Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)
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Experience a world without limits in the Alpha Romeo Tenali Plug-in Hybrid. Tap the banner to learn more. Alpha Romeo is a registered trademark of FCA Group Marketing SBA, used with permission. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Kendall Deneen, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Amanda M. Greenwell about her new book, The Child Gaze, Narrating Resistance in American Literature, out now from the University Press of Mississippi.

Dr. Greenwell is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, and her book theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in 20th and 21st century U.S. literature for children and adults. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. Thank you so much, Kendall. I appreciate your having me. So I want us to sort of kick off by just talking about how you came to the project or the question of the book.

Yeah, so I remember the crystallizing moment really clearly because it happened like around midnight when I was working on a different project. It was an article length project that was exploring Joel Christian Gill's subversive invocation of stereotypes in his Tales of the Talented Tenth comic series for young readers. And there was a pair of panels in which young Bass Reeves, who is the character in one of those texts,

his gaze kind of conveys his agency as he is looking back on the sly at an enslaver who uses derogatory language to refer to him. And as I was analyzing these panels, I thought to myself, okay, great. Let me look up who's written about the black child looking back in literature. There must be some things out there. And when I wasn't finding much, I sort of changed that to, okay, who's written about the child looking back at all in literature. And I,

I was able to find, you know, like Bill Hooks' work on Black women's oppositional gaze, where she mentions childhood in that formulation.

But really, even for the child in general, I would find maybe an article here or there that sort of mentioned looking, but nothing really as expansive as a book length study. So, you know, an article here and there that looked at the child gaze in one particular piece of literature or film. And those were useful, but they weren't doing exactly what I hoped I would find right when I was at crunch time really working on this piece.

And when I realized that I was disappointed that I hadn't found anything that really fit with what I needed, what I also realized was that I in a lot of my work on literature, I had been historically kind of sensitive to acts of looking or exchanges of gazes and those types of things.

And that's also when I realized that a book about child looking would actually be incredibly useful, given that there's nothing out there. It would have been useful to me as a researcher in my own past and that this was potentially, you know, a subject area that folks hadn't explored for all of the fruitfulness that it potentially contains. And so that kind of moment all of a sudden made me realize there this could be a book and I think I could be the one to write it.

And so it was it was an exciting kind of moment that I then, you know, sort of had to shelf while I was working on some other things. But then eventually when I became ready to work on this, it was just very exciting to start to see everything that was out there and everything that's possible. I'm so glad you wrote the book because it really helped me in thinking through my own work with The Bluest Eye, which we're going to talk about a little bit about how you're reading The Child Gaze in that novel later.

So can you talk a bit about how this book was impacted? I mean, you mentioned bell hooks, but I'm in the beginning of your book when you're talking about how that the oppositional gaze sort of influenced your thinking. It was a really rich moment, I thought. So if you could talk a little bit more about how the book was impacted or informed by that argument that hooks is making in the oppositional gaze, that would be great.

Sure. So her work was absolutely critical to the project. It was one of the first right kind of moments that I found in the scholarship that was going to help me. And in a way, it actually ended up bookending my own time while I was working on this project. So her formulation of the oppositional gaze is about how Black women look back in a way that both propels the paradigms created by the white gaze and the male gaze, and it also empowers the individual with agency that moves beyond the

or outside of those boundaries, right, that those paradigms create. So this to me was actually really akin to what I had seen in that Gill text, right, drawing on the Bass Reads comic. And it was also kind of true for things I had seen in other texts where children who are often circumscribed in their power to enact agency, nevertheless are building and growing that sense of an inner self that resists that circumscription.

in the project, when I circled back to her essay, as sort of one does, right, when you're toward the end of a project, you're like, what did I miss? What else is in my notes? What's in there? I zeroed in on a passage that ends up, you know, figuring in my introduction fairly early on. And I think I flagged it earlier, but just, you know, you're keeping track of so many sources, right, that you don't always come back to the things that you meant to. But I zeroed in on this passage where she describes how, as a child herself, Hook

