, which is upsetting, to say the least.

Back to the trans stuff for one second: one of these two articles foregrounding trans issues, Battis’s on “Trans Magic” uses transgender-ness, it seems, as more of a metaphor for unlocking gender binaries than on people’s lived experiences of being trans. Much like the over-use of the term ‘queer’ to mean anything that transgresses… anything…. this usage threatens not only to dilute the power of the term, but to metaphorize experiences that are, in actuality, quite immediately real and in need of their own non-metaphorized analyses.

So, my overall take on Over the Rainbow: I’ve been having a love affair with this book and individual articles in it for years, but taking it as a whole? Where is race? Why is transness relegated “to the back” with other “suspect” materials like fan fic and computer games? Shouldn’t a book on queerness be a little bit more… well… queer in its structure??

Unlearning Like… Everything (vis a vis Bernstein)?

Taking on the project of whiteness to reproduce itself as a silent non-identity-identity, Robin Bernstein argues that “[c]hildhood innocence — itself raced white, itself characterized by the ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness — secured the unmarked status of whiteness, and the power derived from that status, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (8). Not a peripheral effect of, but rather a central, game-changing player in, the material constructions of whiteness and “racial difference constructed against whiteness” in this country, images of childhood both fundamentally shape(d) — and can be used to reveal — the invisibility of whiteness in white supremacist societies like this one (8).

Bernstein does not only intervene in the what constitutes childhood and therefore children’s literature conversation with this crucial argument: she also offers scholars an important method of analyses with which to force the whiteness of childhood innocence into visibility. Through her text, she reads “scriptive things”, a process which she defines as such: “using archival knowledge to analyze items of material culture in order to discover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past behaviors… to understand how a nonagential artifact, in its historical context, prompted or invited — scripted — actions of humans who were agential and not infrequently resistant” (8).

Making a pain-based argument in her first chapter (which the dis/ability scholar and dis/abled person in me desperately wants to explore further) and several analyses of dolls along the way, Bernstein reimbues objects with power not in themselves, but in the scripts they passed on to the people who use and buy and sell and give and make and steal them. In doing so, Bernstein charts a path in children’s literature which can potentially allow scholars to examine how texts script reactions. Analyses, especially in children’s literature, often get complicated (or rather, unsatisfyingly uncomplicated) when scholars argue that, “this book/object/etc encourages children to x” (unsatisfying because of the assumption of the importance/definitiveness of authorial intent, but mostly because of the question of ‘which children, when, where, etc?’). Instead, paying attention to the scripting at once connects and disconnects the maker of the object and its users/viewers/etc.: I think chapter 2 (analyzing the subtle subversions scripted into the topsy-turvy dolls) is an excellent example of how this can be effectively utilized.

It seems to me, then, that Bernstein’s principle thesis that whiteness is scripted into the multiple layers of communication about supposed childhood innocence — which Black children are not afforded (indeed, not even able to feel pain in the dominant script [chapter 1]) — challenges the very fundamentals of the discourse of “innocence” and defining “childhood.” In other words, taking Bernstein’s arguments seriously — and I think that we must — means that we need to unlearn, or at the very least, relearn, much of what Rose has argued about childhood innocence and many have reproduced (a theory of childhood innocence that ‘forgets’ race precisely in the ways that Bernstein warns against).

In laying out Bernstein’s argument and challenging Rose’s and others’ assumptions about the universality of innocence in doing so, Racial Innocence refuses to unlink any conception of “children” — whether drawn out of adults’ desire or not (or with Gubar’s “collaboration”, or some other configuration) — from the various violent morphologies of the material and lived histories of race and racism.

In this way, it seems to me that this book is one answer to Danny’s call to examine the power that underlies any conception of childhood and children. However, I wonder about the direction of power flow that Bernstein spends most of her time discussing. Though she offers plenty of experiences of young Black girls interacting with, and thereby contributing to the construction of, childhood (especially in her last chapter on dolls), I wonder if a Gubar-esque critique is possible here. Gubar criticized Rose (as we discussed, perhaps as a straw (wo)man in certain instances) for flattening children into agentless beings, with adults constructing childhood for them; can we enact a similar critique of Bernstein, in which except for her examination of the resistance embedded in the scripts of topsy-turvy dolls in chapter 2, formations of childhood driven by people of color are not generally emphasized?

