out of the blue
Dear Zetta,
I am happy to inform you that your article, “The Trouble with Magic: Conjuring the Past in New York City Parks.” which appeared in Jeunesse 5.2 (Winter 2013), has won the ChLA Article Award! Your official letter will be in the mail but I wanted to say congratulations and hope that you will be able to join us at the conference in Richmond to receive your award. The committee thoroughly enjoyed reading your article.
All the best,
Dr. Tammy L. Mielke
Chair, Article Award Committee
I was stunned—and immediately emailed the Chair to make sure it wasn’t a mistake. My ChLA membership has lapsed and I wasn’t sure if I’d been nominated by a friend. But it turns out the committee simply reads all the articles on children’s literature that they can find, and my essay grabbed their attention. I nearly trashed that essay after being told by two white male editors that it didn’t match the “tone” of other contributors to their anthology—this after they practically begged me to submit an essay. I suspected they realized at the last minute that they had no scholars of color in their book…anyway. I withdrew my essay and left it on my hard drive for a year before submitting it to Jeunesse —a Canadian journal (!!!)—where it was appreciated and embraced. If you’d like to read my Jeunesse article, let me know and I’ll email you a PDF. Here’s the abstract:
This paper will examine the use of New York City parks as magical sites of discovery and recovery in speculative fiction for young readers. According to Terence Young, the nineteenth-century rationale for urban parks was that they would promote “public health, prosperity, social coherence, and democratic equality;” although city park designers were initially concerned with serving men, they gradually incorporated the perceived needs of women, adolescents, and children. Young further contends that urban park design, with its vision of “a universal sense of nature,” eventually gave way to a modernizing process of “spatial segmentation and specialization;” park designers rejected the need for “generic spaces linked by a composed repetition of earth, water, and the same plant species throughout,” and opted instead for greater variation in order to accentuate specific locations within the park, which were designed to serve specific groups.
It could be argued that speculative fiction for young readers has gone through a similar process of modernization, shifting from “universal” and “generic” narratives with repetitive features (witches, wizards, werewolves, etc. derived from Western European folklore) to a sort of “specialization” that emphasizes the particular cultural practices and histories of the racially diverse urban population. In her thirty novels, Ruth Chew use city spaces like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Summer Magic, 1977) and Prospect Park (The Hidden Cave, 1973) to engage young readers in the magical adventures of white, middle-class children. My own speculative novels (A Wish After Midnight and Ship of Souls) utilize these exact same sites to reveal the complexity and ethnic diversity of urban youth while conjuring the suppressed history of free and enslaved blacks in New York City. Urban parks hold specific significance for African Americans: the construction of Central Park in the 1850s led to the destruction of Seneca Village, a settlement of predominantly black landowners. Yet city parks can also be sites of preservation: the discovery of human remains in lower Manhattan in 1991 culminated in the designation of the African Burial Ground as a National Park Service site, and the Weeksville Cultural Center is currently undergoing a massive city- and state-funded renovation. Urban parks function as sites of tradition and innovation, and thus are central to my “Afro-urban” project, which seeks to represent the various ruptures and responses that shape black history and identity.
Terrence Young, “Modern Urban Parks,” Geographical Review, Vol. 85, No. 4, Thematic
Issue: American Urban Geography (Oct., 1995), pp. 535-551.
I’ll have to see if I can find a way to get to Richmond in June; right now I’m supposed to spend June in the UK doing research for the CAAR conference, but plans change. I’ll be attending the ACL conference in April and can’t wait to break bread with Laura Atkins, Janine Macbeth, and Maya Gonzalez! Time to plot revolution…