Hooks felt that the impulse to look when she wasn't necessarily authorized to do so was like an innate assertion of the integrity of the self. And it helped crystallize some ideas about, you know, looking kind of connotes this embodied kind of knowing that gazing is enacted within hierarchies of power that have to do with age, race and gender.

that when it's enacted by those on the lower end of that power hierarchy, that it can function as a destabilizing force. And that, you know, these were the notions that were really driving my project. So to kind of come back to that passage that hadn't really been overtly in my mind, but obviously had had, right, some kind of subconscious impact when I originally went through everything. It was sort of humbling as a researcher to see like, oh, oh gosh, here it is.

But also it was really kind of affirming that in my sort of time coming back to Hooks' work at the end of this project, seeing her words that way made me sort of recognize how far my thinking had come, right, via the text that I was looking at and how seeing her passage anew, I now had sort of words to articulate why that passage meant so much to the work that I'd done on The Gaze. I want to kind of dive into chapter one, right?

Which is titled The Appreciative Child Gaze. And you open that chapter by talking about an illustration in a children's book written by James Baldwin and illustrated by I'm probably going to say this name incorrectly, but you are in Kazakh. Right.

And I just loved this section, of course. Also so lovely to see James Baldwin's work for children, you know. But can you talk a little bit about how you're reading this image within the context of the chapter? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So this image comes up right around the middle of what is an unusually long passage.

picture book titled Little Man, Little Man, A Story of Childhood. And it's James Baldwin's only picture book. And as you said, he collaborated with French watercolor painter Jorn Kozik to create it. The images are gorgeous. And the

And it follows TJ, who's our main character, a.k.a. Little Man, as he experiences a day in his home neighborhood of Harlem. This book was published in 1976. Right. So in 1976, Harlem was often vilified in popular media, especially news media for things like crime, expensive drug use, etc. I think most of us can kind of create that list because those images were so powerful when we were seeing them.

And Baldwin and many other Black writers were, of course, working against those stereotypes, not by denying the existence of crime or the problem of drug use, right, but by exploring them in the larger national context that had contributed to their existence. So, you know, that was what Baldwin was largely working on as an adult author. I put adult in quotation marks, right? We say children's author. We don't get the same sort of, you know, tag to adult authors.

But, you know, Baldwin had a nephew and a niece and they're like, hey, uncle, you know, when are you going to write a book about us? And so Little Man, Little Man kind of takes up the image and the experience of Harlem from a child's vantage point. A child who sees things he loves and enjoys in Harlem, as well as things that seem weird or that confuse him. Because, of course, the world is more complex than any one sided stereotype is ever going to convey.

So according to Baldwin's own theory of childhood, which he lays out in a talk to teachers, children spend a good part of their young lives looking around, noticing everything, including things that adults might not notice or might not want those children to notice. So this all sort of is the context for the image you're asking about in Little Man. And that image is probably one of the most super positive images in the text. It's TJ in his kitchen.

with his mama and his daddy. They're eating a Sunday morning breakfast. It's brightly colored. There's sort of blues and yellows and these kind of, you know, watercolor versions of primary colors. And, you know, there's a blue sky. There's high rises in Harlem that are visible against that sky through the window. They're all kind of smiling at each other. There's a lot of eye contact. And the readers sort of positioned like almost as if we're coming to the table with them as if we could sit down at that table.

with them. And I use that image as a starting point for the discussion of an appreciative child gaze because that gaze can be really celebratory like it is in this image, but it also can be like considering and thoughtful, meaning appreciative has all these connotations that can mean like, oh, I appreciate you, but

But it can also mean like, I appreciate the situation you're describing. Right. Which kind of says to someone like, I understand there's complexity here. Right. And there's things that we have to think about beyond the surface. And that kind of thoughtful consideration usually comes without any kind of demeaning judgment. Right. You're kind of in that mode of considering. Right.