I am super curious how these kinds of questions will impact her next book, to be called White Angels, Black Threats: How Stories about Childhood Innocence Influence What We See, Think, and Feel about Race in America. She will be using stories like those of Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to make it clear how absolutely vital children and childhood studies are to state violence in this country today, including police violence, media propaganda, and mass incarceration.* I am even more curious how Black girlhood, so emphasized in Racial Innocence, will play a role in this new book: often in the current discourse about state violence, violence against Black women is ignored in the face of sole attention being placed on violence against Black boys, teens, and men (see what I did there? Where does childhood end? I’m sure she will analyze that in media reports, and I’m sure the conclusion will be: sooner for Black people and other people of color than it does for white people). How will Bernstein interweave these questions? How should she?

Discuss.

* This is also a hugely powerful function of Racial Innocence, as well. Even as we know that children’s lit is becoming something more and more ‘acceptable’ to study in the academy, despite its persistent feminization and therefore devaluation (etc.), it’s becoming more and more conventional as a mode of professional study. BUT. Issues such as these — the exigency that Bernstein brings to the proverbial table — is precisely what I believe we need in studying children’s lit (and in studying… well… everything else) and something that we often forget when we evacuate our conversations about innocence and childhood from the fundamental issues of power that shape them to begin with.

On the (Performative) Destruction of Periodization

Sometime in the month before the Comps, something inside me starting having a very visceral response to the word “period” (read: it makes me twinge on the inside now). So when Westman titled her article “Beyond Periodization,” and then – within a paragraph – referred to children’s lit as “the disempowered stepchild of literary history” (so deliciously campy, and thus so deliciously children’s lit… meta), I was in love (464).

Interested not only in tickling my anti-period sensibilities and affinity for all things campy, Westman wants readers to come to understand “the viability of children’s literature for rethinking our narratives of literary history” (464). Just from the start, I have great respect for this mission: not only is Westman here establishing her interest in elevating children’s literature to the (masculinized) “seriousness” that it has been denied through its erasure in periodization (*internal twinge activates*), but she is also making it her mission to use children’s lit not to join the ranks of literary canon per se (an arguably conservative move), but as a way to fundamentally restructure how all of us think about what we study.

Bold moves, Karin. Bold moves.

Building into the perpetual scholarly conversations on whether or not children’s literature even exists (and if so, how and how do we know when something’s children’s lit, anyway?), Westman argues that thinking through the genres (and “intergeneric potential”) of children’s literature is extremely productive in helping us delineate histories of the field, target audiences of the field, and when individual works are worthy of receiving accolades in the field (465). In doing so, Westman cross-sections her work with the deconstruction of periodization as the dominant mode of classifying literary history.

Using the example of Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, she argues that this text (and by extension, other works of children’s literature) “repeatedly and frequently exceeds its initial generic performance of ‘picture book’” (467). Tracing the renewed iterations of this book (Goodnight iPad comes to her mind) since its original publication in 1947, she asserts that this work fundamentally “challenges periodization as a defining method of literary history” (467).

Reading this, I couldn’t help but persistently wonder how this framework of analysis could have fundamentally changed/contributed to Adams’s article on medieval children’s lit. If she’d traced the moralistic educational works, for example (or the Bible, for that matter), out of the medieval period and into their manifestations throughout more recent history, could her argument have been even more readily apparent to the ‘non-experts’ she kept referencing?

I also can’t help but wonder whether, had Westman more explicitly elaborated on the importance of performance theories in “instances of generic performance across established periods” (which she referenced several times), her own analysis could have been more complex (467, emphasis added). Do the texts we classify as children’s literature perform differently as their expected audiences change? As their medium of re-production changes (picture books, chapter books, YA, interactive ipad books, ‘you choose’ books, books that children get to read to themselves rather than having a live-and-in-person adult read to them, etc.), how does the performative power of these works change? What does it mean, anyway, for a work of literature to engage in performative action? Had Westman explicated some of these thoughts, all of which are held within her repeated references to texts’ performativities, perhaps the analysis would have been able to reach further into the intergeneric potentials of children’s lit.