![]() Though there are excellent exceptions to the rule, such as Sharon Draper’s body of work, I found the limited scope for black teens disappointing. The young adult black literary cannon, past and present, has an oversaturation of stories centered on gang violence, dismal ghetto life, historical fictions that span anywhere from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, or some tragedy stationed in an ambiguous Africa. It was a reality that my teenaged self was unwillingly to face. These were grim narratives determined and informed by, in my perception, the main character’s race. They were neither romance gone awry nor adventure epics with the world hanging in the balance. These tragedies were not those of Nicholas Sparks-esque teenage folly. However as I read deeper into the genre, I noticed that in the young adult section most of the novels that were authored by black writers were stories of tragedy. This wasn’t to say that I didn’t read any Morrison and the like, but my heart lead me to the young adult book store without fail. When I reflect on my teenage years, most of the stories I remembered reading and loving were supernatural, sci-fi, and were very white. Aside from the obvious issues of lack of black representation in the genre, I had questions about how black teens are reading these texts, and what they’re reading. ![]() How do our environments inform what young black women, at Williams College, read and how they perceive blackness in the Young Adult literary canon?īeing an English major with a passionate (and at times questionable) love of young adult (YA) novels, I decided to center my final project on teen readership, specifically black female readership. ![]()
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