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WORK TITLE: SMALL-GIRL TONI AND THE QUEST FOR GOLD
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CITY: Kansas City
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Kansas, professor of English, 1998-.
AWARDS:Frances L. Stiefel Teaching Professorship in English, Ned Fleming Award for Excellence in Teaching, Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship, Mabel S. Fry Teaching Award; University of Kansas, KU’s Women of Distinction, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to journals, including African American Review, Callaloo, MELUS, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature.
Contributor of chapters to books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature, edited by Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., 2011; Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Supriya Nair, 2012; Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic: (En)Gendering Literature and Performance, edited by Emilia María Durán-Almarza and Esther Álvarez-López, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, September 2015, A.S. Newson-Horst, review of The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora, p. 60.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Winter 2013, Roslyn Weaver, review of Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon, p. 155.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2023, review of Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold.
Publishers Weekly, October 9, 2023, review of Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold, p. 68.
Giselle Anatol
Giselle Anatol
Professor
CONTACT INFO
Email:
ganatol@ku.edu
785-864-2575
Wescoe Hall, Room 3027
PERSONAL LINKS
Anatol CV 2021 (.pdf) Anatol CV 2021 (.pdf)
Biography —
When I was a child, my mother, aunts and uncles, and grandmother regaled me with stories of the soucouyant, a demonic figure from Trinidadian folk culture. The soucouyant appeared to be a withered old woman during the day, but at night she peeled off her skin, transformed into a ball of fire, and flew from house to house, where she sucked the blood or life essence of her unsuspecting neighbors. My recent book—The Things That Fly in the Night—explores representations of vampirism in African diasporic folk traditions and contemporary literature, especially the recent proliferation of narratives among writers of African descent (such as Edwidge Danticat, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, David Chariandy, Toni Morrison, and others) who take up the monstrous character and reconfigure it to urge for female mobility, racial, cultural, and sexual empowerment, and/or anti-colonial resistance.
SHOW LESSabout Biography
Research —
Areas of Research - Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora Literature, especially 20th- and 21st-century women's writing, African American Literature, and Children's and Young Adult Literature, particularly representations of race and gender in narratives for young people.
Selected Publications —
Anatol, Giselle Liza. “Getting to the Root of US Healthcare Injustices through Morrison’s Root Workers.” MELUS (January 2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab053
“The Sea-People of Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms: Reconceptualizing Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic through Considerations of Myth and Motherhood” in Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic: (En)Gendering Literature and Performance. Eds. Emilia María Durán-Almarza and Esther Álvarez-López. New York: Routledge 2013. 202-17.
“Using Film to Enhance Cultural Understanding: Images of Jamaica in How Stella Got Her Groove Back and The Harder They Come.” Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Ed. Supriya Nair. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2012. 183-98.
“Trailing in Jonathan Harker’s Shadow: Bella as Modern-Day Ethnographer in Meyer’s Twilight Novels” Co-authored with Joo Ok Kim. Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on the Pop Culture Phenomenon. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatol. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 191-205.
“Children’s and Young Adult Literatures.” The Cambridge History of African American Literature. Eds. Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. 621-54.
“The Replication of Victorian Racial Ideology in Harry Potter.” Reading Harry Potter Again: Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatol. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2009. 109-26.
“Maternal Discourses in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber,” African American Review Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 2006): 111-24.
“A Feminist Reading of Soucouyants in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Skin Folk,” Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature. 37.3 (September 2004): 33-50.
“The Fallen Empire: Exploring Ethnic Otherness in the World of Harry Potter.” Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Ed. Giselle Liza Anatol. Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 2003. 163-78.
“Speaking in (M)Other Tongues: The Role of Language in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” Callaloo 25.3 (Summer 2002): 938-953.
CV: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://english.ku.edu/sites/english/files/attached-files/Anatol%20CV%202021.pdf
CONTACT INFO
ganatol@ku.edu
Hall Center for the Humanities
Biography —
Giselle Anatol joined KU in 1998. Her research interests include Caribbean literature and folklore, U.S. African American literature, speculative fiction by authors of the African diaspora, and representations of race, ethnicity and gender in writing for youth. She authored The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora, a book published in 2015 by Rutgers University Press, and a number of book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. She has also fostered scholarly collaboration by editing three collections of essays on children’s and young adult literature.
