Chapter 10 - ‘Let Every Child Run Wild’: Cultural Identity and the Role of the Child in Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

Summary

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction has slowly emerged since the 1970s as a significant presence in Caribbean writing, although it still constitutes an understudied group of texts and has received comparatively little critical attention from scholars and critics. This essay explores how Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction draws on Afro- and Indo-Caribbean oral traditions and folklore whilst also exploring contemporary cultural issues such as sexuality and body-image as it approaches questions around Caribbean cultural identity with different perspectives, purposes and poetics. Collectively, these works have provided an important space through which to revisit history, either to tell stories that have been left out of the official record or to retell grand historical narratives (colonial and national) from other perspectives. The presence and centrality of child narrators has been a marked feature, and their voices are frequently deployed to critique and provide fresh commentary on established narratives, historical reasonings and social questions.