So in this book, that celebratory kitchen image is not set apart from the rest of the text, but it's right in the middle of this book that also shows TJ considering the confusing sadness of other things in his neighborhood, like the teenagers and adults who battle with addiction, who are kind of draped on the brownstone stoops of the neighborhood, the physically unleashed anger of his friend as he confronts his brother in such a state.

the contentious relationship between his building superintendent and his wife, but also like really fun moments like going to the corner store, right? And interacting with the person who owns that store.

So this image is, to me, part of Baldwin and Kacik's strategies for capturing the range of experiences that are all valid, all worthy of care and attention that make up TJ's Harlem world. And that's a world that they invite the reader to access via the child's appreciative gaze, which I argue often works against popular narratives otherwise promulgated in what is often white-dominated media.

It's such a powerful argument. And yeah, the image, I think, speaks so strongly. Well, the way you're reading the image speaks so strongly to, yeah, the importance of that appreciative gaze.

So moving on, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the relationship that you see between surveillance, counter surveillance and the literary child, because this is really motivating your second chapter. Yeah, absolutely. So this chapter was sort of the seed of the project, right? Even like the Joel Christian Gill moment that I mentioned earlier, that that birthed like this kind of concept into into my work. And so for this chapter, I.

wanted to kind of create the critical conversation happening in surveillance studies. So scholars of surveillance studies kind of help us understand that cultures of surveillance surround us. They have surrounded us for centuries. And that means that all of us tend to enact looking, especially when we're in public, but even also in some private spaces, either within or against that culture of surveillance. And most surveillance depends on what scholars call social sorting, which

which is when you sort populations for different types of treatments, right? So you can think about gated communities, you can think about private part, and those often operate to make it seem like that sorting is natural and right in the way that things should be. But scholars point out that surveillance is never neutral because of that social sorting. And often that sorting excludes marginalized groups. And it's often, you know, via...

identities like race and class, but also, you know, we can think about age, right? It's one of those identities by which people are sorted, especially because child surveillance has ramped up more and more with the advent of technologies that track child data and child images.

Surveillance also enforces rules about who gets to look at what and when. So our visual codes of looking are also kind of happening within the surveillance culture. And then counter surveillance, right, is when the object of surveillance flips the script and looks back at the surveiller, kind of becoming now the subject. And essentially that kind of asserts this primacy, this subjectivity that has the power to look. Surveillance is the term...

Or surveillance, I'm sorry, is the term that folks often use for the ways that like students or civilians might use cell phones to film an abuse of power by state sanctioned authority. And surveillance means surveillance from below and the below being right where that person is on that usual power hierarchy. So.

The thing is, if a child performs counter surveillance, then they are essentially making visible a power structure that is usually so naturalized as to seem invisible to most others. Which means that a counter surveillance child in a social arrangement where children are usually understood as least powerful, most victimized, is a pretty striking figure.

And striking figures can also sometimes seem dangerous or scary to the adults that are in power. So like think of the way like youth activists are sometimes treated by those that they oppose, which tends to escalate from like dismissal at first to eventual like vilification and undermining as they gain traction. And I think that process seems to move a little bit faster when the child is also differently classed or race than the surveyor, that the move to vilification happens pretty quick.

So there's this aversive power, right, in counter surveillance to expose. And sometimes that exposure leads to change and sometimes it doesn't. But when the child is part of this counter surveillance, I think it just it harnesses this kind of extra power by way of contract. Right. So the literary connection that is that like authors, artists, philosophers, et cetera, the thinkers, right, thinkers are often surveilled specifically because their work comes off as counter surveillance.

Right. So we mentioned James Baldwin before he had an FBI profile. So did Lorraine Hansberry, sort of Angela Davis. The work of Simone Brown and George Yancey on like black bodies being subjected to surveillance. But nevertheless, the starting agency was enormously foundational to my work on this chapter and kind of thinking about racialized surveillance and counter surveillance. So we know that like literature has sort of functions counter surveillance.

