Shifting Places —Heather Snell

It seems fitting to publish a special issue on mobility acclimatize to my new role, she and I are effectively at a time when Jeunesse’s editorial board is undergoing shifting places. significant shifts. This issue marks the beginning of Over the years since the formation of Jeunesse, my tenure as lead editor. The loss of Mavis Reimer there has been regular mobility in the editorial as lead editor will be felt profoundly. Reimer led the ranks. The following editors have been instrumental transformation of Canadian Children’s Literature / in shaping the journal: charlie peters (2009–11), a Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse into Jeunesse, specialist in early nineteenth-century literature; Laurent a move that signalled the turn for the journal toward Poliquin (2009–11), a specialist in French; Catherine an international scope and an interdisciplinary reach Tosenberger (2009–12), specialist in folklore, fandom in the study of young people’s texts and cultures. Over studies, and YA literature; Jenny Wills (2012–14), the past eight years, she has also generously given her a specialist in critical race studies; and Doris Wolf time and expertise to teaching three junior editors— (2009–15), a specialist in Canadian and Indigenous Doris Wolf, Catherine Tosenberger, and me—how to texts. Naomi Hamer, who specializes in children’s work together to manage a biannual journal that has picture books, films, television, and audience studies, seen an increasing number of submissions since the and Mary LeMaître, specialist in colonial discourse publication of the first issue in 2009. Most of what I analysis and French, joined the editorial team in 2013. know about managing and editing an academic In a move that signalled an even greater embrace of journal I learned from Reimer, and so it is with the an international scope for the journal, we welcomed knowledge that I have gained working with her that three new highly skilled editors to the team in the fall I adopt the role of lead editor. Since Reimer will of 2015: Kristine Alexander, an Assistant Professor of spend another year as part of the editorial team as I History and the Research Chair in Child and

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) 1 Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge who The fact that this issue focuses on mobility at a time works on the history of children and adolescents in when we are seeing much mobility on the editorial the context of imperialism, globalization, and the First board is, of course, pure coincidence. It is nevertheless World War; Angela Dwyer, an Associate Professor a pleasant coincidence, one that enabled me to reflect in Police Studies and Emergency Management at on where we have been and to look forward to where the University of Tasmania who works on policing we may be going. I should add here that this is only experiences, queer young people, and sexuality the second special issue we have published. The first, from a law, criminology, and sociology perspective; on consumption, appeared in 2014. Encouraged by and Louise Saldanha, an instructor in the English the success of that issue, we decided to put together a Department at Douglas College whose work focuses collection of articles on another key theme relevant to on critical theories of race, gender, migrancy, disability, young people today: mobility. Our call for papers for this and pedagogy. I have no doubt that this formidable issue was wide-ranging. Unwilling to define or restrict editing team will be able to meet the challenges of an intellectual engagements with mobility as it pertains to interdisciplinary and often multidisciplinary journal young people, we invited papers on everything from with great alacrity. dancing children to the containment of freedom and A journal would be nothing without its copy movement. Our call was received enthusiastically: editors and proofreaders, the frequently uncelebrated we ended up with many submissions that unpacked, people behind the scenes who labour to ensure that deconstructed, and played with the notion of mobility no errors remain in the final copy. Melanie Unrau in a variety of ways and in relation to children’s bodies, (2009–10) served as the first copy editor of Jeunesse, toys, and narratives; the spaces of adolescence; travel, followed by Benjamin Lefebvre (2010–16), an expert both real and virtual; transnationalism; multiculturalism in Canadian literature and young people’s texts. charlie and psychogeography; migration/immigration; dance peters proofread the first issue of the journal but was and fitness; critical media literacy; and downward succeeded by Miria Olsen (2009–12) and then by mobility. While we could not use all of the fascinating Catherine Logan (2012–14). Lauren Bosc, a graduate articles that we received, the resulting issue brings of the University of Winnipeg’s M.A. program in together pieces that not only stand out for the quality Cultural Studies, is the current proofreader. All of of their engagements with mobility but also provide these individuals have helped to make Jeunesse a a snapshot of just how much mobility—and the lack successful journal. thereof—has an impact on the lives of young people.

