Producing Children: Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity(Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies)

Producing Children imagines the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of a creative relation between children as producers and consumers by revising the long-established, hierarchical relation between adults and children. The chapters in this collection reveal that studying child-produced culture complicates our received understandings of children’s culture as culture by adults, for children, about children. They also underscore “children’s literature” as a cultural phenomenon that moves across and beyond genres, forms, and media. As a whole, this collection reveals that attention to child-produced culture invites dialogue and collaboration across fields and disciplines invested in the critical understanding of children as embodied beings and childhood as both a stage of development and discursive construct with social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions and influence. With the ongoing vibrancy of childhood studies as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, studies of child-produced culture provide scholars with an exciting opportunity to complicate, enrich, and expand theorization of childhood creativity, children’s culture, and even children themselves.

Table of Contents:
Introduction  PETER C. KUNZE AND VICTORIA FORD SMITH PART ONE Authorship 1 Daisy Ashford and the Child Writer’s Use of Scale KATHARINE SLATER 2 “I didn’t die and felt the Earth”: Nature and the Urgency of Perception for Young Black Poets in The Voice of the Children Workshop RACHEL CONRAD 3 Representations of Youth Environmental Activism and Agency in Aika Tsubota’s Secrets of the Earth BRIANNA ANDERSON PART TWO Performance and Play 4 Phillis Wheatley’s Image and the Creative Black Child BRIGITTE FIELDER 5 “When he saw the pencil put to paper”: The Meaning-Making of Children’s Language in Depression-Era Harlem MAGGIE E. MORRIS DAVIS 6 Creative Testimonio as Activism: A Case Study of Sophie Cruz and Sarai Gonzalez CRISTINA RHODES 7 Acting Up: Child Actors as Authors and Collaborators in Contemporary World Cinema PETER C. KUNZE PART THREE Collaboration and Cocreation 8 “Mostly Written By”: A Cookbook Model for Reading Children’s Art IVY LINTON STABELL 9 Negotiating Nightmares: Improvising with Children in Arthur Tress’s The Dream Collector VICTORIA FORD SMITH 10 Choreographing Kinship: The Adult-Child Pas de Deux in Day on Earth and Lineage MARAH GUBAR 11 Charli, Charlie, and Me: An Autoethnographic Study of TikTok Dance and Child/Adult Collaborations TREVOR BOFFONE Notes on Contributors Index

About the Author :
PETER C. KUNZE is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press). VICTORIA FORD SMITH is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She is the author of Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature.

Review :
"A welcome and eye-opening collection of richly contextualized, multidisciplinary studies that push us to think more seriously about children as cultural producers. This timely anthology moves forward in exciting ways important conversations about children's cultural agency, creativity, and collaborations with adults." - Mary Celeste Kearney (author of Girls Make Media) "Producing Children brings together rich, interdisciplinary perspectives to offer fresh insight on children's role in cultural production. The case studies explored in this collection reinforce the urgency of centering children's voices, experiences, and agency in how we understand the definitions and operations of culture." - Ashleigh Greene Wade (author of Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice)