Children's Fiction About 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities

In this study, Lampert examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifi es three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children:ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities,arguing that the identities formed within the selected children’s texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. Looking at texts including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics, Lampert finds in post-9/11 children’s literature a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. The shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitutes good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This book makes an original contribution to the field of children’s literature by providing a focused and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

Young children as rule makers

Young children engage in a constant process of negotiating and constructing rules, utilizing these rules as cultural resources to manage their social interactions. This paper examines how young children make sense of, and also construct, rules within one early childhood classroom. This paper draws on a recent study conducted in Australia, in which video-recorded episodes of young children’s talk-in-interaction were examined. Analysis revealed four interactional practices that the children used, including manipulating materials and places to claim ownership of resources within the play space; developing or using pre-existing rules and social orders to control the interactions of their peers; strategically using language to regulate the actions of those around them; and creating and using membership categories such as ‘car owner’ or ‘team member’ to include or exclude others and also to control and participate in the unfolding interaction. While the classroom setting was framed within adult conceptions and regulations, analysis of the children’s interaction demonstrated their co-constructions of social order and imposition of their own forms of rules. Young children negotiated both adult constructed social order and also their own peer constructed social order, drawing upon various rules within both social orders as cultural resources by which they managed their interaction.