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Cultural Diversity and Social Justice: Readings from the South

Chapter · May 2022

DOI: 10.1002/9781119038276.ch23

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Macarena García González

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Preprint version of García-González, Macarena. “Cultural Diversity and Social Justice. Readings
from the South” In Coats, K., Stevenson, D., & Yenika-Agbaw, V. (Eds.). (2022). A Companion to
Children's Literature. John Wiley & Sons.

Cultural Diversity and Social Justice. Readings from the South.

In this chapter, I use the notion of “epistemologies of the South” by Boaventura de Sousa
Santos to expand the demand about cultural diversity and social justice in children’s literature
towards the need to question our ways of knowing diversity. Today we appear better equipped
to recognize how children’s books narrate White, middle-class, heteronormed, and able worlds,
naturalising them. Yet we still need to push harder not only to get other stories published and
read, but to understand the deeply ingrained epistemological and cognitive exclusions in our
attention to cultural diversity. In other words, I propose to move from claims on the importance
of representation to those on the importance of understanding how it is that the colonisation of
minds and desires has taken place. I argue that to integrate decolonial epistemologies in
children’s literature scholarship, we need to unsettle our understanding of what literature and
literacy are to acknowledge the plural forms in which stories may challenge Western hegemonic
exclusions.

Keywords: whiteness, decolonial, ethnicity, bibliodiversity, literacy practices.

Jenny Fraile, a Venezuelan specialist in promoting reading, tells of when she read the
story “Frida,” by Yolanda Reyes in a school in Petare, a Caracas neighbourhood known as one of
the largest slums in the world. “Frida” is about a boy from Cartagena, Colombia, who during the
summer meets a girl who is from Stockholm. The girl’s name is Frida and the main character,
Santiago, describes her, paying particular attention to her Nordic appearance: “She has the
longest, smoothest, and whitest hair I’ve ever seen. Her eyebrows and eyelashes are also white.
Her eyes are the colour of the sky, and when she laughs, her nose wrinkles. She is a little taller
than me even though she is a year younger.” The story does not say anything about the
appearance of Santiago, but for the children of Petare there was no doubt: “a little Black boy,
just like us,” Fraile reports her students saying. She also reports them telling her: “Of course,
teacher, if he is from Cartagena!” The original edition, from 1995, is accompanied by some
illustrations in which we do not identify Santiago as an Afro-descendant, but Fraile was reading
aloud so the students did not see the illustrations and were thus constructing the character in
their minds. When Frida returns, Santiago writes a composition in which he laments how far his
friend lives: “In ‘THIS IS THE FARTHEST OF FAR’1 in Sweden! And I can’t even imagine her
there because I don’t know what her room, her house, or her schedule are like”(8).
I wanted to begin this essay by imagining Petare’s classroom as one of many places that
you could read from the South. I am thinking of “the epistemology of the South” introduced by
the Portuguese theorist Boaventura de Sousa, where he insists on an expansion of the
Eurocentric understanding of the world. For de Sousa Santos, it is impossible to think of global
social justice if we do not review our epistemic injustices, if we do not overcome that paradigm
of critical theory that is based on ideas of autonomy of the individual and her possibility of
improvement and development. The epistemologies of the South imply a recognition of other
ways of knowing in order to imagine alternative worlds. Santiago falls in love and admires Frida’s
Nordic traits, and the story deals with his falling in love with her as a summer love, but the
children in Petare also read it from an Afro, Latin American, marginalized us who cannot even
imagine the North, although they have grown up with this reference of desire. They read it from
the other side of the “colour line,” a term W.E.B. Du Bois uses to highlight the problem of
White supremacy and racial segregation. In this essay, I use the notion of “epistemologies of the
South” by Sousa Santos and its implications for a decolonial praxis to stress the challenging
question of cultural diversity and social justice in children’s literature studies, expanding it, as it
becomes possible, with the question of those knowledges and ways of knowing of which we
remain unaware.
The lack of cultural diversity in the literature that we read, recommend, and offer to
children is a worrying fact which has been addressed by activists and researchers in children’s
literature studies over the past few decades. Today we appear better equipped to recognize how
children’s books narrate White, middle-class, heteronormed, and able worlds, naturalising them.
In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein makes a compelling argument on how Eurocentric values
permeate children’s culture with racist values. Bernstein explores how nineteenth-century stories
for children produced class, gender, and racial boundaries that are still deeply ingrained in our
social conceptualizations and in our contemporary (racialised) productions. Bernstein argues that