And we also know the word counter story right in literature, which is often used to name the narratives of lived experience from the perspective of people from underrepresented groups. And that often includes narratives that tell stories of bias, discrimination and disempowerment by people.

the authority that's out there. So when I kind of take all of these things together, right, and mix them, right, so I've got surveillance, counter surveillance, literary studies, and how surveillance has worked in that regard. My argument about literary children who counter surveil is that any counter surveillance literary child whom the author has created as a character sympathetic, right, to the text implied reader, tends to position the book itself as a tool of counter surveillance.

And literature, as we know, is one of those tools that can be used to expose discriminatory systems. So when the child character figures as the vehicle of that exposure, the text is really punching up from the lower rungs of the hierarchy, making it all the more evocative for the reader who's sensitive in that time. If fashion is your thing, eBay is it.

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Thank you for giving us that sort of context. So now I'm wondering if you can sort of walk us through one of the literary examples specifically that you're using in Chapter 2. Yeah, I'm happy to do that. So let's look at The Plot Against America, which is a 2004 novel by Philip Roth, which tells an owl history, which is like an alternate history of the United States that commences with the election of Charles Lindbergh to the presidency of

And he campaigns on a nativist anti-Semitic campaign. And this happens in 1940, right? The imagine 1940 of this text.

So the narrative perspective in this text is that of an adult man telling the story of his Jewish boyhood in a Jewish neighborhood during that time period. And rather than treat the child as different from the adult, the text tends to energize a continuous relationship between the child and the adult self, where the reader is encouraged to understand the child's perspective as a valid, honest,

unironic window through which to view a moment of extremism in this conjured U.S. history. The young child is also named Philip Roth. So there's also this kind of playful invitation. And this is a trend often discussed by Roth scholars because Roth does this in more than one book to see the child figure as a creative manifestation of the author. And I think that matters a little bit to the impact of the book that I'll discuss later.

But in the novel, Philip watches as government mandates begin to strip away rights from the Jewish American populace, eventually having severe repercussions on his neighbors and on his own family, who becomes somewhat divided between folks willing to work with the government and folks diametrically opposed to it. The comparison between Philip's experience as a child before the 1940 election, which is very patriotic, kind of quintessential,

American childhood with a working dad, a PTO mom, apple pie, 4th of July. I'm not exaggerating. This is literally how the first couple pages of the text reads. But the experience of kind of comparing him before 1940 as a child to after 1940 as this Jewish child, all of a sudden feeling himself entirely attacked is the major affective crux of the text.

So in one really striking moment of child looking, he's in this dream state, literally dreaming he's in bed, where he sees his stamp collection. And that itself is like a very 1940s mid-century kind of boyhood hobby. He sees that stamp collection marred by Nazi symbolism of various types. And it goes on for quite some pages. It's what we call like it's a narratively extended scene. It kind of telescopes the time you have to spend in it.

But it's this scene that conflates child vision with political insight, because that dream is kind of his like big realization of what's going on, even though he's noticed things earlier. So in my book, I turned a few times, not just in Philip Roth's text, but other texts to the way that the child gaze harnesses the fairly common readerly impulse to see children as gifted with clear vision, right, kind of tied to this romantic paradigm and popularized by Wordsworth.

So it kind of invokes this concept, but only to dash it to pieces by emphasizing that the same child who sees is actually not transcendent and able to escape all of these worldly restrictions, but really mired in the dangers and the horrors of their political milieu in our own world. So when Philip wakes up from that dream, he wakes up to the same horrible reality, right, as a Jewish child in the United States.

And that mirrors, I think, the way that allohistory as a literary genre might liaise a little bit with realism, right? It taps into something that we know is true or capable of being true. And therefore, it helps us understand or recognize what might be going on in reality. And I think, you know, Roth's kind of double name situation is doing a bit of the same thing. And really just the counter-surveillance child gaze in fiction, I think, serves this similar purpose as well.

we recognize counter surveillance as a mode that we can enact in reality. So even if the authority that we're looking back at in a literary text isn't exactly like the authority that's in our world, there's enough of an obvious liaising, even in the impulse to look back, that really energizes the political work of these texts. So moving into your third chapter, we're examining what you call the transactional gaze. I'm wondering if

