'We Knew We Were Being Watched': Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

• Published in: Studies in American fiction Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 99 - 118
• Main Author: Dawson, Adam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.03.2022
• Subjects: 19th century; Adults; African American literature; African Americans; American literature; Autobiographical literature; Bildungsroman; Black people; Children; Children & youth; Fiction; Genre; Girls; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Narratives; Novels; Personality; Popular culture; Self concept; Woodson, Jacqueline; Writing
• DOI: 10.1353/saf.2022.0004
• ISSN: 0091-8083; 2158-5806

1 I build on these observations to show that these narrative patterns continue in twenty-first century writing. [...]Woodson’s novel represents an important break from much of the history of African American autobiographical writing, including both autobiographical fiction and autobiography itself, owing to its insistence on deploying the genre to narrate individual character development. 2 By using this model of adolescent development, Woodson renounces the straightforward teleological linearity of standard coming-of-age narratives, positioning August’s coming of age instead as that which can only be understood through retrospective encounters with her life. 6 The human life story does not necessarily follow a pattern of teleological development; rather, this development is a formal feature of the autobiographical genre itself.7 The rejection of a linear narrative of self-development in Another Brooklyn is an effect of, and a response to, the adultification of Black girls, which complicates both the teleological development of a self, and the genre of autobiography.8 According to Phillip Goff and colleagues, the adultifying gaze “violates one defining characteristic of children— being innocent and thus needing protection—rendering the category ‘children’ less essential and distinct from ‘adults.’ [...]Goff observes, “Black felony suspects were seen as 4.53 years older than they actually were,” meaning “that boys would be misperceived as legal adults at roughly the age of 13 and a half.”