1
In Spanish “en ESTO-ES-EL-COLMO de lejos”, playing with the name of the city, Stockholm.
culture scripts our interactions in ways and modes of which we are hardly aware, producing and
reproducing systems of exclusion.
Anyone who has been in a minoritised position knows how important it is, how
important it has always been, to see oneself represented in cultural production. Thus, it is vital to
note how many characters of this or that culture are included as well as how they appear, what
relationships they establish, and how they escape (or do not) from being consumed by their
difference. It is also imperative to notice if there are groups that are presented following a
stereotype, a “single story” as Chimananda Adichie argues, or if there are other possible stories
that resist the naturalisation of White supremacies. But in this short text, I will also attempt to
outline why this is not only a problem of representation: to think about cultural diversity and
social justice in children’s literature, we cannot only focus on the question of under- and
misrepresentations of different cultures but rather inquire into how racialised, ethnic, and class
hierarchies are deeply intertwined, and how we may also be complicit to them when attempting
to resist them. I use this notion of Southern epistemologies to help me rethink that entangled
relationship of structural injustices and what we call “cultural diversity.”

Whiteness and Euro-centric exchanges

Nancy Larrick was the first person to publicly call out racism and whiteness in children’s
literature in the USA. She published the brief “The All White World of Children’s Literature” in
1965, which referred to a study of more than 5,000 books in which only 6% included people of
colour. In her text, she highlighted how pernicious these omissions were, calling out publishers
to stand against White supremacy. She referred to the connection between children’s fiction and
citizenship education: the White child grows up as a “kingfish” and does not develop “the
humility so urgently needed for world cooperation, instead of world conflict.” Surprisingly, the
publishing market has not changed much since Larrick. In 2014, two opinion columns in the
New York Times came back to the topic: “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?”
(by the Black children’s author Walter Dean Myers) and “The Apartheid of Children’s
Literature” (by his son, Christopher Myers) . Both columns referred to statistics revealing that
Black people are featured in just 93 of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013. Things have
not moved on since Larrick’s time, they warned. In 2015, children’s literature scholar Sarah Park
Dahlen partnered with illustrator David Huyck to produce an infographic with data collected by
the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) of the University of Wisconsin, which shows
the alarming whiteness in the books children read: most main characters were White (73%) in
contrast with animals or things (12.5%) while African and African-Americans (7.6%), Asian and
Asian-Americans (3.3), Latinx (2.4%), or First Nations (0.9%) made up the remaining characters.
Three years later, they did a follow-up study with new data showing more diversity, but still an
alarming majority of White main characters (50%)(Park Dahlen and Huyck).
These numbers come as no surprise to those of us paying attention to how “race” is
produced in children’s fiction in other languages. With Xavier Mínguez-López from the
University of Valencia, we conducted a corpus analysis of Spanish-language picturebooks
reaching similar conclusions; that is, White (middle-class) characters blatantly outnumber all the
other possible depictions of ethnicities and racialised people or social groups. In our analysis of
99 picturebooks, we found that more than 70% of the characters have their faces coloured with
pale-pink, pale-orange, or plain white tones. Most faces remain uncoloured. We named the latter
the “paper-white” characters, whose skin colour is that of the paper as if a metaphor of how
white operates as the neutral, unmarked, universal colour of the imagined human. We were
surprised not to find significant differences between books originally published in Spain with
those in Latin America, yet as in the statistics coming from the U.S., we note a slight
improvement in more recent publications. Brown characters were found, with very few
exceptions, only when the story thematized marginalization.
The all-White world in children’s literature has been an attended dimension of our
research field recently, especially in publications of North American scholars. Researchers have
delved into the authenticity of representations of other ethnicities as well as have questioned who
has the right to write (or illustrate) them (Fox and Short; Yokota and Bates; Bishop; Yenika-
Agbaw; Martin). Scholars have also inquired into how deeply-ingrained schemas and scripts
about otherness are set into motion in children’s fiction (Stephens; Coats, ‘Visual Conceptual
Metaphors in Picturebooks: Implications for Social Justice’), and into the recurrent stereotypes
and the marginalization of migrants, first nations, and other minority groups (Yenika-Agbaw;
Martínez-Roldán and Dávila; MacCann; Bradford, ‘The End of Empire? Colonial and
Postcolonial Journeys in Children’s Books’; Hade and McGillis). The pervasive whiteness in the
editorial market has also been a matter of inquiry for library sciences, which have consistently
argued the importance of offering diversity on the shelves to prepare all students for cultural
