Diversity, You Say
Defining diversity may be one of the most difficult tasks a person could try to complete. Diversity is many things, and may have different meaning depending on who is trying to explain it. To me, diversity does not just mean that not every character is white—diversity may also include people who have different neurological structures in their brains that change how they learn or perceive the world; or it may be including people with disabilities such as a lower spinal injury; it may even be found in a person’s sexual orientation.
In Young Adult Literature: from Romance to Realism, Micheal Cart states that publishers didn't recognize the call for multicultural young adult literature until the 1980s, nearly two decades after immigration acts went into place that brought many immigrants into the United States (Cart 42). To discuss what Multicultural literature is, Cart includes a quote from Masha Kabakow, saying that “multiculturalism can be defined simply as the inclusion of, appreciation of, and respect for all cultures; but a more complex formulation includes a challenge to the power structure that subordinates people on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, and religion" (Cart 43). For the purposes of the articles included in this journal, I am calling these literatures diverse young adult literature in order to include a wider scope than either Kabakow or Car's definition might be able to encompass.
The possibilities of what constitutes diversity are wide enough that even when trying to define diversity, people may not think to include every diversity group. Rather than defining diversity in a cut-and-dry dictionary definition that may not be all-inclusive, I would like to explain a little about how I selected books for my contributions to this month’s issue. In my search for diversity represented in fantasy, I looked for the kinds of diversity a person might find in any other publication: ethnic variation, sexual orientation, physical disability, neurological construction, and the like.
There are many great works of young adult fiction out there that showcase these diversities—
A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass represents neurological diversity by following a little girl with synesthesia.
Works by David Levithan such as Boy Meets Boy and The Realm of Possibility represent different sexual orientations.
Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian represents both physical disability in its main character’s post-water on the brain development, as well as ethnic diversity.
For fantasy, however, I felt like these were not the only ways that diversity could be represented. I did not want these criteria to limit my search.
Many fantasy novels have a cast of non-human characters in their pages, ranging from elves and dwarves to unicorns and humanoid cats. These different races often have differing cultural practices and beliefs. In some fantasy, these races do not get along based merely on the fact that they are not the same race.
Growing up a reader of fantasy, this has always been an interesting element of the fantasy reading experience for me. Seeing how these different groups treat one anther has often made me ask why, because they are all clearly people of some sort. I always found it unfair how certain groups would treat one another simply based on an individual’s race. To me, this was a great injustice; I felt like if every character just took a minute to get to know one another, they would find common ground.
With so many possibilities to consider, I kept an eye out for fantasy that either represented diversity that a person could find in the real world, or that had a range of different races. I was not necessarily looking for cultural clashes, or diversity groups coming up against adversity based on their diversity, but where there is diversity, there is often adversity. For this reason, I found many works where characters experience adversity. I also found novels where the context of negative stigma regarding differences between people has been removed, leaving room for those elements of characters to grow and become developed beyond merely prevailing under a hail of aforementioned stigma.
