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14 pages, 228 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Slow Violence and Precarious Progress: Picturebooks About Wangari Maathai

by Sinéad Moriarty

Humanities 2025, 14(3), 50; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030050 - 6 Mar 2025

Viewed by 779

Rob Nixon in his 2011 book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor writes “[i]n a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear” (p. 15). Nixon talks about the power of literature to render spectacular environmental violence which has become mundane and thus largely invisible. He points to the writing of Kenyan environmentalist and politician Wangari Maathai as work which captures the notion of slow violence. In her writing, Maathai creates the sense of urgency that Greta Gaard argues is a key boundary condition for an ecopedagogy of children’s literature. This article explores seven illustrated biographies of Maathai. The article interrogates the extent to which the books capture what Rob Nixon describes as “slow violence”, that is violence that occurs slowly, over time, and which is often overlooked. The article also introduces the term precarious progress to describe the fragile nature of the change initiated after slow violence. Finally, the article also draws on Val Plumwood’s writing on place attachment and “shadow places” to explore how the Kenyan landscape is depicted as not mere object but subject in these texts and the way in which they work to foster a consciousness of place in their child readers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eco-Rebels with a Cause: Representations and Explorations of Politics and Activism in Children's and YA Literature)

12 pages, 6293 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Econormative Childhoods in Wimmelbooks on the Four Seasons: Analysis of Central European Wordless Informational Picturebooks

by Krzysztof Rybak

Literature 2024, 4(3), 172-183; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature4030013 - 31 Jul 2024

Viewed by 1863

Abstract

More and more informational picturebooks on environmental topics have been published in recent years, many focusing on the inevitable climate change. Conversely, there is still a tendency in contemporary picturebooks to represent the climate traditionally, irrespective of actual climate change. A particularly interesting case is the representation of the seasons, especially in books aimed at the youngest ‘readers’, such as wimmelbooks. Not only are they crucial for developing emergent and visual literacy, but they also contain normative images that constitute a prototype for the child. The ‘norms’ picturebooks present are based on the authors’ ideologies that constitute all informational picturebooks as their authors interpret facts. Hence, this article aims to analyse the visual strategies used and the ideologies expressed by wimmelbooks from Poland and Germany in representing the seasons (Marcin Strzembosz’s Jaki to miesiąc? [2002] and Ali Mitgutsch’s Mein Wimmel-Bilderbuch: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter [2007], among others). The preliminary research shows that the authors seem to propose traditional, idyllic, ecologically normative images of the environment, which I propose to call econormative (inspired by the word ‘aetonormative’), such as snowy winters, sunny summers, etc.; hence, wimmelbooks seem to assent to stereotypical depictions of the seasons associated with the notion of ideal childhoods set in econormative environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Constructions of Childhood(s) in Fiction and Nonfiction for Children)

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