change (Mabbott; Dahlen, Sarah Park). These investigations have been accompanied by —
preceded by in many cases— the activism of actors linked to the publishing world that demand
greater diversity in the publishing offer today, claiming the value of children’s literature for
citizenship education. These campaigns have been especially visible in the US where in 2014 two
writers viralised the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks (WNDB), and where several other
campaigns in relation to social justice and cultural production have used social media to
undermine cognitive frames that refrain us for understanding exclusions. Here, I am thinking
about the #ownvoices campaign, which highlights books in which characters share a
marginalized position with the author (which was started to spotlight disability stories by authors
who shared the condition) and of Twitter campaigns as the #metoo and #blacklivematters,
which became global. In relation to children’s literature, we should also mention the
#slaverywithasmile hashtag, which speaks against the culturally insensitive texts of several
publishers. These different campaigns may be understood in relation to the demands of identity
politics and recognition in the US, but also to the growing climate in which structural injustices
are recognised around the world.
In Europe, cultural diversity has been mostly related to the importance of international
and intercultural exchanges and less connected to social movements and identity politics.
Children’s books are often considered to be a privileged tool to foster intercultural education and
international exchange (Arizpe). This is not, of course, an orientation limited to the European
continent, but we may localize it in Euro-centric oriented discourses about the importance of
international cooperation. These discourses permeate different institutions founded after the
Second World War in Europe. The International Research Society for Children’s Literature
(IRSCL) was founded in Frankfurt in 1969 by European researchers. The International Youth
Library (IYB), which holds the most extensive archive of children’s books, was founded in
Munich by Jella Lepman, who returned from the U.S., where she fled before the war. In 1946,
Lepman created this institution to foster international understanding through children’s books.
She was also responsible for the creation of the International Board on Books for Young People
(IBBY) and its journal Bookbird. In those years, IBBY created the so-called Nobel Prize for
children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Awards. All these institutions are oriented
towards literary reading and cultural exchange and related to claims on the importance of reading
fiction from other regions and cultures to foster citizen education and intercultural
communication. The IYB hosts scholars from around the world and has promoted, through its
international fellowships and through an annual recommendation of books, the White Ravens
Honour List, the circulation of literature from lesser-known regions.
Efforts towards the internationalisation and translation of books expand the question
about cultural diversity to that of how different cultures are recognised and communicated
across languages. Children’s literature scholars highlight that few titles get translated into English
and that cultural differences are often flattened when children’s books are translated (Beauvais;
Yokota and Teale; Oittinen). Different initiatives encompassing small-scale publishers,
educational enterprises, and government organizations promote and assist the translation of texts
from so-called minoritarian cultures into European languages (Weber; Lathey, Gillian). Some of
these initiatives, such as the Translation Nation driven by the Stephen Spender Trust, involve
school children with migrant backgrounds who work with professional literary translators.
Translation studies have been particularly fertile to children’s literature studies perspectives in
relation to cultural diversity as they delve into how translations are shaped by broader
assumptions about who is the reader and what are the cultural and cognitive abilities they need to
understand the text. Scholars analysing translations of children’s books warn how these are
more clearly domesticated, that is, adapted to the target culture, than adult literatures (O’Sullivan;
Panaou, Petros and Tsilimeni, Tausoula; López). The idea of the “domestication” of the source
text, sometimes referred as acculturation, in which difference is obscured or erased, is opposed
to that of “foreignisation,” in which respect for otherness prevails (Bassnett). Research shows
that more dominant cultures —related to the economic and political power, often coinciding
with a more extensive spread of the language— opt for domestication strategies while books
translated into less hegemonic languages use more foreignisation strategies; that is, they leave
more traces from the original in the text. This polarity has been explored in postcolonial
approaches to translation, yet as the research of Haidee Kruger in South Africa shows, these
concepts are quite limited when taken to understand exchanges in less occidentalised contexts,
such as in South Africa, where translations into Afrikaans and English appear to use more
foreignisation strategies than those into lesser established languages. I mention Kruger’s research
to remark how we also create universal models when inquiring into how diversity is marked and
put into cultural circulation, and when we fall into the universalist trap, we may well be trapped
by a Western explanation of the world.

