Amanda M. Greenwell's "The Child Gaze"

Amanda M. Greenwell is associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in African American Review; Children’s Literature; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; The Lion and the Unicorn; Studies in the Novel; Studies in the American Short Story, and other publications.

Greenwell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of the book, they’d learn that the narrative technique I term the transactional child gaze “does not simply locate the child in the ideological environment…[but rather] enmesh[es] the child with the environment in the moment of seeing, binding them together in the ongoing alchemy of subjectivity and perspective.” The page emphasizes the necessity of active, ongoing reflection on the part of the literary child who looks transactionally, which asserts the child as “extant and active” within systems often built to oppress them. Children who look transactionally are depicted as enormously affected by their environments, but not necessarily deterministically; the transactional child gaze, due to the child’s agency, is a potentially destabilizing force.

Page 99 falls on the third page of chapter three, and it hosts a great passage to help readers understand the premise of the chapter, though not the whole book. It captures some of the key introductory concepts that will be explored later in the section through close readings of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Ultimately, the chapter argues that “the transactional child gaze allows an interrogation of the ideological scripts that are brought to bear upon the child as well as the visual methods by which they interpellate the subject” (131).

The page only manages to convey a hint of the larger scope of the project, however. It makes brief reference to the appreciative child gaze and the countersurveillant child gaze, which are discussed in chapters one and two, respectively, but it does not describe those modes of gazing. Readers will have to visit those chapters to learn how and to what effect the appreciative child gaze conjures reactions along a spectrum of celebration to weighty consideration, and to understand the various methods by which a countersurvelliant child gaze creates striking indictments of abusive power on the level of narrative, even when child looking does not effect real change within the storyworld of the text. And nothing on page 99 would point readers to the fourth chapter, which explores the manifestation of these various modes of child gazing on the comics page, including depictions of the direct gaze, which implicates the reader through the fourth wall.

The central premise of the book might be inferred from page 99: that literary texts invoke several modes of child looking to perform social critique. However, it would not make clear how the book draws on work in the cultural history of the American child, children’s literature, rhetorical and critical race narratology, visual culture studies, and several other fields to craft a critical conversation that helps us comprehend the various ways US texts from the 1930s to the 2010s employed nuanced child gazing to talk back to hegemonic US structures of national belonging. And readers would miss out on the call for further work on the child gaze in the future!

Learn more about The Child Gaze at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue