We proceed from the claim that the most exciting political work happening in literature today is in YA and Children’s literature. While the figure of the child has often been evoked in sentimental pleas for a more just future, J. E. Muñoz reminds us that while “Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white” (95). The “always already white” child stands in for futurity because their futures are not foreclosed nor determined by the realities of racial difference. The future of children of color is not a given.
Focusing on Latinx YA and Children’s literature offers us the opportunity to move away from sentimental constructions of the child and childhood, in which imaginary children are conflated with actual children to the latter’s detriment, and imagine worlds in which the futurity of racialized children is not foreclosed. Building on the excellent work in collections by Laura Alamillo, Larissa M. Mercado-López, Cristina Herrera, Trevor Boffone, Jesus Montaño, Regina Postma-Montaño and others, this panel on how Latinx YA and Children’s literature imagines Latinx futurity. In other words, what can works written for young adults and children tell us about the kinds of futures that can be imagined?
As these panelists explain, YA fiction imagine decolonial alternatives and invests in the promise of youth’s futurity that charts pathways to hope and joy beyond the limits of current racialization.
De Veritch Woodside paper analyzes the representation of life, death, power, and marginalization within the framework of Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics in the dystopic young adult novel Sanctuary, co-written by Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher. Set in 2032, this novel narrativizes a mixed-status family’s experiences of surveillance, family separation, and constant threat of detention and deportation. Nogar’s paper examines how paratextual materials in bilingual books support and project uniquely Latinx and bilingual epistemes into the future. Urcaregui examine the closet as a conceptual space of queer Latinx futurity from which we might dream of those other planets and make worlds, while Hudson analyzes how the speculative series Woven in Moonlight by Isabel Ibañez and Forgery of Magic by Maya Motayne rely on fantasies of an aggrieved Spanish past to inform their fantastic worlds.
This panel is organized by the Latinx literature forum to address the often-overlooked place of people of color in YA literature. This panel will be of interests to members across MLA, including those in Children’s & YA literature, in contemporary and twenty-first century literatures, in speculative genres, and those with interest in issues of race, decolonialism, immigration, and queer studies. Each panelist will present for no more than fifteen minutes, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of discussion and conversation. The papers were selected for their direct conceptual engagement with each other to foster conversation.