Decolonial epistemologies
Postcolonial theory was born out of literary studies but has been scarcely used in
children’s literature studies perhaps because, as David Rudd (Rudd, ‘The Theory Wars Revisited:
Rose and the Reading Critics vs. the Liberal Humanists’) argues, children’s literature studies were
often “in the position of Switzerland: a cozy and pacific enclave” (89). In 1992, when
postcolonial theory featured prominently in English Studies departments of the Global North,
Perry Nodelman sketched a parallel between the colonial order and the adult-child order,
considering children as subaltern subjects. The adult-child relationship has often been considered
in terms of (imperial) domination (Zornado; McGillis; Stockton), but this equivalence reveals a
quite simplistic understanding of power imbalances, obscuring child agencies as well as the
multiple forms of intergenerational collaboration (Gubar; Rudd, ‘Children’s Literature and the
Return to Rose’; Bradford "Postcolonial"). I bring Nodelman’s article here to remark how the
position of the adult has been long debated in our field, while its Euro-centric —and
(post)colonial— orientation has run rather unacknowledged.
Even if slowly adopted, postcolonial and decolonial approaches inform important
research in our field. We may first acknowledge the research on the problematic ideologies in
some children’s literature classics. We have long discussed the racism in Pippi Longstocking Goes
Aboard, Tintin in the Congo, Babar, The Story of Little Black Sambo, in the portrayal of the Oompa-
Loompa workers in Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, more recently, in Dr. Seuss’ books
(Nel). Some claim that these books or passages need to be removed (from the texts, from
libraries) while others maintain that we need to teach readers to be critical of them (Joosen;
Kohl). A decolonial approach would remark that these passages are not strictly the problem, but
rather how children’s literature is moulded by Euro-centric values, complicit in the culture of
(military) dominations and in the exclusion of subjects. In “Imperialism and the Politics of
Childhood Innocence in Peter Pan and Wendy,” Hyun-Joo Yo makes an argument on how not
only Barrie’s descriptions of indigenous people are problematic, but the figure of Peter and the
insistence on his innocence is racist; as Robin Bernstein convincingly argued, the image of the
innocent child is that of a White innocent child and this relation is deeply embedded in our
culture. Peter Pan’s orientation towards play and his adventures in hunting would naturalise the
(White) desire to conquer and dominate. Scholars such as Clare Bradford, Karen Sands
O’Connor, Daphne Kutzer, Marilisa Jímenez, and Elisabeth Wesseling, among others, have been
doing important historical research on children’s literature and the media, unveiling how
otherness has been racially and ethnically produced in opposition to a Euro-centric imaginary,
and how children’s texts’ perpetuation of romantic stereotypes about the colonised peoples are
foundational in a culture of White supremacy (and the Euro-White adult entitlement towards the
rest of the world). Yet domination is just part of the picture; children’s literatures have also been
spaces of struggle and resistance. Ann González exercises a postcolonial reading of Latin
American children’s literature—looking mainly at texts for children of well-established literary
authors such as José Martí, Roa Bastos, and Horacio Quiroga—finding cues to understand them
as addressing children that would not be trained to serve the masters from the old world (p. 63).
Where else do we find such contested imaginaries? How do we identify them and put them to
work for decolonial futures?
The colonial project did not discriminate in the colonisation of minds, which makes
decolonisation quite a difficult endeavour. De Sousa Santos’ attention to epistemologies helps us
to move from those claims about the importance of representation of certain groups to those
about how we may trace (and dismantle) the ways in which such groups are created. As Edward
Said argued in 1978, Euro-centric knowledge is colonialism. A decolonial approach entails,
therefore, not only a critical approach to the representation of otherness (sometimes celebrated
in narratives of metropolitan multiculturalism) but also to inquiry into how literacy and book
culture are shaped by a colonial and modern desire. De Sousa Santos’ call for Southern
epistemologies resounds with broader transdisciplinary orientations that challenge Euro-centric
humanism with attention to its epistemological limitations2. Eurocentric epistemologies have
been particularly challenged in anthropology, a discipline that is burdened by the tradition of
(scientifically) producing the other.
A decolonial approach to the question of cultural diversity in children’s literature inquires
into how colonial and imperial legacies are still present in children’s literature and how we may
resist them and open up spaces for new relations. A decolonial approach will not only consider
the relation with the former colonies, but the different sorts of neo-colonialisms (Latin American
nations relations with their indigenous populations, for example), and how the colonial is deeply
entangled with broader systems of hierarchization and exclusion such as racism, classism, sexism,
ableism, and anthropocentrism, to name some. What are the available repertoires to think about
decolonial relationships between reader and text? Some authors (Capshaw; Jímenez Garcia) have
argued for the need for Ethnic Studies perspectives in children’s literature studies. Capshaw
warns us of the pitfalls of celebrating “multicultural children’s literature” since multiculturalism is
a concept in which differences are to be managed and contained (145).
In her essay “Teaching the Conflicts: Diverse Responses to Diverse Children’s Books,”
Karen Coats claims that we face a kairotic moment for diversity in children’s literature. She
departs from the controversy that followed the publication of Marisol, by Chicano author Gary
Soto, which was furiously criticised for narrating the story of a girl that moves from a Hispanic
neighbourhood to a middle-class suburb, which was taken as a narrative suggestion that her
neighbourhood was not good enough for the character. “Gary Soto no longer writes children’s
books” is Coats’ first phrase in the essay, which argues that rather polarised disagreements on
our definitions of what is and may be multicultural literature for young readers have triggered a
fear in publishers and the cancellation of different projects. Coats finishes, claiming that
“apparently, the need for more diverse books is not as strong as the need by some to control the
narratives of cultural identity” (28). The controversy explained by Coats may be regarded as

