From the beginnings of African American children’s literature around the turn of the twentieth century, the parameters of what should be included has been as much of a source of conflict as the terminology used to label this group of people. Commenting on the contested nature of this genre, Dianne Johnson (1990) asserts in _Telling Tales: the Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth_: > _Like children’s literature, as a broad category, African American children’s literature is a label which refers to the intended audience. On the other hand, like Afro-American literature, Black children’s literature refers to the ethnic and racial identities of the authors. When the two categories are combined into one, the parameters of the new category are much less clear. This confusion in definition is important, largely because of the deliberate uses to which the literature is put._ In this passage, Johnson highlights the shifting terminology associated with the people, and therefore with the genre—African American, Afro-American, Black—as well as the anomalous nature of the genre itself: unlike most literary genres, children’s and young adult literature are defined by audience, not by authorship. Furthermore, in stating that “Black children’s literature refers to the ethnic and...

_Diaspora_, which means “to scatter” or “disperse” in Greek (IdEA, n.d.), combines “the prefix _dia_- (meaning ‘through’) and the verb _sperein_ (meaning ‘to sow’ or ‘to scatter’)” (Edwards 2014, 76). While Münz and Ohlinger write that the term “was first used in ancient Greece to characterize the exile of the Aegean population after the Peloponnesian War” (2003a, 3), Edwards says that it originally appeared in the Septuagint, which is “the translation of the Hebrew Torah prepared for the ruler of Alexandria in Egypt around 250 BCE by a specially appointed group of Jewish scholars” (2014, 76). Although the word has historically been used as a self-designation by populations of Mediterranean Jews during the Hellenic period, today we use it to describe those living outside their shared country of ancestry or origin. Both emigrants and their descendants belong to the diaspora of the emigrant, who might or might not maintain strong ties to an ancestral homeland. Those with mixed heritage can belong to multiple diasporic communities (IdEA, n.d.). Jewish traditions make a sharp distinction between voluntary migration (_diaspora_) and exile (_galut_). According to Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Only the loss of a political-ethnic center and the feeling of uprootedness turns Diaspora (Dispersion)...