Spread across the year, the ACLiSA Speaker Series features speakers who are researchers and creators of children’s and young adult literature from South Asia and abroad with the aim to bridge knowledge and access gaps – within disciplines, industries, and communities.
As ACLiSA is an organisation formed and run by early career researchers, it is also important to us to spotlight the work that graduate students and ECRs do in this regard, and hence the Speaker Series offers a mix of speakers at various points of their careers.
KidLit Beyond KidLit:
KidLit Beyond KidLit is envisioned with the idea that children’s literature is more than just “a parallel universe to the world of canonical literature”, as Peter Hunt phrases it (2). But Hunt also notes that this is a form of literature that is also interwoven with other literature, and as researchers and scholars of children’s literature know, children’s and young adult literature deals with issues as grave and important as “canonical” or “adult” literature. Yet, a subconscious divide continues to exist within academia wherein children’s and young adult literature studies is seen as a separate field of inquiry outside the known canon, the occasional inclusion of works like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1965) within Victorian literature studies notwithstanding. In South Asia, where CYA literature studies continues to be in its nascency, such divides are even more entrenched.
It is within this space that the ACLiSA Speaker Series: KidLit Beyond KidLit offers an intervention to emphasise that CYA Literature is not a separate, exclusive field of literature but a part of larger critical concerns just as much as the “Adult” literary canon is and the need to take cognisance of KidLit when studying and researching literature. Children’s literature is the first literature that we encounter as children; the stories we begin reading with. So why does it not carry greater importance in critical literary discourses? Why is CYA literature so often excluded from other fields of literary study when children are as much, if not more, affected by the sociological, psychological, legal, environmental, economic, historical concerns than adults? Moreover, as it is targeted at a group of readers in an entirely different stage of maturity and identity than adults, CYA literature bears significant potential not just in literature departments but also in other disciplines like History, Education, Anthropology, among others. For example, what does it mean to see children’s literature as a historical source rather than just adult literature? What additional insight does it bring to cultural understandings of society and human experience? What does it mean to incorporate CYA texts within broader areas of study without the preconceived bias of it being children’s literature and therefore unserious? More specifically, for our purposes, what understanding of social systems does CYA literature offer in the context of South Asia?
The ACLiSA Speaker Series: KidLit Beyond KidLit invites scholars from and of South Asia from beyond Children’s and YA Literature studies, in disciplines of History, Queer Studies, Environmental Humanities, Popular Culture, for example, who work with CYA literature without being strictly children’s and YA literature scholars, to ponder these questions and share with us what including children’s literary texts within their work has meant to them. What avenues of exploration has this opened up for their project? How has this changed their hypotheses and thinking, if it has?
The aim of this Series is twofold:
- To establish that CYA literature has as much a role to play in literary studies as the “adult” canon and is inherently not the separate or parallel canon that it is often considered to be,
- To consider new ways of understanding CYA Literature in South Asia by taking it beyond the exclusive bubble it is often subconsciously ascribed to.
Works Cited:
Hunt, Peter. Children’s Literature. Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Author Talks:
The ACLiSA Speaker Series: Author Talks invites writers, illustrators, publishers, and creators of children’s and young adult literature in South Asia to discuss their work, influences, and collaborations. It highlights and brings into academic discourse the trends, concerns, and public impact of children’s literature within the contemporary social milieu in South Asian countries and aims to create a space for dialogue between the creator and the researcher. ACLiSA also aims to celebrate the incredible cultural and linguistic diversity of South Asia and the many CYA literatures that are produced therein, through this series.
On Scholarship:
As the conference themes of recent children’s and YA literature conferences – the Child & Book Conference; the YA Studies Association Conference; the IRSCL Congress; the Let’s Talk About Sex in YA Conference at Cambridge; the CripKidLit conference at Cambridge; the MA Children’s Literature Conference at the University of British Columbia; the International Children’s Literature Symposium hosted by Ocean University, Newcastle University and the University of Pittsburgh, to name a few – show, children’s literature studies internationally is moving towards interdisciplinary goals with aims of inclusivity and global diversity. In the burgeoning field of CYA Studies in South Asia, however, largely due to a lack of funds, these discussions remain inaccessible.
To address this research and access gap, the ACLiSA Speaker Series: On Scholarship invites researchers of children’s and YA literature from within South Asia and abroad to give talks on their research and the literature produced in their countries or the countries of their research, as well as the field of children’s literature studies within academic institutions.
