Black/Jewish imaginaries and children’s literature: reading resistance and intersectionality in A Pickpocket’s Tale

In this essay I apply theories of intersectionality to A Pickpocket’s Tale (2006), a young adult novel which imagines eighteenth-century Britishness, indenture, slavery, and Jewishness. I argue that this is a text which represents feminist resistance and its limits as located within the shared social and physical spaces of Jewishness and blackness. My discussion of the novel’s discourse of resistance focuses on scenes, characters and settings where Jewishness and blackness are defined and intersect. By focusing on its black/Jewish coalitional politics I conclude that A Pickpocket’s Tale presents a politicised intersectional narrative of racial, gender and religious identity that is both subversive and conservative.