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The study explores the nexus between Ibu-Ubu boyhood initiation and the conservation of cultural heritage in Afikpo, Southeast Nigeria. The study is motivated by the rarity of such cultural conservation through initiation rites in an age of Christian-inspired culture terrorism against Igbo traditional religion, arts and relics.

The study adopted cultural anthropological research method. The boyhood initiation rite was studied through participant observation of the initiation between September and November 2017. As a cultural anthropological study, oral evidence was derived from the men who had undergone the rite. Through the oral evidence, interpretations were given to the material culture, monuments and heritage that have been conserved through Ibu-Ubu initiation rite.

The study discovered that amid the deluge of Christian-motivated culture terrorism and erosion of Igbo cultural arts, relics and heritage, the people of Afikpo have preserved most of their tangible and intangible heritage through the Ibu-Ubu boyhood initiation rites.

This study will assist in the reinvigoration of campaigns on environmental and heritage conservation in Igboland. It is sufficient to posit that Igboland is ridden with myriads of environmental and cultural terrorism, perpetrated by some Christian fanatics. The study reveals the relevance of the boyhood initiation rites in ensuring the preservation and conservation of Igbo cultural heritage in a century marked with fanatical Christian evangelism, culture-terrorism and destruction of both tangible and intangible heritages, which the Christians have labelled evil, barbaric and fetish.

Comics and graphic novels can disrupt traditional texts by challenging the “worship of the written word” (Torres, 2019), a feature of white supremacy that perpetuates textual hierarchies within educational spaces. Giving all of our students access to contemporary literature that centers Black youth perspectives is not only important in decolonizing literature education but also in presenting a holistic view of Black childhood. They can be used in the classroom as subjects to challenge stereotypical depictions by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts that are often marginalized in traditional curriculum. Within this chapter, we focus on comics and graphic novels as tools to enact students’ multiliteracies and to analyze visual stories depicting BlackBoy adolescence, using the frameworks of BlackBoy Crit Pedagogy (Bryan, 2022), an equity framework that interrogates the interdisciplinary ways that Black boy students' literacy learning can be formed through the teaching and learning of Blackness, maleness, and the schooling experiences of Black boys. We utilize this framework to analyze the use of diverse comics and graphic novels to facilitate critical conversations of bringing inclusive visual texts into the classroom. We invite practitioners to reimagine curricular ideas and content centered on empowerment and Black boy adolescence and how those ideas are presented to youth through a variety of visual narratives.

Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed directorial debut Get Out (2017) highlights the issues regarding racism and Black identity that have seldom been the subject of horror film. More specifically, Get Out offers representations of Black masculinity that push against the stereotypical and reductive ways that Black men have often been depicted in horror cinema. The portrayal of Black men in Get Out takes shape in ways influenced by a range of relationships featured in the film. Amongst these is the dynamic between the leading character Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), in addition to Chris’s interactions with Rose’s mother Missy (Catherine Keener), as well as his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery). As such, scrutiny of Get Out yields insight into the construction of Black masculinity in horror film, including how on-screen inter- and intra-racial relations are implicated in this. The writing that follows focuses on how Get Out offers complex and scarcely featured representations of Black masculinity, and boyhood, in horror. As part of such discussion, there is analysis of the entanglements of on-screen gender and racial politics, which contribute to the nuances of depictions of Black masculinity in Get Out.

IN MY BOYHOOD DAYS, I got my reading matter, apart from the Gem and the Magnet, from the local branch of the public library. The library was near our home, in a Lowry‐like suburb of Leeds, full of gaunt churches and squarely‐built chapels, tall factory chimneys and long streety perspectives. Mr Bucktrout, the librarian in charge, was a fierce‐looking shortish gentleman with pince‐nez and a shock of grey hair. When we local boys called in to exchange our books, Mr Bucktrout would look sternly at us over his pince‐nez.

A delightful moment was when one ceased reading juvenile literature and tackled adult books, able to do the mechanical reading and understand its content. With me that came early. In my teens I was romping, or ramping through Scott, Dickens, Lytton, Jane Austen, Reade and other Victorians, with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress before that, back in my boyhood.

As I look back, I find that, for me, as for many old men, the book of greatest influence is the Book of Life; and as one who has been extraordinarily lucky in friendships I know that close contact with other minds has been of superlative value. From quite early boyhood I had friends of intellectual quality, and as I grew up I benefited from close association with such men as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, A. G. Gardiner, and others, all my seniors, and all shrewd observers of history and the current scene. Nevertheless the love of books, and the constant reading of books, have partially made up for almost total lack of schooling.

This paper aims to describe the work of a group of seventh-grade boys in a middle school superhero storytelling project. In this project, the boys, one of whom identified as Latino and five of whom identified as Black, created a voiceless, faceless, raceless superhero named “Mute.” Using a Black feminist theoretical framework, the author considers how the boys authored embodied moments in the construction of their character and in a basketball scene. The author argues that within the narrated space of the story, embodiment functioned as a critical tool for authoring spaces that thwarted and bypassed dominant social narratives.

The white, female, university-affiliated author was a participant-researcher in the “Mute” group’s ten storytelling sessions. The ethnographic data set collected included fieldnotes, recordings and copies of all the writing and images of the group. The author uses this data to conduct a narrative analysis of the Mute story.

The author suggests that the group’s authoring of embodiment and choreography in their story makes space outside of the binary stances often available in traditional critical analyses. Instead, the group’s attention to embodied aspects of their character(s) allowed them to refuse either/or positions of such stances and construct a textured reality that existed beyond these bounds.

Black feminist theorists have warned that critical readings are potentially essentializing, risking a reification of the same systems they hope to overturn. The Mute group’s invention of a superhero character and their use of authored embodiment deflected such essentializing readings to imagine a new, more just (story) world. Thus, the author recommends an increased attention to how students are writing and reading embodiment to fully see the everyday ways they are critically working both against and beyond the social narratives that organize their lives.

THE children's magazine was practically dead a few years ago, in fact during the war there was scarcely one worth buying, and there was a real need for something in this class. While books will always have first place, educationists and all interested in children's reading will agree that good periodical literature is a useful adjunct. On account of its regular appearance it encourages the habit of continuous reading among children who are sometimes lured away by out‐door activities in the summer, and by cinema clubs and other distractions in the winter. A good magazine, too, introduces children to a variety of subjects and types of story, thus widening their reading interests before their minds become set. It may be a vehicle for presenting current affairs in a form more suitable than in the daily papers, as has been the policy of The Children's Newspaper for nearly thirty years. A recent issue covered a variety of news calculated to interest boys and girls—a boy's journey by canoe across South America, the erection of a statue to Robin Hood (who probably comes first amongst boyhood's heroes), science news, a report on the United Nations meeting at Lake Success and an editorial on the subject, an explanation of inflation, wages and prices, a photograph of a model of the new House of Commons, articles on Jeremy Bentham, astronomy, the new constitution of Malaya, as well as other features, jokes, and snippets of information. This is good value and would doubtless enliven a current affairs lesson at school, but, as a magazine for general reading and entertainment, it is rather too serious. It is the kind of periodical that parents and well‐meaning friends think their children ought to read, but do they really read it from cover to cover, or do they only pick out the lighter bits ? As a news‐sheet of information it is excellent, but the production and layout would need to be more attractive to make it a favourite.