Stamping Grounds

This paper proposes historical connections or “linking phenomena” (Volkan 1999) between select examples of 21st-century children’s literature and 20th-century avant-garde collage artworks that preceded them, in relation to an aesthetics of postage stamps and the ephemera of postal imagined geographies. Shaun Tan’s aesthetics of the postage and library stamp in Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) and Migrations (ICPBS et al. 2019) seen in the light of artist Kurt Schwitters’ collage Opened by Customs (1937–1938) powerfully suggest what Alastair Bonnet (2016) calls “migrant nostalgia” in the “persistence of loss”. By presenting them together with Jacques Derrida’s (1987) discourse of the “parergon” and imaginative geographies of “worlding”, I propose that works of art and artwork for children’s literature carry strong correlations of how the motif of the stamp is used in deliberate discontinuity as a modality of feeling for present and future community building.