2 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Of course, this past year has also seen the eruption with his family on a small inflatable rubber boat of the European , which provoked a great when it capsized only five minutes from shore. The mobility of people out of African and Asian countries boat had been carrying more than twice the number where burgeoning and ongoing conflicts forced many of people for which it had been designed. Aylan, his to flee across the and to seek five-year-old brother, Galip, and his mother, Reyhana, asylum in Europe. The Syrian civil war alone has been drowned. The only member of the Kurdi family to responsible for much of this mobility: early in 2014, survive was Abdullah, Aylan’s father, who explained to Syrian migrants made up one-third of all those who journalists in shortly after the incident that no landed on the shores of Greece and Italy, overtaking life vests had been available (King and Johnson). Afghans and Eritreans, the next two largest groups of What made the photo particularly affecting to migrants trying to reach Europe (“Mediterranean”). Canadians was the fact that the Kurdi family had been Because many of these migrants travelled on heading to Europe after failing to be approved entry overcrowded and barely serviceable boats, the death into Canada, where they already had family. Aylan’s toll due to drowning rose dramatically in 2015: 1,308 aunt, Teema Kurdi, had attempted to bring Aylan and migrants drowned in April alone (“Mediterranean”). his immediate family to Canada as refugees but had The crisis, which has provoked much attention been denied, largely, she reported, as a consequence worldwide, has only underlined the urgent need to of the Turkish authorities’ failure to cooperate: “We examine mobility and its curtailment. couldn’t get them out” (King and Johnson). Abdullah The impact of the crisis on young people was Kurdi, however, maintains that Canadian authorities brought home most poignantly to those of us who are to blame for the tragedy, arguing that, if they had study young people’s texts and cultures by the widely not rejected his application for asylum, the family circulated photo of a dead three-year-old Kurdish boy would not have had to seek asylum in Europe and his whose body washed up on Bodrum’s Akyarlar coast wife and his children would still be alive (“Drowned”). of Turkey’s Muglaˇ province on 1 September 2015 (see Canadian Citizenship and Immigration officials insist fig. 1). Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir discovered that they received an application only for Mohammed, the boy’s body on the beach early in the morning of 2 Abdullah’s brother (“Drowned”). The murky details September and, despite being “petrified,” took several surrounding the Kurdi family’s applications proved photos (“Photographer”). The boy was later identified pivotal in exerting pressure on Prime Minister Stephen as Aylan Kurdi, who had been fleeing persecution in Harper and his government to allocate more funds

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 3 Figure 1: The now iconic photo of Aylan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach. Reproduced with permission of the Associated Press.

