From Mulberry Street to Market Street: childness matters

Abstract

AbstractIn 2016, Last Stop on Market Street, an American picturebook by Matt de la Pena, won the Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises, after working “with a panel of experts, including educators,” decided to cease publishing And to Think I Saw in on Mulberry Street (1937) along with five other books that “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Both decisions seem to have been motivated by a strong commitment to a contemporary critical multicultural perspective (Yenika-Agbaw, 2022). In this paper, I will explore another perspective through which we might assess the quality and potential impact these and other texts might have on child readers. Drawing on Peter Hollindale’s (1997) contention that a children’s book acts as the vehicle for a reading event during which readers form or reform their ideas of the social construction of childhood and their place within that construction, I will examine how these books portray “childness,” defined by Hollindale as both a distinguishing property of a text and what a reader brings to the reading. As these texts offer snapshots of what it means to be a child in two different times and contexts, I argue that the constructions of childhood in children’s books have changed significantly in the twenty-first century. I will use multimodal discourse analysis and critical content analysis to query the degree to which these texts are “childly” (a term of respect for Hollindale, as opposed to childish) by focusing on notions of the imagination, diverse representation, and adult/child relations.