Georgia Educational Research Association Conference

Didacticism in Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Slave Fiction

Twenty-first-century young adult fiction continues to perform a didactic and pedagogical function, presenting ontological possibilities for young readers and encouraging the reproduction of the dominant discourse of the twenty-first-century United States. Few genres of young adult fiction fulfill this function more effectively than those "neo-slave narratives" meant for young readers, such as M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing, Christopher Paul Curtis' Elijah of Buxton, Walter Mosely's 47, and Sharon Draper's Copper Sun. These works are simultaneously sites of memory of the antebellum slave system and prisms on twenty-century America. As scholars of young adult literature, such as Roberta Trites, have observed with other works within related genres, these novels simultaneously serve to inscribe both subversive and conservative messages about the power of society as it relates to young readers. Despite their historical setting in the antebellum South, these novels are cultural productions of and commentary on an era -- the first decades of this century -- when resistance to structural racism (mass incarceration, income inequality, etc.) is becoming more pronounced, even as overt racism has gained new currency in the cultural discourse.