Emmeline’s daughter Sylvia was a known anti-war campaigner, who argued that the war was a class issue—since most of the men who died were poor and working-class. The women’s suffrage movement is often seen as a white British protest movement, but recently, several children’s books have been published that include the protest of Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh. Two recent books that include Singh are David Roberts’ Suffragette: The Battle for Equality (Two Hoots 2018), which pictures Singh (presumably) on the front cover as well as giving her a two-page spread inside, and Kira Cochrane’s Modern Women: 52 Pioneers (Frances Lincoln 2017). Roberts keeps the focus of Singh’s transformation to radicalism on being “troubled” (36) by the way the British had treated her family, but Cochrane’s book specifically mentions Singh’s “loathing” for the British Empire after her visit to India. For women of colour, suffrage was not just about the right to vote; it was about the right to represent themselves and be heard as people of subjugated nations. For years, Singh’s story was lost to child readers, and those that do depict her often shy away from her anti-colonial attitudes.


It


is acceptable to depict Singh as part of a battle that white British women dominated, but rarely is her post-war work to raise awareness of the contribution of Indian soldiers recognized, an effort which, according to Manmeet Bali Nag, “triggered near-panic among the stalwarts of Whitehall and New Delhi” (https://ponderingpauses. wordpress.com/2018/03/10/sikh-princess-suffragette-sophia-duleep- singh/). Singh, like the fictional Luke Knight, is celebrated for her radicalism, but only when the issue is not racially-based.


Recently, Angie Thomas’ YA debut The Hate U Give, and Breanna J. McDaniels’ debut picture-book Hands Up (in the USA) and Mohammed Khan’s debut I am Thunder and Sita Bramachari’s Tender Earth (in the UK) all offer narratives where children and young people of colour engage in protest over injustices they have experienced.


Onjali Q. Rauf’s 2018 debut, the Blue Peter Book Award winning The Boy at the Back of the Class can be read as a careful negotiation between ideas of ‘childhood innocence’ and a narrative of protest against injustice. When the nine-year-old protagonist learns that her new classmate Ahmet is a refugee who has been separated from his parents, she wishes to help. An unlikely plan to visit the Queen proves to be the catalyst for a happy ending. This may not seem like the most realistic portrayal of social protest. Yet Rauf deftly includes


neighbours and politicians with racist views – whilst refraining from using racist epithets for her middle-grade audience. The first person narrative offers us light-hearted moments of innocence – just what does a deputy headteacher do if the headteacher is never absent? – yet we get a sense that our mixed-race narrator has grown up with some sense of injustice and that her friendship with Ahmet leads not to a rude awakening but rather an extension of her understanding of the world.


The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present), Lucy Pearson, Routledge, 978-1138252189, £37.99


Suffragette: The Battle for Equality, David Roberts, Two Hoots, 978-1509839674, £18.99 hbk


Modern Women: 52 Pioneers, Kira Cochrane, Frances Lincoln, 978-0711237896, £20.00 hbk


I Am Thunder, Mohammed Khan, Macmillan Children’s Books, 9781509874057, £7.99 pbk


The Boy at the Back of the Class, Onjali Rauf, Orion Children’s Books, 978-1510105010, £6.99 pbk


Karen Sands-O’Connor is professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State in New York. She has, as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, worked with Seven Stories, the National Centre for the Children’s Book, and has recently published Children’s Publishing and Black Britain 1965-2015 (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).


Darren Chetty is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip hop culture. He is a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and published by Unbound, and tweets at @rapclassroom


Books for Keeps No.235 March 2019 15


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