Anatol has been recognized repeatedly for teaching and research excellence at KU, receiving the Frances L. Stiefel Teaching Professorship in English, the Ned Fleming Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship, and the English graduate student organization’s Mabel S. Fry Teaching Award. She was named one of KU’s Women of Distinction in 2013 and was selected for the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholar-in-Residence fellowship program in 2012.
New children’s book pays tribute to Toni Morrison
LAWRENCE – A University of Kansas professor of English has taken the profound grief she felt after the 2019 death of the acclaimed African American author Toni Morrison and turned it into a children’s book inspired by the great storyteller.
“Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold” (Viking Press/Penguin Random House) is thought to be the first children’s book inspired by the life of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such novels as “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon.”
Giselle Anatol
Giselle Antatol
Giselle Anatol was teaching the latter book the year after Morrison died, and, among several other Morrison works, it figures into the plot of “Small-Girl Toni.” In “Song of Solomon,” the character Milkman hunts for treasure.
“He is frustrated at every turn in his attempt to get this physical gold,” Anatol said. “But eventually he discovers important information about his ancestors and his connections to family and community. I thought it would be great to incorporate those ideas into a children's book.”
Anatol said she has long dabbled in producing bespoke, illustrated children’s literature for family members, and she tried unsuccessfully to get some published while she was a graduate student. She laid the endeavor aside for years while producing nonfiction academic works such as “The Things That Fly In the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora" (Rutgers University Press, 2015).
She went back to it after Morrison’s death, starting by gathering up some of Morrison’s impressionistic turns of phrase and vibrant imagery.
With the help of an agent she met a children’s literature conference and eventually her editor at Penguin, Anatol said, she made the narrative “more plot-focused” and child-centered for a young audience. That was enhanced by the luminous artwork of her collaborator, Raissa Figueroa.
Morrison herself wrote some children’s books with her son, Slade.
“She thought that the picture book actually was the perfect vehicle for bringing generations together to talk about important topics,” Anatol said. “It can open up conversations and understanding, given the way that very young children can hit on a truth that adults are afraid to talk about.”
Thus, in one such instance, Small-Girl Toni and her three siblings encounter a prejudiced shopkeeper who rebuffs them in their quest for golden sweets. The book is set in the mid-20th century, when Morrison would have been a young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio.
Anatol said she makes “winks and nods” to Morrison’s oeuvre throughout the book. She hopes adult readers familiar with Morrison will get the allusions, while children and other readers will be intrigued.
“For people who have not read Morrison,” Anatol said, “maybe they'll think, ‘OK, I'll try to read a Morrison novel again, now that I have this kind of guide as to what the essence of the story is.’ And then for children, I hope they will think, ‘This is really cool. Maybe when I get older, I will want to read a Morrison book.’”
Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold
Giselle Anatol, illus. by Raissa Figueroa.
Viking, $18.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-593-40486-7
A child seeks to change the world in this allusive picture book loosely based on the art and life of Toni Morrison (19.31-2019). Though townspeople frequently scoff at her "outlandish stories" and big dreams, Small-Girl Toni believes that her tales can make a difference: "Grown-ups say that stories can't save jobs... but if my stories have gotten me sent to the principal's office, and to bed without supper, maybe they can lead me to a whole heap of treasure." As Small-Girl Toni leads her siblings in search of gold, Anatol, making her picture book debut, incorporates components of Morrison's works. The children's journey yields little in the way of the aimed-for treasure, but their arrival home reveals "the warmth of true wealth" and offers a new lens on the gold they gathered along the way. If references to Morrison's oeuvre feel aimed at adult audiences rather than young readers, digitally rendered, watercolor-textured art from Figueroa (You Will Do Great Things) marries cool and copper tones, revealing moments of gold throughout this picture book about where treasure lies. A biographical note and references to Toni Morrison's works concludes. Ages 4-8. Author's agent: Alexandra Levick, Writers House, Illustrator's agent: Natascha Morris. Tobias Literary. (Dec.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Small-Girl Toni and the Quest for Gold." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 41, 9 Oct. 2023, p. 68. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A770540041/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=daba1bb0. Accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
Anatol, Giselle SMALL-GIRL TONI AND THE QUEST FOR GOLD Viking (Children's None) $18.99 12, 26 ISBN: 9780593404867
A charming tale in tribute to the life and imagination of storytelling powerhouse Toni Morrison.