4 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) to refugee resettlement and to expedite resettlement society through public policy and collective effort.” He quickly (“Drowned”). Moreover, the Kurdi scandal adds that “what might’ve been—or might still be—a became the organizing image for an issue that was key story about how one three-year-old boy didn’t come to to the 2015 Canadian federal election as party leaders be safe in Canada is now a story about how we should scrambled to recruit it in service of their own political react to the prospect of millions of displaced people.” agendas. The image of teary-eyed Canadian politicians In fact, he speculates that it probably should have quickly began to rival that of Aylan Kurdi’s body, become a moral issue long before it ever became a highlighting the troubling ways in which Demir’s photo Canadian election issue. moved people affectively. The rapidity with which photos of Aylan Kurdi’s In a Maclean’s article on the Kurdi tragedy, body went viral on the Internet should also give us Aaron Wherry insinuates that Aylan’s death would pause. Does it take a photo of a dead three-year-old likely not have received much, if any, attention had washed up on a beach to incite us to care about the it not occurred in the middle of a federal election plight of refugees? Attesting to just how affecting the campaign. Remarking on both the frequency with photo was, not just to Canadians but to an international which Maclean’s reported on the refugee crisis in public, politicians worldwide expressed shock and the months leading up to the Kurdi tragedy and the outrage in the wake of the rapid circulation of the puzzling reluctance during that period on the part of image, often comparing Aylan to their own children, politicians to discuss the issue, Wherry writes, and there was an upsurge in donations to charitable “[T]hat this occurred during an election campaign, organizations dedicated to helping refugees. In a piece when media and public attention is as focused as in the Guardian, Jon Henley and his colleagues remark is possible, could be something of a sad blessing.” that “[a] day after shocking pictures were published Disagreeing with Liberal leader , who of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose insisted that the Kurdi tragedy “is something that lifeless body was washed up on a Turkish beach, tens goes beyond politics,” Wherry argues that, although of thousands of people across [Britain] were signing “[w]e might wish for it to be beyond cheap or crass petitions, donating to NGOs, preparing to drive politics—or simply beyond the usual manner of truckloads of supplies to Calais or volunteering to consideration— . . . almost nothing is beyond politics. take asylum-seekers into their homes.” They go on to At least insofar as politics should be understood as the report that many charities experienced a high volume process by which popular will and interest shape our of phone calls from people asking how they could

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 5 help; Caroline Anning of Save the Children announced “to match the first £10,000 in donations to an appeal that “[t]he number is up more than 70% over the past for the charity Save the Children.” Authors John 24 hours.” Not surprisingly, Anning elaborated, most Green, Derek Landy, and Jojo Moyes applauded his callers want to help refugee children: “[The pictures efforts, adding £10,000 each to his pledge. Concerned of Aylan Kurdi] were such compelling pictures, even individuals and communities across Britain decried when people are familiar with the broader refugee the government’s failure to help refugees and drew story.” Henley and his colleagues report further that the on discourses of hospitality, humanitarianism, and Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), which rescues global citizenship to emphasize the need to help migrants in the Mediterranean, reported a “15-fold them. Underlining the compulsion to use the crisis to increase in donations in 24 hours.” MOAS director confirm the rightness of national values while touting Martin Xuereb speculated in this article that “[w]e are the importance of global citizenship, businesses such increasingly understanding that behind every statistic, as the Coach and Horses pub characterized the values every number, there is a life—a life who has a mother, of “respect, dignity, and kindness” as being peculiarly a father or a sibling, a grandparent.” One would think British in their campaign to raise £5,000 to feed Calais that, in the wake of thousands of photographs of dead migrants (Henley et al.). and suffering individuals since the invention of the Similar philanthropic responses to the Aylan Kurdi photographic camera in 1826, one would not need photo were seen in the United States within a week of yet another reminder of the lives that persist beyond its publication. In the New York Times, Rick Gladstone statistics. It is common to talk about “compassion and Karen Zraick report that donations to UNICEF fatigue” in the face of images of death and suffering, earmarked for refugees increased 636% and that yet it is always just such an image, albeit often one that the organization’s website attracted three times the focuses on a child, that moves people to make these usual amount of traffic. Caryl M. Stern, president and kinds of inane statements. chief executive of the United States fund for UNICEF, Perhaps one of the more compelling subsets of surmised that “[y]ou see a dead child and can’t help responses for researchers and teachers of young but be catapulted into action” (qtd. in Gladstone and people’s texts and cultures was that of popular Zraick). To the question of why the dead body of Aylan children’s writers: as Henley and his colleagues report, Kurdi provoked such emotional responses in so many Patrick Ness managed to collect more than £60,000 people when many photographs of children killed and after tweeting about the refugee crisis and pledging wounded as the result of the civil war in Syria had

