“You and Me, Alfred”

Abstract

By focusing on instances of intergenerational solidarity in, primarily, the Emil books by Astrid Lindgren, this chapter nuances the question of how power, agency, and generation are represented in children’s books. Instead of reading the Emil books as either instances of aetonormativity or as examples of child agency and subversion, an “all ages” approach is employed to unpack the double generational bind—child-parent and child-adult. In that context the notion of “kinship” is also employed to show how solidarity can be made to extend beyond the immediate family circle. Hence, the Emil books demonstrate that free play and acts of solidarity are not mutually exclusive things and that the world can be made a better place right now. In other words, there is a utopian drive in Lindgren’s stories as children who have that energy and that sense of solidarity can continue to do good as adults.