Small-Girl Toni is certain that stories--her stories--can change the world. Many adults in her predominantly Black community disagree, but Small-Girl Toni does what real-life Morrison will become known for when faced with doubt from critics--she tells stories anyway. Like stories about treasure in her town to draw her siblings into a hunt. The foursome pick blackberries as they search for doubloons in lonely Ms. Solomon's backyard; they offer to walk Widow Sersee's dogs in the hope the canines will sniff out long-buried gold; they peer enthusiastically through the candy shop window at golden treats, only to be rebuffed by the white store owner. All the while Small-Girl Toni spins her tales, and as the siblings arrive home glumly with no treasure, she helps them see the gold they found along the way--"It's all in how you tell the story." Bold softness is as much a signature for Figueroa's illustrations as it is for Morrison herself. Bright, rich spreads celebrate the deep roots of Toni's small town and the exuberant heights of her story landscapes. Readers will return again and again to search the pages--younger ones to find the different examples of gold and older ones to find Anatol's creative nods to Morrison's writings, referenced in the appended biographical note.
Glowing and overflowing with the legacy of the author who inspired it. (Picture book. 4-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Anatol, Giselle: SMALL-GIRL TONI AND THE QUEST FOR GOLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766904264/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=641d5c01. Accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
Anatol, Giselle Liza. The things that fly in the night: female vampires in literature of the circum-Caribbean and African diaspora. Rutgers, 2015. 295p bibl index ISBN 9780813565743 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780813565736 pbk, $32.95
53-0075
PN849
CIP
Anatol (Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence) discusses contemporary literature that foregrounds the black female vampire as a figure through which to critique women's prescribed roles in traditional folk legends, poetry, and songs of the African diaspora. In six well-organized, well-written chapters (framed by an introduction and a conclusion), the author provides an in-depth analysis of the tradition and its revisions. Anatol focuses on the change in gender of the vampire from male to female in the cultural flows and exchanges of diasporic peoples. She explains that the conventional female vampire figure is typically regarded as a malign presence, and tales of her are intended to socialize the community to obey the patriarchy. The author maintains that the traditional African diasporic view of the draining of blood as signifying slavery and colonialism shifts as the retelling moves further away from the beginnings, "evok[ing] a sense of agency and power." An interesting study for those interested in the literature of the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.--A. S. Newson-Horst, Morgan State University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Newson-Horst, A.S. "Anatol, Giselle Liza. The things that fly in the night: female vampires in literature of the circum-Caribbean and African diaspora." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 53, no. 1, Sept. 2015, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A428874676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bfb90247. Accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
Anatol, Giselle Liza, ed. Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 248 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-230-11068-7. $26.
Much like the vampires that inspire them, critical works on vampire literature multiply in ever-increasing numbers and take on many different forms that alternately delight, terrify, amuse, or bore us. Stephenie Meyer's enormously popular Twilight (2005-2008) series of young adult novels and filmic adaptations in particular have received a good deal of scholarly attention, and to this critical field we can add this collection of essays edited by Giselle Liza Anatol. The contributions cover the usual areas of interest for Twilight scholars such as gender, sexuality, and race but also add some newer perspectives and as such are worth attention.
Anatol's collection is split into three sections. "Literary Contexts: Past and Present" includes six chapters that explore Twilight's connections with other literary works. The second section is "Gender and Sexuality" and it comprises five chapters dealing with this area, although a number of the other chapters also discuss gender. The final section, titled "Class, Race, and Green Space," brings together five chapters focusing on ethnicity, class, fashion, and landscape. This last combination seems a bit of a catch-all--but to some extent collections such as these can never be neatly organized given the overlap of themes discussed throughout.
