Liminal childhoods and the refusal of order: reading Alice, Chhuti, HaJaBaRaLa, and contemporary Australian children’s literature

Abstract This paper brings together five children’s texts— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), Chhuti (Tagore), HaJaBaRaLa (Ray), The Lost Girl (Kwaymullina), and My Two Blankets (Kobald & Blackwood)—to theorise childhood as a site of liminality, affective disruption, and epistemic resistance. Their breadth is deliberate: placing colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural works in conversation affirms a pluriversal frame that resists narrow canons and positions children’s literature as both critical and creative pedagogy. Drawing on poststructuralist (Deleuze, Butler, Nietzsche) and postcolonial (Bhabha, Spivak, Nandy) frameworks, the analysis explores how these texts unsettle normative binaries—adult/child, English/Other, coloniser/colonised—and reimagine children not as incomplete beings but as relational, agentic figures navigating cultural tension and world-making. From Alice’s linguistic absurdity and Phatik’s emotional dislocation to Ray’s subversive nonsense, the canonical works interrogate adult rationality and colonial logics through motifs of play, silence, and refusal, which reverberate in contemporary Australian picturebooks where Kwaymullina’s The Lost Girl foregrounds Indigenous sovereignty and kinship and My Two Blankets portrays migration, multilingual identity, and intercultural belonging. Viewed together, these texts demonstrate how children’s literature can function as critical and creative pedagogy, foregrounding affect and hybridity as generative tools for intercultural learning and curriculum reform.