“Not Even My Name”: Refugeehood, Migration, and Forms of Resistance to Cultural Assimilation in Children’s Literature.

Abstract

Each individual’s name signifies stories, traditions, and memories connected to familial, national, and/or religious pasts. Frequently, however—most often as a consequence of forced population movements—many individuals experience changes to their names during their transition to a host country. This process is often perceived by the subject as a painful reconfiguration of personal identity and, in some cases, as a gradual loss of historical continuity and a rupture from cultural and/or religious heritage. The present article introduces a selection of picturebooks and illustrated children’s books from world literature in which the protagonists are underage refugees or children of migrants who struggle, in their own ways, both to assimilate and to preserve their names and the symbolic meanings these carry. These works foreground the complex relationship between a person’s name and the sense of maintaining individual and/or national identity, particularly during the process of adaptation and assimilation in the host country. The article also presents some of the activities that took place for and by the students enrolled in the course Multicultural Children’s Literature, taught at the Department of Early Childhood Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. These activities were implemented within the framework of highlighting the potential of children’s literature to help both young and adult readers empathize with the efforts of young refugees/migrants to negotiate their integration into a new community and to resist forms of cultural assimilation, such as the changing of names.