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Christine Wilkie Stibb

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Christine Wilkie Stibb’s The Outside Child In And Out Of The Book examines the construction of the child subject within a text, and contextualizes that construction by connecting to historical, social and political events outside the text. She does this by taking real-world (ie: historical, social and political) instances and connecting them to each book. Each chapter focuses on a different construction of the child outsider: outsider (the child as subject and the creation of subjectivity); displaced (refugees and asylum seekers); erased (subjecting the child’s body to public gaze and erasure of his or her identity); abject (those expelled from the hierarchies); unattached (loss of parents and idea of home, moving from one place to another, …show more content…

Her first chapter of “Outsider” serves as a foundation for the five that follow. She offers the foundational example of Michael Jackson as the embodiment of the non-binary- seeming neither man nor woman, black or white, neither child nor adult. Other binaries Wilkie-Stibbs explores in this chapter are the spectrum of angel-monster, normal and non-normal, us-vs.-them. her concept of child-outsiderness exhibits “itself in the child who is adopted, in care, orphaned, homeless, a refugee, seeking asylum, part of a diaspora, immigrant, displaced, or dispossessed; is the victim and/or survivor of violence, abuse, poverty, neglect, or war; or is silenced, rendered invisible, or specially controlled and silenced by certain power structures, ideologies, or belief systems” (10). She goes onto explain her intent as not observing the Other, but …show more content…

This chapter explores the stories of immigrants and refugees, or other asylum seekers. She explains “they are works of literature, not case histories, but they do more than exploit for the purposes of entertainment the sorts of distressful situations in which some real children find themselves. Literature at its best is what most convinces us of the realities of other people’s identities and selfhoods, so that these novels, responsibly written and attempting authenticity, act as powerful and memorable case histories which are as true as, or truer than, factually accurate ones. (26) Upon looking at the UNCRC- mentioned above- Wilkie-Stibbs examines the westernized and industrialized construction of the child and childhood that anyone under eighteen is a child, and they shall be protected (24). However, in historical documents references, including the French Revolution’s 1795 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and bringing up the idea of child labor and child soldiers, each nation has its own conception of what it is to be a child. Rachel Anderson’s The War Orphan, Derek Gregory’s The Colonial Present, Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth, Elizabeth Laird’s Kiss the Dust, Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy, Elizabeth Lutzeier’s Lost for Words, and Julia Alvarez’s How the

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