6 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) been circulating already, Stern concluded that Kurdi There is another touchstone for the Kurdi image was “not just a baby caught in a crossfire—he was beyond Phúc, however, and that is the iconic images savable” (qtd. in Gladstone and Zraick). Her point of of children suffering as a result of the Holocaust. reference was Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize–winning image These images provide not only an alternative point of of nine-year-old Kim Phúc, a victim of a napalm attack reference for the Kurdi image but also a tradition of during the Vietnam War taken 2 June 1972 (see fig. 2). representation of child victims that helps to organize Much like Kurdi’s, Phúc’s image became metonymic and systematize contemporary images of suffering of suffering brought on by war and violent conflict. children. Froma I. Zeitlin points out that the child The fact that Phúc was only nine years old at the is ubiquitous in Holocaust texts, both because “the time the photo was taken signals further the kind of relentless killing of children removes any doubt as to affective mobility that the spectre of the savable victim the intent of the ‘Final Solution’”—the extinction of provokes. Speaking on behalf of the Aylan Kurdi Fund, Jews—and exemplifies “the general condition of all established to “honour the pursuit of peace, well-being the victims, raised to the most poignant degree” (32). and education that many thousands of children have Yet a child’s survival—“even a single one”—“signifies bravely undertaken and continue to undertake,” Ranj a resistance to the brutal facts, a ray of hope for the Alaaldin asserts that Kurdi’s image “symbolizes the future” (32). Speaking to one of the most widely collective failure of the international community as a recognized and memorable images of the Holocaust, whole.” That Kurdi’s image subsumed all other images the photo of an unidentified “ghetto child” raising his of suffering Syrian children is, Alaaldin admits, “sad”: hands before a German guard pointing a machine “Tens of thousands of children have been killed as a gun at him (see fig. 3), Zeitlin theorizes that empathy result of conflict in Syria.” As Aljazeera reports, “more with the child constitutes “a gesture” to the “persistent than seventy children have died attempting to make the desire . . . to mitigate the threat of extermination by same crossing between Turkey and Greece” as Kurdi the rescue of a single child,” a desire that she sees since the circulation of the iconic image of his body as a trope in Holocaust literature and film (34). Her washed up on a beach (“‘More’”). Nevertheless, like nuanced analysis of the vicarious witness provides a the image of Phúc, the image of Kurdi stands in for context for understanding Stern’s thesis that Kurdi’s the experience of all children affected by war. More image was tragic in large part because he was precisely, Kurdi’s image stands in for the emotions the “savable.” He was savable in the sense that the tragedy rampant circulation of such images arouse in people. could have been avoided had governments worldwide

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 7 Figure 2: The iconic photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, shown just left of centre running naked along the road after being burned by napalm. Entitled “The Terror of War,” Nick Ut’s photograph won the Pullitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1973. Reproduced with permission of the Associated Press.

8 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Figure 3: Iconic photo of the unidentified “ghetto child,” taken as Jews scheduled for execution are rounded up during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 9 been more welcoming of refugees. But he is also savable as a form of heteropathic identification in which “the in a different sense: as a symbol of all child migrants, child victim of incomprehensible horror” supplants Kurdi is available for benevolent appropriation—we “‘the appetite for alterity’ with an urge toward identity.” cannot save Aylan, but we can save children like him Displacement thus precedes appropriation in one’s by donating to the refugee cause. In doing so, we take visual encounter with the image of the child victim. up the role of rescuer. The fact that few people know Spectators become at once rescuer and surrogate as Aylan’s name testifies to the ubiquity of this symbolic they embrace and trade places with the child victim operation. Like the ghetto child, he passes into history as simultaneously. In a statement that reconnects us to a generic child endlessly subjected to the gaze of those Wherry’s insistence on the political nature of the Kurdi who would either shift places with him or claim him as photo, Hirsch argues: “This could be the effect of the their own. ‘it could have been me’ created specifically by the In her own work on Holocaust texts, Marianne present political climate that constructs the child as an Hirsch highlights the status of the child as an always unexamined emblem of vulnerability and innocence.” empty and infinitely fillable container constructed More disturbing for Hirsch than this appropriative and mobilized by adults. Echoing scholars such as manoeuvre, though, is “the obsessive repetition of these Jacqueline Rose, she argues that the child is “the site images of children—in itself an example of acting out of adult fantasy, fear, and desire.” In keeping with the and the compulsion to repeat.” The image of the child ease with which the victim is made to shift places with a victim is available for appropriation at the same time child, “in the post-Holocaust generation we tend to see that it signifies the impossibility or undesirability of every victim as a helpless child.” What is at stake here is confronting precisely that which disturbs us: not just the erasure of the child’s specific circumstances “[T]he image of the child victim stands in for all that but suffering itself as something that afflicts more than cannot be—and perhaps should not be—worked children. Today, suffering is infantilized. Building on through.” Although Hirsch makes her argument in Zeitlin, Hirsch elaborates that we accordingly “enact a the context of the Holocaust, one can correlate the fantasy of rescuing at least one child as ultimate form unspeakability of that event with other crises, when of resistance to the totality of genocidal destruction.” the absence of emotional disruption might facilitate Crucially, appropriation and displacement shape our “too easy a resolution of the work of mourning.” The visual encounter with the child victim. Referencing problem with the image of the child victim is that it is Kaja Silverman’s work, Hirsch describes displacement capable of detracting attention away from the specific

10 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) circumstances that created the child’s victimization illustrative of Hirsch’s thesis than Weiwei’s arrangement in the first place and our own responsibility for and of his own body in the same position as the toddler’s on potential complicity with the child’s suffering. a beach that could be the same one on which Kurdi’s Artists who engaged the Kurdi photo in the body was discovered. Weiwei identifies heteropathically aftermath of its frenzied circulation highlight further the with Kurdi even as he exhibits the photo as a means of importance of reading visual encounters with Kurdi’s preventing children like Kurdi from meeting a similar dead body within a much larger context of other images fate: this is artistic activism as rescue. Reminiscent of of child victims. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, for example, Trudeau’s reading of the Kurdi tragedy, Weiwei himself exhibited a self-portrait resembling Demir’s photo of described his artistic intervention as one that allowed Kurdi’s dead body (see fig. 4). Nothing could be more him to connect to a place outside of politics: “[F]or me

Figure 4: Ai Weiwei’s self-portrait, designed to resemble Nilüfer Demir’s photo of Kurdi’s dead body. The photo was taken by Rohit Chawla on the Greek island of Lesbos in service of an article in India Today and an accompanying exhibition at the India Art Fair. Reproduced with permission from the photographer.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 11 to be in the same position [as Kurdi], is to suggest our global inequities that help to create the conditions for condition can be so far from human concerns in today’s conflicts that drive people to make the perilous crossing politics” (Chung). As Wherry points out, however, there across the Mediterranean Sea. is no place outside politics. Weiwei’s self-portrait has More recently, a graffiti rendering of Kurdi’s body been criticized by a number of people (see Malm), appeared on a wall on the banks of River Main near including blogger Niru Ratnam, who reads it as a crude, the headquarters of the in egotistical, and highly aestheticized “over-identification , Germany (see fig. 5). Like Weiwei, artists with refugees.” Ratnam argues that the self-portrait Justus Becker (also known as COR) and Oguz Sen draws attention not to the plight of refugees but to the (also known as Bobby Borderline) reproduced the many and varied ways in which people appropriate iconic Kurdi image to encourage Germans to be less images such as those of Kurdi that circulate “too readily xenophobic: as Becker stated in an interview, “We hope and without enough reflection.” Weiwei’s photo, to have people emotionally rethink their selfish fears Ratnam concludes, promotes the artist rather than of refugees coming to Germany” (qtd. in McGee). The intervenes productively in debates about and treatments problem with such affective projects is that they end of refugees. up becoming a canvas onto which viewers can project Australian singer-songwriter Missy Higgins took a their own fears, anxieties, and desires. Kurdi is taken similar approach as Weiwei in her writing of a song out of context, his face conveniently buried in the sand, inspired by the Kurdi photo, only instead of putting a posture that makes it all too easy to place oneself herself in place of Aylan she appropriates the voice of or one’s own child in his position. Universalized, he his father, Abdullah. Drawing more attention perhaps exists not in all his specificity but for us, as proxy and to the futility of appropriative identifications, Higgins’s virtual adoptee. The deftness with which his mother, his song sentimentalizes the father’s experience and at the brothers, and even his father are disappeared from the same time shores up the innocence in which the figure scene or, as in the case of Higgins’s song, appropriated of the child often is shrouded. The use of drawings as proxy for us should tell us something about the by Syrian children in the music video moves us even primacy of heteropathic identification with Kurdi as further away from considering the systems that are to the image of his dead body washed up on a Turkish blame for the refugee crisis: we are invited to identify beach went viral on the Internet. It is not that the image with the father’s loss and, in doing so, to appropriate this makes us feel without thinking too deeply but that it loss as our own at the expense of interrogating the larger can make us feel without thinking too deeply in the