The first section covers Twilight and intertextuality, with readings of the series in the context of Little Red Riding Hood, Jane Eyre, Gothic literature, and law. The second chapter, "Textual Vampirism in the Twilight Saga: Drawing Feminist Life from Jane Eyre and Teen Fantasy Fiction," from Kristina Deffenbacher and Mikayla Zagoria-Moffet, probably best describes the theme of this section in a discussion of "textual vampirism," where "all intertextuality, as defined by Julia Kristeva, can be read as a form of vampirism, as 'any text is the absorption and transformation of another'" (31). Accordingly, Deffenbacher and Zagoria-Moffet read the novels as vampirizing Jane Eyre, arguing that "in its vampiric relationship with Jane Eyre, the Twilight saga both feeds upon and transforms Bronte's female bildungsroman and gothic romance" (32). This idea of textual vampirism recurs throughout the collection in different ways. Kim Allen Gleed, in a chapter titled "Twilight, Translated," looks at the differences between the English and French language versions of the Twilight novel, suggesting that translator decisions about the protagonists produce a more assertive Bella Swan and menacing Edward Cullen in the French translation Fascination (2005). Although this chapter begins by explaining that the purpose is not to judge the French translation as "'good' or bad,' 'faithful' or 'unfaithful' (fans have already done more than their fair share of that)" (60), it contradictorily ends by asserting the French translation to be both "good" and faithful (67). Studying translations is a potentially fruitful area, although it would have been useful to see more critical conclusions about these differences, perhaps by discussing the significance of the shifts with respect to not only culture but also the notion of authorship.
Authorship is more directly addressed in Maria Lindgren Leavenworth's contribution, "Variations, Subversions, and Endless Love: Fan Fiction and the Twilight Saga," which discusses the "twin desires" in fan fiction of retelling and revising stories (79), with reference to several fans' works that retell Twilight using different settings from popular television series or films (including, apparently, even Dirty Dancing [1987]) or introduce other non-canonical elements such as Bella's death. Indeed, readers might wonder more about this issue in light of media reports that Twilight fan fiction spawned E. L. James's bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) series, perhaps in itself a kind of never-ending cycle of textual vampirism, although obviously this chapter was published well before James's success.
As with much of the scholarship around Twilight in general, a good deal of attention in this collection is devoted to gender, both in the middle section explicitly focused on the topic and in the collection as a whole. Gender and sexuality in the Twilight series have been widely canvassed in other places such as Christine Seifert's "Bite Me! (or Don't)," Natalie Wilson's Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga, and in other essay collections on the series such as Clarke and Osborn's The Twilight Mystique: Critical Essays on the Novels and Films and Parke and Wilson's Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What's At Stake in a Post-Vampire World; consequently, the collection retreads some familiar ground in this area. Although the series has attracted hostile reception at times with regard to gender constructions and roles, not all contributors pursue a negative reading here. Although chapters such as Merinne Whitton's "'One is Not Born a Vampire, But Becomes One': Motherhood and Masochism in Twilight," include some cogent observations about the marginalization of women and specifically mothers in the series and Margaret Kramar discusses Bella as Red Riding Hood, a victim, in "The Wolf in the Woods: Representations of 'Little Red Riding Hood' in Twilight," other contributors such as Deffenbacher and Zagoria-Moffet, in the chapter mentioned earlier, find some positive aspects in Bella's transformation "from patriarchal fairy tales to ... self-reliance and equalizing strength" (33).