To kind of get us started on this chapter, you could describe how the transactional child gaze varies from these other gazes that you're talking about in chapters one and two. Yeah, thank you for that question, because this was also a question when I was working on the book itself. I

I really had to be careful and I, you know, to painstakingly show the difference between these things because it's not quite a difference in mode. It's almost like a difference in register. So, appreciative child gaze, right, which we talked about earlier and the counter-surveillance child gaze, those can each be depicted along a spectrum of knowing and not knowing on the part of the child. So,

So in chapter one, for instance, I show how a really celebratory depiction of the child gaze in Sidney Taylor's All of a Kind Family is enacted by children who don't really like reflect much on their emotions or reactions to what they see at any length. They're really happy. And that is what the text is doing. And that's important. And it does its important work. But the children are really like introspective. They're not mulling over the things they see.

And likewise, in chapter two on counter surveillance, I show how Langston Hughes's short story, The Redheaded Baby, has a toddler character who has none of his interiority depicted, but whose gaze nevertheless shakes the main character to their core and works to expose that main character's hypocrisy and racism. So in those cases, neither of those types of gazing depends on the depiction of the interiority of the child character.

Although I think some interiority is kind of implied by the act of looking itself, right? But we don't sort of dwell in that space necessarily. We can dwell in that space. We don't have to dwell in that space to make something appreciative or counter-surveillance. But the transactional child gaze absolutely requires that that child be aware of their looking and, in fact, consider it at great length. And

And the narrative attention to the way that the child thinks about what they see is what makes a gaze transactional. And when I use the term transactional, I'm working in the tradition of John Dewey and these Rosenblatt's concept of the dynamic exchange between subject and object of perception, the space where learning, thinking, and reacting tends to happen. So a child gaze then can be transactional and appreciative, transactional and counter-surveillant,

or transactional and some other mode of looking that hasn't yet been theorized. It doesn't necessarily exist apart from those gazes discussed in chapters one and two, but it does require this dimension of active interior reflection on the part of the child. And in my project, I focus on texts where that interior reflection is concerned with the ongoing creation of that child's subjectivity in relation to the visual markers of the ideologies of their environment. So in that respect, it's kind of a way to name

a method that literature can use to invite us to witness subjectivity in action. And that's an exciting place to open up possibilities for affirmation and critique of those ideologies. Thank you. So I wanted to ask you about how you're using Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye, which I mentioned at the top, to discuss the transactional gaze and how it works to critique on the level of the narrative, the ideologies that Morrison's own child characters ultimately internalize.

So could you could you talk about how this is working a little bit? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So The Bluest Eye follows two main child characters, right? Claudia McTeer and Pakola Breedlove. And they are two black girls living in the same small town in 1940s Ohio. Pakola comes from a home characterized by abuse and neglect. And she has felt that her whole life, where Claudia lives in a comfortable home with attentive parents.

Pakola's transactional gaze exposes how her thinking has been largely controlled by the attractiveness of the images of whiteness around her. So Shirley Temple ringlets and blue eyes are one of those major images that they come back to right over and over again in the text.

And that's all been helped out by the fact that she also is bullied a lot for being especially dark, especially poor and especially outsider because of those items in her community. Importantly, though, and this is central to my analysis, that Popola is not drawn as a flat or a stock character. We're actually continually invited into her consciousness where Morrison makes clear that Popola is constantly thinking about what she sees.

And that includes as much as she's sort of enamored by the whiteness around her, it also includes these little glimmers of resistance, like when she thinks like dandelions are pretty and shouldn't be lumped in with beads. And those moments, I argue, make her whole interpolation to the dominance of white standards of beauty all the more tragic because this is still a child who feels and thinks and has agency. And so look at how powerful these forces are that they are able to do this to her.

