Research project
‘These children are people like us’: agency, belonging and the ethics of representing displaced children in the work of Beverley Naidoo
This project is the outcome of a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children’s Books. Children’s literature has the potential to both contribute to and provide a powerful counternarrative to dehumanising popular discourses about displaced people. A writer of children’s fiction, depicting displaced children in West African, apartheid South Africa and the UK, Beverley Naidoo is in ideal subject for a case study examining this potential. Using Naidoo’s children’s fiction and her archive held by Seven Stories, I use a postcolonial critical approach to interrogate the tensions between belonging and alienation for displaced children. Exploring the ethics of representing minority voices as an outsider, I examine how Naidoo constructs the child as a political actors and situates chi