2
In our joint article “New Materialist Openings for Children’s Literature Studies” we review how
posthumanist and new materialist philosophies challenge humanism, proposing an attention to
epistemological and ontological relationalities.
related to the racial paradigms and identity politics in the US, but we can find similar
apprehensions from mainstream publishers elsewhere.
A decolonial approach to the notion of diverse books may help us unpack what is meant
by multicultural literature and how we and our institutions are involved in systems of exclusion
that persist even when we seek to include diversity. If we label some books as “multicultural,”
should we label the rest as “monocultural”? What are we advocating for when we demand more
“diverse” books? How different and threatening might diversity be? How uncomfortable? Adult
literatures are praised for how they produce discomfort and unveil complex contradictions in our
patriarchal societies, but we appear to expect less from children’s literatures. How do we open
space for difference in the stories that are published, bought, read, told, and enjoyed by children?
How might these stories work to create decolonial futures?

New territories to imagine

I opened this chapter with the shared reading in Petare, Venezuela, because it appeared
to me as a scene that brings in other contexts and other moments in which a story told in a book
gets entangled with the intensities of a place and becomes differently. The English-speaking reader
of this book will probably have no idea where Petare is. What is lost when we agree to discuss
these matters in English? How am I to address cultural diversity when most of the references I
use in this text are from Northern scholars and refer to Northern debates? What is needed to
conduct an international debate on the entanglement of social justice and cultural diversity in
children’s literature? Petare, a highly populated neighbourhood in Caracas, is considered to be
one of the largest slums in the world. Petare refers to the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, to Tepito en
Ciudad de México, to the cerros in Valparaíso, and several other places in the world. Cartagena —
the Colombian city Venezuelan children relate to Black marginalised people—is another Petare,
another place in which children learn about truncated futures. The readers could care less if the
editor and the illustrator of Frida had a different character in mind. Did it become a text about
blackness and marginalised communities? Did it also become a text about social injustices? How
do situated readings make literatures differently?
The attention to possible decolonial relations between social justice and children’s
literature needs to include an attention to those readings that run free from pretensions of
authors and publishers as well as to the extensive culture of retellings and remediations of stories
by children and for young audiences. A term that allows us to look in this direction is that of
speculative fiction (SF), as a blanket term for literary genres that “deliberately depart from
imitating ‘consensus reality’ of everyday experience” (Oziewicz). Speculative fiction refers to
various narrative forms —fantasy, horror, futurisms, and others— that subvert the Western
cultural bias that favours mimesis, the literature that imitates reality. Speculative fiction is closely
related to movements for radical imagination, such as Afrofuturisms and Latinxfuturisms in
which oppressed groups imagine other worlds and futures that are not constricted by segregation
and colonial pasts. E. E. Thomas has followed the question about radical imagination in her The
Dark Fantastic. Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, distinguishing how
different sorts of Black feminisms and Afrofuturisms make it possible to counter-tell the story of
exclusion and White privilege. Thomas combines the critical with the affirmative: she revises the
unjustifiable omissions of characters of colour in children’s literary and media cultures while she
celebrates how race and imagination are also on the side of readers and viewers who co-produce
our imagined worlds in fandom communities. Her text appears to remind us that literature is
never contained by the author or by the distinguishable artefact —the book— but is rather a
force co-produced by human and non-human agencies.
As postcolonial theorists have thoroughly argued, books and education have been
instrumental to colonisation, an integral part of what Aníbal Quijano calls the “colonialidad del
poder”, the coloniality of power. This relationship between literate culture and domination has
not only been reported by postcolonial theorists (such as Hernández-Zamora), but by a wide
range of other sociologists and philosophers. Peter Sloterdijk reviews how literacy and
alfabetization was opposed to oral transmission and to local ways of knowing, and used to
impose the language of the ruler. How do we unlearn our literate selves? How do we open up
our literate cultures? De Sousa Santos’ Southern epistemologies call for a recovery of indigenous
ways of knowing but also for an exploration of the global South’s strained identities that
decentre Eurocentrism. How can we think about what children’s literature might become if it is
understood from a Southern epistemology? If we move from a conception of literature as
