Literary London in the second half of the twentieth century is home to a small, well-meaning Andean Bear, whose status as human/animal, English/Peruvian and child/adult remains ambiguous throughout the nearly-70 years we’ve known him. It’s also home to several communities of Borribles, children who refuse to grow up and survive on theft and stories and face a constant threat of being captured by the police and having their pointy ears clipped. And then there are the immigrant teenagers of Farrokh Dhondy’s short fiction, who inhabit a less fantastical world (except that one of them has a harrowing encounter with AI, and another is probably a ghost). What, if anything, do these childlike figures have in common?The Second World War and the beginning of the long, slow process of decolonization saw a shift in the focus of British children’s literature. It was no longer possible to look outward towards a vast and claimable world; instead, attention shifted towards the domestic space of the British Isles. Yet the same period saw unprecedented immigration to Britain from its colonies, and a changing discourse around the construction of the figure of the migrant, within which race was a key component so that, as Wendy Webster notes, “in place of the vision of Britain bringing order to the colonies, Black and Asian Commonwealth migrants were portrayed as bringing disorder to the metropolis”.

So how does British children’s fantasy address this change? Through a discussion of Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borrible trilogy (1975-1986), Michael Bond’s Paddington books (1958-2018), and Farrokh Dhondy’s Trip Trap (1984), I embed these disruptive child figures in the discourse of immigration, and try to make sense of their negotiations with that discourse.

Bio: Dr Aishwarya Subramanian is an Associate Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University in Haryana, India, researching children’s literature, fantasy, space and borders, and post-imperial nationalisms. She’s also a reviews editor, and occasional podcaster, with Strange Horizons.