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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 137–150

Chapter 9
Fabric with feeling

Materiality, memory, and affect in Nina Sabnani’s Mukand and Riaz

This chapter analyses the triadic relationship between materiality, memory, and affect in the Indian picturebook Mukand and Riaz (2007) by Nina Sabnani. Set against the backdrop of the Partition of India and Pakistan, the book is based on the “fragmented memories” of Sabnani’s father, a child refugee at the time (Sabnani 2007). This chapter examines how the book connects microhistory to macrohistory. Specifically, the chapter looks into the ability of artefacts to embody individual emotions and collective experiences and explores how this ability is translated through the material poetics of the picturebook. The chapter suggests that this work’s layered approach to materiality provokes a fine-grained understanding of human-object relations, contributing to new materialist children’s literature studies.

Keywords: Child-material relations, Materiality, New materialist approaches to children’s literature, Material Memory
Article outline
  • Touchstones for thought: Notes on an evolving research method
  • Memory and narrativization: Thinking and becoming “with” material
  • Transitive relations and criss-crossing modalities
  • A return to touchstones: Implications for the study of children’s literature
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.09sub
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