Reading Black Childhoods in Chains and Crongton Knights

This essay reads Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (2008) and Crongton Knights by Alex Wheatle (2016) as texts in the young adult (YA) genre that provocatively render black childhood legible. It contends that Anderson and Wheatle destabilise the presumed authority of first-person narratives through the formal choices that structure their novels. Through these choices, the essay argues, creative representations of black childhood in these two texts subvert and challenge perceptions of black children as so mature and resilient as to be outside or beyond notions of childhood or innocence — what is known as ‘adultification’.