Strenae (Feb 2024)
Villes désirées, villes désirables
Abstract
Cities are generally presented as inhuman and hostile in children’s picturebooks. The grim vision of exclusive urban spaces is often opposed to the depiction of an idealized rural environment. Such a dichotomy in French children’s picturebooks closes any potential for the transformation of the representation of cities towards a more habitable and inclusive space. It is temptative to think of poverty as a theme that could reinforce this dual vision, as urban spaces make salient the exclusion of the children and the poor. Indeed, poverty is often associated with cities and seems particularly concentrated and visible in those contexts. However, a close examination of contemporary children’s picturebook about poverty highlights two potential ways to improve cities, without denying the harsh reality of it. The iconotextual medium seems to open up a way for the transformation of the city. On one hand, they acknowledge the attractivity of cities and the economic opportunities they offer for rural inhabitants who often face harsher conditions back in the village. The picturebooks highlight the paradox of the city, in which a city’s attractivity makes poverty more visible. On the other hand, the detailed depiction and narration of the many specific issues at stakes in urban spaces draws potential concrete solutions towards a more desirable city for all. This article proposes the joint analysis of two body of work. On one hand, it relies on a corpus of children’s picturebooks about poverty established by the Center for Documentation and Information about Children’s Literature (CRILJ) and extended through the Ricochet database. The restricted selection focuses on the picturebooks in which the city is a key visual, narrative and textual element. It encompases picturebooks featuring urban poverty in a occidental context often associated with homelessness, and picturebooks translated and published in France which focus on migration from rural areas to urban ones. On the other hand, the analysis is based on the creation and production of a series of picturebooks co-written with Nobel Prize Laureate and economist Esther Duflo, and published by Le Seuil Jeunesse in 2022 and 2023. The main focus is on the third book which is about economic migration, but draws from the many visual, textual and narrative occurrences of the city in the whole series. This approach allows for a detailed understanding of the creative challenges in representing the city in picturebooks about poverty, as well as a comparison with the various visual, textual and narrative strategies operated by illustrators and authors.
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