12 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Figure 5: COR and Bobby Borderline’s graffiti image of Aylan Kurdi, located on a wall near the headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, photographed by Roberto Zambotti. Reproduced with permission from Stadtkind Blog.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 13 wrong direction: rather than conjuring up feelings for poverty and race within our own countries (Briggs 182). Aylan and his family, we can end up seeing Aylan as Kurdi’s image may move many to tears, but its repetition mere proxy for ourselves or our own loved ones. The signifies an obsession with sentimentalized childhood, endless reproduction of the Kurdi image recalls not which in itself detracts from any real analysis of politics just a tradition of Holocaust representation wherein we while providing reassurance that morality continues to are, perhaps, encouraged to feel without thinking too thrive despite the hegemony of a neo-liberalism that deeply—sometimes rightly so—but also a humanitarian shrinks everything down to its value on the market. tradition of representing needy and suffering children There has been an international trafficking of images as both proxies for and orphans ready to be rescued by such as those of Kurdi’s, lending credence to Terri benevolent adults in economically well-off countries. Tomsky’s thesis that the kinds of traumas provoked by Nancy Batty decries the kinds of images circulated violent, coerced, or involuntary mobilities are in and by Save the Children, World Vision, UNICEF, OXFAM, of themselves commodities to be bought and sold on and other charities, arguing that they are obscene in the a global market. Tomsky builds on Jean Baudrillard’s way that they “solicit our gaze in order to engage us in argument that “‘distress, misery, and suffering have an immediate and paternalistic relationship with the become the raw goods’ circulating in a global age famine victim (almost always a child) that displaces not of ‘commiseration,’” suggesting that “[t]he ‘demand’ only the Third World parent as a figure of competence created by a market of sympathetic, yet self-indulgent and efficacy, but also the very possibility of a future for spectators propels the global travel of trauma (or rather, the Third World” (18). Laura Briggs is equally dismissive the memory of that trauma), precisely because . . . of these images because they risk drawing attention suffering has a ‘resale value on the futures markets’” away from the international, political, military, and (52–53; Baudrillard 82, 81, 82). While Tomsky is economic structures that cause suffering in favour referring here to Bosnian suffering, her argument applies of mobilizing ideologies of “rescue.” The “imploring equally to Kurdi’s suffering as well as his father’s. As waif,” she argues, has become more than “one possible evidenced by the reproduction of the image of Kurdi convention of visual culture”; it is a “finely honed trope” and the appropriation of his father’s experience of loss, (180). The trope of the imploring waif, not to mention both have considerable resale value on the futures that of the dead or suffering child, helps to organize market. Traumatic memory in this and other instances our cultural knowledge and thinking about needs in functions like currency, in that travelling memory is those parts of the world distant from our own as well as “overdetermined by capitalism” (Tomsky 53). Trauma

