Quince Duncan's Los cuentos de Anansi: Reframing Young Black Lives in Anti-Racist Costa Rican Children's Literature

Abstract

This article investigates the role of Los cuentos de Anansi (Anancy's Stories) (2019), written by Quince Duncan and illustrated by Ruth Angulo Cruz, in disrupting anti-Blackness via anti-racist stories for Afro-Latine young peoples in Costa Rica. Drawing from the critical work of scholars such as Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Joe R. Feagin, Tara Yosso, and Dolores Delgado Bernal, I demonstrate how Duncan and Angulo Cruz's work provides counter-stories for Afro-Latine young people to see themselves and their ancestors as a valuable part of the national imaginary, and further, from these kinds of affirmations, offers essential tools for resistance against racism and other exclusionary oppressions. My analysis draws on three stories from the Jack Mantorra section of the picture book, ‘Yemayá, jefe del pueblo’, ‘Vaicito’, and ‘Y una historia moderna: Miguelillo Tulipán y Bambembimbombum’, all which foreground the cultural wealth of Afro-Latine peoples and cast young Black people as leaders. I argue that these stories provide important tool kits for Afro-Latine children to effectively counter whiteness and Eurocentrism, thus propelling these young readers forward. Whereas colonialism and racism have erased, occluded, or devalued Black lives and their significant contributions, Black heroes like Yemayá, Vaicito, and Miguelillo provide young readers with vital tools for constructing new meanings of self and of community that are Afrocentric in nature. Armed with these forms of cultural awareness and knowledge, Afro-Latine children can become anti-racist activists who disrupt anti-Blackness in Nuestra América. Los cuentos de Anansi seeks to transform the lives of children so that they can transform the world around them. In this regard, Los cuentos de Anansi, in proposing these transformational possibilities, allows us to envision our hemisphere in profoundly more just and equitable ways.