Ready Made for the Market: Producing Charitable Subjects in Dystopian and Voluntourist Young Adult Novels

Authors

  • Heather Snell The University of Winnipeg, Canada

Keywords:

young adult literature, charity, dystopian literature, voluntourist literature

Abstract

The passages that function as epigraphs to this paper may seem strange bedfellows, not least because the genres of the young adult (YA) novels from which they are taken – dystopian literature and ‘voluntourism literature’ respectively – seem so unrelated. Yet if nothing else these passages indicate that dystopian and voluntourist YA literatures invest equally in the politics of charity and attendant spectacles of rescue. Dystopian YA almost always depicts and therefore models for its readership young people saving the world. For example, Neal Shusterman’s ‘Unwind’ – a series of four novels set in a dystopian United States where the surgical division or ‘unwinding’ of unwanted teens between the ages of 13 and 18 has become an accepted practice – celebrates those who rescue and harbour unwind AWOLs, a strategic act that ultimately contributes to eliminating unwinding. Similarly, voluntourist YA literature, so named for its preoccupation with travel and volunteering, celebrates those who help others in need, usually through development work. As a genre that tends toward social realism, it i s radically different from dystopian literature, yet it too aims to cultivate an other-regarding ethic for the benefit of young readers. Both genres urge readers to adopt a sensibility and outlook that would most facilitate their transformation from ordinary teens into charitable saviours of the world.  

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Author Biography

  • Heather Snell, The University of Winnipeg, Canada

    Heather Snell is Associate Professor of English at The University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and a Research Associate at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her research straddles two fields, postcolonial cultural studies and young people’s texts and cultures. She has published articles in Postcolonial Text, The Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, among others, and she is the co-editor of Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood (Routledge, 2014). Her current research examines representations of the child in global visual culture and efforts to re - claim this figure on the part of postcolonial cultural producers from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and South America. Her monograph, now in progress, is tentatively entitled Reading Urban Poverty: Children and Youth, Global Visual Culture, and Postcolonial Counter - Imaginaries.  

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Published

2016-07-01

How to Cite

“Ready Made for the Market: Producing Charitable Subjects in Dystopian and Voluntourist Young Adult Novels” (2016) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 24(2), pp. 96–126. Available at: https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/index.php/pecl/article/view/1107 (Accessed: 10 October 2024).

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