14 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) is an economy, one that, as with the tourist gaze, picture books featuring adults guiding children through organizes and systematizes our looking. The details strange cities can play pivotal roles in producing tourist- surrounding Kurdi’s death and the difficulty his family consumers and in reproducing racial, ethnic, cultural, experienced in applying for Canadian visas are largely urban, and national stereotypes. Sharon Smulders, irrelevant, for it is the myths that arise from voyeuristic in “Multiculturalism, Psychogeography, and Brian looking that endure: these are what get repeated Doyle’s Angel Square,” focuses on the affect that arises endlessly. The repetition of the Kurdi image is designed between individuals and urban place as it plays out not to convey the “reality” of the refugee experience but in fictional representations of hostile and violent play to extract a narrative from it that is capable merely of among children living in a working-class community provoking emotion: “[G]etting the story ‘right’ factually striated by language, race, ethnicity, and religion in is less important than getting it ‘right’ affectively” Low, Quebec, and Lowertown, , after the Second (Tomsky 54). A fantasy of reality and the attendant World War. Danielle E. Price examines a different imagineering of rescue disappear Aylan’s brother and Canadian YA novel in “Heterotopic Nightmares and mother from the scene of his undoing. There is, then, a Coming of Age in Elijah of Buxton,” although as does sense in which the Kurdi image signifies a double death: Smulders she considers how particular sites—in this Aylan’s death by drowning in the sea as a result of his case, heterotopic sites—bring the tension between stasis coerced mobility and his death as a singular and unique and mobility into relief for the benefit of the protagonist. individual in the eyes of hungry albeit compassionate In “Downward Mobility and the Individualization spectators. Kurdi’s value on the futures market is of Youth Struggle,” Miranda Campbell argues that determined by the ease with which we replace him with representations of downward mobility in the HBO “me,” “my child,” “my nephew,” “my niece,” and so television series Girls are a form of public pedagogy, on. One might ask whom we are mourning when we suggesting that contemporary pop-cultural engagements respond to this image with teary eyes. with the difficulties of navigating today’s economy risk All of the pieces in this issue of Jeunesse take merely reinforcing the neo-liberal idea that individuals seriously the complex relationships between young are ultimately responsible for their failures in the people and mobility. In “Childhood, Power, and Travel marketplace. In “Paranormal Politics and the Romance in Salvatore Rubbino’s Picture Books,” Patricia Kennon of Urban Subcultures,” Leonie Rutherford, Elizabeth turns to fictional instances of how children’s mobility Bullen, and Lenise Prater compare the representations is commodified, showing that seemingly innocuous of young adults crossing borders that separate real and

