Read more
Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children.
Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.
List of contents
Introduction
PETER C. KUNZE AND VICTORIA FORD SMITH
PART ONE
Authorship
1 Daisy Ashford and the Child Writer’s Use of Scale
KATHARINE SLATER
2 “I didn’t die and felt the Earth”: Nature and the Urgency of Perception for Young Black Poets in
The Voice of the Children Workshop
RACHEL CONRAD
3 Representations of Youth Environmental Activism and Agency in Aika Tsubota’s
Secrets of the Earth BRIANNA ANDERSON
PART TWO
Performance and Play
4 Phillis Wheatley’s Image and the Creative Black Child
BRIGITTE FIELDER
5 “When he saw the pencil put to paper”: The Meaning-Making of Children’s Language in Depression-Era Harlem
MAGGIE E. MORRIS DAVIS
6 Creative Testimonio as Activism: A Case Study of Sophie Cruz and Sarai Gonzalez
CRISTINA RHODES
7 Acting Up: Child Actors as Authors and Collaborators in Contemporary World Cinema
PETER C. KUNZE
PART THREE
Collaboration and Cocreation
8 “Mostly Written By”: A Cookbook Model for Reading Children’s Art
IVY LINTON STABELL
9 Negotiating Nightmares: Improvising with Children in Arthur Tress’s
The Dream Collector VICTORIA FORD SMITH
10 Choreographing Kinship: The Adult-Child Pas de Deux in
Day on Earth and Lineage MARAH GUBAR
11 Charli, Charlie, and Me: An Autoethnographic Study of TikTok Dance and Child/Adult Collaborations
TREVOR BOFFONE
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
PETER C. KUNZE is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of
Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press).
VICTORIA FORD SMITH is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She is the author of
Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature.