Contributions from Tracy L. Bealer ("Of Monsters and Men: Toxic Masculinity and the Twenty-First Century Vampire in the Twilight Saga"), and Joseph Michael Sommers and Amy L. Hume ("The Other Edward: Twilight's Queer Construction of the Vampire as an Idealized Teenage Boyfriend") tackle gender from a slightly different angle by focusing on Edward rather than Bella. Bealer argues that "the novels hyperbolize and thoughtfully address the trials of negotiating a progressive male identity in a masculinist world" (140), where Edward's "evolution from a patronizing and callous loner to an empathetic and vulnerable romantic partner" (140) models how "masochistic denial" (of his desire to harm Bella) might to some extent be seen to subvert social constructions of masculinity (149). In "'When You Kiss Me, I Want to Die': Arrested Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Twilight Series," Rhonda Nicol critiques the popular practice (culturally and academically) of contrasting Bella Swan and Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 19972003) as failures and victors of feminism, arguing that the characters have more in common than some suggest and proposing that the appeal of the Twilight series for many readers is its "easily navigated morality" in a more complex real world (121). Nicol also claims that much criticism of gender in the series involves "simply vilifying [the books] and implying that fans ... are naive dupes of the patriarchy who have not been appropriately 'enlightened' by feminism" (113-14). Perhaps some of the other contributors' remarks in this collection demonstrate this assumption of readers' naivete in their concluding warnings about the dangers of the series to young impressionable readers (for example, 26, 111, 216). Nicol raises a valid point, and this attitude is not only found in Twilight criticism but in many approaches to popular texts.
The final section of the collection is the least cohesive, bleeding as it does into the previous themes of intertextuality and gender. This third part includes contributions about consumerism and gender, fashion in and out of the series, and location and landscape. Focusing on race, Joo Ok Kim and Giselle Liza Anatol in "Trailing in Jonathan Harker's Shadow: Bella as Modern-Day Ethnographer in Meyer's Twilight Novels" use the notion of Bella as ethnographer--an outsider observing the worlds of the vampire Cullens and the shapeshifting Quileutes--to discuss notions of knowledge and power in the series against the backdrop of Jonathan Harker's journaling in Bram Stoker's Dracula. They argue that the novels "perpetuate the dominant social order ... [and] also contain the historical and cultural reverberations of empire, and ongoing expression of global capitalist violence" (201-202). This concern about racial implications in the series is emphasized in Brianna Burke's chapter on the Quileute characters, "The Great American Love Affair: Indians in the Twilight Saga." The series' use of Indigenous groups as werewolves has been discussed elsewhere (for example, Shelley Chappell's "Contemporary Werewolf Schemata: Shifting Representations of Racial and Ethnic Difference," Natalie Wilson's "It's a Wolf Thing: The Quileute Werewolf/Shape-Shifter Hybrid as Noble Savage," and Kristian Jensen's "Noble Werewolves or Native Shape-Shifters?"), but Burke makes some useful comments; she is however less convincing in concluding that the mass appeal of the series has "the potential to irreparably damage the feminist movement and harm teenage boys everywhere who will never be able to live up to the impossible standard set by Edward Cullen. Most importantly, they harm Native peoples struggling for livelihood and recognition, and undermine their very existence by supplanting them with stereotypes and mythic status" (216). That the series has this sort of profound impact is questionable to say the least and perhaps recalls Nicol's comments about assuming that readers are passive. Moreover, a glance through this book alone, not to mention other critical works on the Twilight series, amply demonstrates that it is possible for scholars and readers to produce a great variety of readings of Meyer's work, including positive approaches.
More robust arguments would have benefited some chapters here, some pieces are descriptive rather than critical, and small editing issues such as variations in the spelling of character names (Rene, Renee, Renee) are present. Overall, however, this collection offers some thought-provoking and worthwhile contributions to anyone interested in Twilight scholarship. In her introduction, Anatol explains that the collection is designed to appeal to a broader readership rather than just other academics, to "inspire conversations across a variety of audiences--teenagers and senior citizens, Mormons and Buddhists, college professors and junior high school students, stay-at-home moms and Marxist theorists" (2). Casting such a wide net is difficult to do well, although the essays provide a range of perspectives and readings of the series that facilitate this to some extent. Most are conventional academic essays, with at least one that is far more anecdotal and personal in nature. Some chapters will be accessible to fans and scholars alike; others use academic language and jargon that is much less accessible. Given this mix, it seems likely that the collection will be of some interest to those beyond as well as those within academe.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
http://www.fantastic-arts.org/jfa/
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Weaver, Roslyn. "Anatol, Giselle Liza, ed.: Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 24, no. 1, winter 2013, pp. 155+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A531845638/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1dc87be1. Accessed 15 Feb. 2024.