centred in authorship and in the book as the object towards one that emerges within practices of
reading and appropriation, we may be better prepared to imagine new links between cultural
diversity, social justice, and children’s literature.
Cultural diversity is, therefore, not only about challenging what Chimananda Adichie calls
“the danger of a single story” —when otherised cultures are reduced to stereotypical and
repetitive characterisations—but about preparing ourselves and our institutions to a broader
understanding of what decolonial studies call the pluriverse, the ontological difference, “the
world in which many worlds fit” (Escobar, xvi). As Boaventura de Sousa Santos insists, the
understanding of the world is broader than the Western understanding of the world. This could
be put to work to trace meanings around children’s literature in different contexts. For instance,
if asked about children’s literature in Latin America, I would be keen to think that we cannot
speak about it without considering what we call “reading mediation,” that is, the set of practices,
beliefs, and orientations taken by adults to nurture positive relations between children and books
(Véliz and García-González). Reading mediation is a fundamental node of children’s literature
that, if brought to focus, questions how books relate to readers and marginalized communities,
how they relate to systems of exclusion, how we become communities through shared readings
and how literature is connected to practices of group literacy. Moreover, if we look at the
practices of reading mediation in Latin America, we may well trace efforts to challenge the all-
White world of children’s literature when traditional understandings of literacy are questioned
(Veliz, García-González and Arizpe).
To think about the relation between social justice and children’s literature differently, we
may also explore children’s literature publishing and how it responds to (post)colonial and
normative orders. Latin American editors have coined the term “bibliodiversity” (Slachevsky) to
claim support for small, independent, and alternative publishers whose production would
challenge cultural uniformity. Bibliodiversity is often associated with the cartoneras, a political and
artistic publishing movement that began after the Argentine crisis in 2003 and has since spread
to many other South American (and also African) countries. Cartoneros are people who make a
living selling cardboard and other salvaged materials to recycling plants, and the cartoneras are
publishing houses that sell affordable hand-made books that use recycled cardboard as the front
cover. Those books are sold at book fairs, markets, and some supportive bookshops. Cartoneras
provide opportunities for unknown authors to be published, for renowned authors to reach a
different audience, and for education communities to challenge the canonical children readings
(Montezuma Jaramillo). The books published by cartoneras do not aim to endure the passage of
time; but rather, they aim to make more stories and stories that are not constrained by the
fluctuating orientations of the market.
In this chapter, I try to think about the relation between children’s literature, cultural
diversity, social justice and children’s literature studies differently. Cameroonian philosopher
Achille Mbembé states: “The problem of the ‘I’ of others and of human beings we perceive as
foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western
philosophical and political tradition” (2). To escape the problem of the “I” of others, we may
also need to think about our own “I” and its complicities with systems of exclusion differently.
Here I have tried to sketch what else may be achieved if we go beyond the demand for
representation in children’s books. I need, nevertheless, to stress how important representation
is, how important it is to have different available worlds in which BIPOC characters have agency
and are presented in various and complex ways. But there is much more to do and to achieve.
We need to imagine worlds that do not represent this one, but rather allow us to explore our
possibilities for radical change. We need to understand more deeply how it is that the
colonisation of minds and desires has taken place, and why White supremacy and White
privileges are still so prevalent even when we all agree on the need of diversity. We need to think
literature beyond the book, to open up to those relations between readers, texts, illustrations,
reading mediators, publishers, communities, and places in which different appropriations and
mediations get entangled with situated meanings for social justice. Reimagining social justice in
children’s literature may, therefore, have to do with opening paths to multiplicity while
challenging the normalisation of whiteness, Eurocentrism, and paternalisms as well as other
modes of exclusion: sexism, ableism, and anthropocentrism, among others. What may be more
challenging of it all is that to be able to open such multiplicity, we need to address the colonial
making of academic research and the limits of our colonised minds. Without a decolonial
perspective scrutinizing all areas of our research, we risk reproducing White and humanist worlds
over and over again.

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