33 - Children’s Literature and the Construction of Contemporary Multicultures

Summary

Given the UK’s increasingly ‘multicultural’ composition, the question of how cultural diversity is represented in literature written for children and young adults has been of enduring social and educational significance. This issue was first highlighted prominently with the publication of the 1985 Swann Report ‘Education for All’, which stressed the need for a curriculum that reflected the diversity of Britain’s population, and has been addressed in public discourse ever since. Creating new versions and offering new visions of society remains a key task in different genres for young readers: narrative, poetry, and picturebook. This chapter focuses on the works of selected writers noted for offering a wide array of cultural perspectives and a long-standing commitment to representing a diverse society. They work with a variety of strategies, ranging from bleakly realistic representations of individuals and communities to the use of speculative fiction pointing towards the narrowness of cultural categories. The black or Asian British child or young adult in these text is firmly placed and made visible in a society that is portrayed as an increasingly diverse cultural contact zone.