Description
The forcible exclusion of individuals as asylum seekers, terrorists, enemy combatants, and so forth is a prominent feature of contemporary world politics. This prominence, and its typical storying from the vantagepoint of the protected ‘self’ renders such practices and their harms unremarkable, and, often, unremarked. In this article, we argue that children’s literature offers a powerful, yet neglected resource for critiquing the taken-for-granted nature of such practices, focusing on the banishment of characters within The Enchanted Wood, the Lion Who Wanted to Love, and Where the Wild Things Are. These texts, we argue, first, offer a powerful structural critique of exclusionary politics by highlighting its (i) arbitrariness, (ii) underpinning violence, and (iii) constitutive importance as a bordering practice differentiating internal security from external danger. Second, by storying such practices through the aesthetic subject of the excluded, such texts also help readers to reverse the gaze and consider the implications of exclusion on its targets.
