Children’s literature and/as political critique: Storying the violences of exclusionary politics

The forcible removal of unwanted individuals from the body politic – as, say, illicit migrants or terrorists – is a prominent feature of contemporary world politics. This prominence, and its typical storying from the vantage point of the national or communal ‘self’ needing protection, risks rendering exclusionary politics and their considerable harms unremarkable, even unremarked. In this article, we argue that children’s literature offers a powerful, yet largely overlooked, resource for illuminating, engaging, and critiquing such practices. Drawing on examples from three prominent and enduringly popular texts – The Enchanted Wood, The Lion Who Wanted to Love, and Where the Wild Things Are – we show that the centring of excluded subjects in these books helps to render visible (1) the contestable, and often arbitrary, grounds for exclusion from existing communities and (2) the threatened or actual violence that underpins exclusionary decisions and processes. In doing this, the books offer powerful demonstration of the capacity of children’s literature – and popular culture more broadly – to expose and mount critique of emerging trends in world politics.