Now, Claudia, of course, thinks of herself as kind of immune to that for a big portion of the novel. There's this great scene where she recounts actually like dismantling and ripping apart a white doll to try to figure out, like try really like investigate visually what in the heck makes this white doll so special. And of course, she finds nothing. Right. So her transaction, she knows she finds nothing. Right. So her transactional gaze exposes the farce of the white gaze. Right.

But later in the novel, Claudia admits that her own disdain for Pecola is in fact, she realizes a sign that she too has succumbed at least in part to these standards of beauty that she seems to otherwise project. So,

Claudia has kind of held up as a foil only to have the foil relationship collapse and like Claudia's own admission. And in the end, the text succeeds remarkably in affirming the power of the hegemonic white gaze via the transactional gazes of two black girls, one of whom actively resisted paradigm, which is still manifest even in her admission of its power over her. Right. Like we can see the resistance even when she's like, I fell to it, too.

Um, so ultimately I argue that while the characters within the story fall prey, the narrative level of the text works really carefully and through this child transactional gaze to impugn the various circumstances of that falling, thereby impugning racist beauty standards as a method of racist oppression. Yeah, it's such a, it's such a powerful and really useful reading, I think, um,

You know, I am writing about that novel, thinking about the way that Claudia sort of narrates the character of Miss Marie. Yeah. So, yeah, your work is like so fascinating and helpful for that. So I really appreciated it. Well, I'm glad I look forward to reading about that. That's going to be great. Thank you.

So your fourth chapter argues that comics materialize the child gaze in specific ways and with specific effects. Can you sort of rehearse this argument for us using one of the examples from your book? Absolutely. I think I'll talk about Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese because I just think it does some fascinating work with eliciting readerly transactions via the use of perceptual

positioning, kind of where the reader or viewer is positioned in relation to the panel, and also the direct gaze of a comics character. And by direct gaze, I refer to like when a character is depicted as looking directly at the reader from the page of the comic, a gaze that combines, I argue, like the power of second person address with the theatrical possibility of breaking the fourth wall. And that's all accomplished visually on the page.

One thing that's fascinating about comics panels in general, of course, is how they can constantly shift the position of the reader viewer in relation to the scene. And what I found in Yang's text is that often he'll position the reader is watching our main character, Jin, do things like interact with classmates and teachers at school. And the premise of the text is that he's one of the few Asian American and even fewer Chinese Americans at his predominantly white California high school. So it,

How's this kind of watching him do these things, but then all of a sudden, a panel will be drawn where we are actually put in the position of Jin as he's handling that interaction. So we might watch him handle the interaction, but then we're sort of watching people come at us as if we are Jin.

And then other times we're placed in the position of the person bullying him, right, or provoking that reaction from him or judging him. And at the same time that that happens, where we are there kind of receiving the impact of everything, that can happen.

kind of make us feel like we are implicated, right? We're implicated in Jin, but on the reverse side, we're implicated in his bullies. We're in all these spaces and some of the same panels where we are positioned as the bullies confronting Jin. At the same time, it seems as if Jin's looking at us, the

the readers being like, what the heck, man? Like, do you see what's happening here? And so this really kind of interesting oscillation and kind of like overlay of subject positions, I think is really, really powerful in this text. And I think there's something very transactional, right, to use that term from chapter three about these moments where the reader's asked to inhabit multiple subject positions. At one point in the book, there's even a series of panels where Jin is staring at the reader

And the text actually just drops the premise altogether that maybe he's just meant to be looking at someone else in the text and we're just overlaid over that person. So his direct gaze is very clearly to no one but the reader. And I think that serves as a way to emphasize this dark humor type of relationship between his narration about the person.

the person on those pages who's supposedly his friend, but the actions of that friend being really offensive and gross. And we sort of have Jin looking at us, really kind of collapsing that fourth wall. You know, we are the narrative. We are the person who is being addressed because who else is there to be addressed? And that really kind of implicates us in thinking about the effects, right, of this type of trauma.

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So in that chapter, I also talk about March by the late Congressman John Lewis, his aide Andrew Aiden and artist Nate Powell, as well as Vassarys by Joel Christian Gill, which I've referred to a couple of times. And each of those employ the child gaze in different modes with differing effects. But they're all kind of accomplished by the way that child sight lines are drawn on the page. And I think that visual manifestation is really powerful. Absolutely. Yeah.