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 15 fantastic or paranormal urban spaces in two popular two adolescents reflect on their own experiences of YA fiction series, concluding that Cassandra Clare’s migration in response to their reading of two YA novels. subcultural shadow-hunter realm is more successful than What becomes clear, in Spring’s analysis and in the Melissa Marr’s faery realm in undoing restrictive politics. others collected in this issue, is that young people’s Moving from representations of mobility to actual identities and social positions are informed by their engagements with mobile young people, Nadja ability to move within and across key social, political, Monnet and Diana Arias, in “Se déplacer sans adultes cultural, and subcultural sites even as they are shaped en ville,” examine the urban itineraries of selected by such sites and the disparate pulls they exert. teens to explore how they both shape and are shaped Given the emphasis of all articles in this issue on by urban space in Barcelona. Once again signalling young people’s ability to act as mobile subjects, it the importance of the city in this issue, Ann Marie seemed fitting to include a forum on agency. Entitled F. Murnaghan reflects on the role that playgrounds “Divergent Perspectives on Children’s Agency,” the in early twentieth-century play in curtailing forum is authored by four children’s literature scholars children’s micromobilities and geographies. Darshana who have themselves been key players in shaping the Jayemanne and Bjorn Nansen, in “Parental Mediation, field: Richard Flynn, Perry Nodelman, Sara L. Schwebel, YouTube’s Networked Public, and the ‘Baby-iPad and Marah Gubar. In his contribution to the forum, Encounter,’” examine YouTube videos in which notions Flynn reviews briefly his own journey as a children’s of the “natural” appear to frame young children’s use of literature scholar, remarking on how he moved from mobile touch-screen devices, effectively concealing the adhering to models that constructed children as “other” ways in which adults direct their play. In “Pedagogical to embracing models that highlight children’s agency. Encounters with Inanimate Alice,” Cheryl Cowdy shares Nodelman defends his choice not to focus on the agency the conclusions of an ethnographic project focused of child readers in his book The Hidden Adult: Defining on young people interacting with a digital novel that Children’s Literature, arguing that paying attention to the invites its readers to move virtually around the globe. “textual aspects of literature for young people” allows Her analysis shows how game-based stories developed him to parse out the (adult) designs this literature has on for the “born-digital generation” can both allay and its audience. As Nodelman points out, “What looks like raise anxieties about mobility. Finally, Erin Spring, in an independent response might actually be a replication “The Experiences of Two Migrant Readers,” shares the of previously accepted cultural patterns.” Nodelman’s results of an ethnographic research project wherein piece raises an important consideration, namely, how

16 Heather Snell Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) we distinguish agential from non-agential behaviour. In needs space in order to move at all—but also that her contribution to the forum, Schwebel observes that space exists precisely for the sake of mobility: even it is difficult for historians of childhood to find evidence one of the smallest known particles, the atom, is of children’s agency in adult-authored, paper-based made up of space in which even smaller particles can archives. She concludes with some suggestions about move; without this movement, there is no atom and how scholars might cultivate children’s agency in a world thus no matter to speak of since matter is made up of in which adults remain largely in control of what gets atomic particles. Working through mobility without published and archived. Finally, Gubar complicates the thinking about space, whether it is through the lens agency debate further by theorizing a “kinship model” of of geography—or psychogeography—or literary and childhood that recognizes that agency is not synonymous cultural studies, is literally impossible. The focus of with autonomy. much of this editorial, namely the Kurdi photo, likewise The reviews and review essays that we chose for points to the inescapability of space in consideration this issue pick up on many of the themes covered in of the often troubling ways in which both children the articles and the forum. Leslie McGrath discusses and photographic images of their dead bodies move, representations of mobility through shoes in a broad engendering further mobilities in the form of affect, range of children’s “shoe stories” published in Canada. In commentaries, and artistic projects along the way. The a series of shorter reviews of recently published key texts movement of the photo itself through real and virtual in young people’s texts and cultures, Emer O’Sullivan, space signifies its transformation into an event that may Melissa Kelly, and Jennesia Pedri discuss sustained or may not shock us into seeing Aylan Kurdi as Aylan scholarly engagements with children’s migrancy, Kurdi—that is, as a unique individual connected to children’s media, and children’s places and playthings. larger socio-economic and cultural forces and not as a Much of this issue is concerned with what young signifier of savable innocence but rather as a real flesh- people do in and to space, how they cross and are and-blood boy who died because his family could not encouraged to inhabit and navigate spaces in particular move safely across national borders. The Kurdi photo ways and through specific ideological lenses, how they should not simply move us to think about the lives that live between disparate spaces, and how spaces are exist beyond statistics but also compel us to think about powerful forces in and of themselves. The direction in the ways in which that child is complexly situated in which many of the pieces collected here take us, then, a world where mobility has become a dangerous and illustrate not only that mobility requires space—one often impossible practice.

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Heather Snell 17 Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my research assistant, Roanne Solitario, for her careful research into the circulation of the Kurdi image, as well as my fellow editors for their advice and constructive criticism on an early draft of this editorial.

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