Did you know? Surfacing and Centring Black History in Literature for Children

My children/young adults' history book Black History for Every Day of the Year, co-authored with my siblings David and Kemi (and illustrated by Kemi) was published by Macmillan in September 2024. The book is innovative in its scale and approach and in it we have aimed to develop racial literacy, in children and adults (including parents and teachers) in relation to engagement with historical sources and the storying of the past. 

In this seminar I will reflect on the two year process of developing this book, considering it against the context of some of the existing Black history literature for children and young people, and challenging existing tropes that surround popular understandings of Black history and how Black history can be conveyed to child and young adult readers.

Yinka Olusoga is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield's School of Education. She researches children's play and cultural worlds, past and present. Her work is participatory, drawing on archives and on contemporary digital tools and arts practices to provoke intergenerational storying of childhood, identity and belonging. Her recent project, The Play Observatory [funded by the ESRC] examined children's play and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another innovative strand of Yinka's work relates to identity, visibility and inclusion in the historical record and, via her work as a children's author, to disrupting racist and colonial histories for young readers.