So I just have a couple more questions for you. They're my traditional end of interview questions. And the first one is, what do you want readers to do with what they learn and take away from your book? Well, I mean, I'm pleased to think that they will learn something. So that's always gratifying to hear. But I think I want folks to think more about children who look and how they do it. And in literature, particularly how that looking and how that looking is crafted right by

by an author, right? How that looking asks us to notice and to think if we are to kind of inhabit that implied readership of the text. I hope that folks will pay attention to eye gaze and sight lines as both portions of other projects. So supplemental, like perhaps in the way that you're describing your own work, but also is worthy of the focus of their own projects, right? That we can really kind of sit on this concept for

for a lengthy period of time, even though when we read, we often, you know, we see characters looking at other characters all the time. You know, we see them looking around rooms, looking just seems to be everywhere in text, but to sort of pause and over those moments that seem particularly electrically charged and to really think like, what is an author accomplishing, right? By positioning their character this way.

I hope that, you know, one of the critical lenses that I bring to bear in this project is narrative theory. So you've heard me use a phrase like textual dynamics, right? Reader-reader dynamics, narrative level, textual level, right?

narrative theory is such a useful tool when we are thinking about how things are crafted on a page. And I don't think it gets employed enough as sort of crossovers into other areas of study, you know, like children's literature, for instance. But also there's, you know, really exciting stuff happening in the vein of what's called critical race narratology. You know, folks who are really helping us understand that scholarly avenues are made possible by kind of combining the incredibly powerful work of

close reading narrative choices with lenses like social critique um and that we our work becomes all the richer when we are borrowing from all these spaces and kind of remixing them um and i mean i think even more concretely if this really is the first book-length study of the child gaze and it seems to me because i've i've tried to search exhaustively for anything else i hope that you

you know, the modes that I theorize here are just the beginning of the work that can possibly be done. So I'm looking obviously at this very specific kind of roughly 20th century American context in the United States, but there's all kinds of other cultural contexts in the world and in different locales and even within the United States that are going to employ their own mores of looking, but then map onto the child in different ways. And, and,

There's just so much possibility out there. There's also possibility in terms of narrative form. What is, you know, what work is out there and possibly to be added to in like the world of theater, for instance, right? Places where we're gazing is embodied, right, constantly. And so I hope that folks kind of pick up where I left off and have fun with it and see what happens.

And what are you getting up to next? You know, we've been talking a little bit about what scholars might do next with your work, but where are you sort of setting your sights going forward? So I've got a couple of things I'm working on right now. One of them is on the children's author, Jesse C. Jackson, who wrote Call Me Charlie. And I discussed that text in this book. But I've been looking into his archive and some of his other texts. And I'm really interested in

The choices that he made and sometimes had to make as an author, being one of the first Black authors to publish a school book for children with white mainstream presses in the United States. So I'm working on an article length piece that might show us a little bit more about the ways he drafted and revised his work and what that means about publication context. And the other project that I'm working on has to do with what I call the time traveling child.

And I'm really interested in texts that are using time slips on travel or kind of wormhole types of narrative devices.

to um position children in spaces that ask the readers to sort of really think about how the world works and you know politically and also kind of personally how do ideologies impact us so um i've got a article length piece i'm working on about um times the historical fiction that endangers children kind of puts children in spaces in american history that are um

they could die in those spaces and explore what it means to do that and to use the time travel or time split motif to do that. And I'm also thinking about the employment of like wormhole and time travel devices as narrative techniques for disrupting normative modes or normative notions of adolescent development. And so how authors are using those narratives to kind of rewrite what it means to grow up in quotation marks. That sounds amazing. I'll have to keep my eyes out for those projects. Yeah.

Thank you so much for being here. This was just wonderful, Amanda. Thank you so much, Kendall. I appreciate the time you spent with me today.

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