Children’s literature from the 1990s and beyond signaled a conscious attempt to address issues of identity, history and geography. Recent critical attention to such concepts as exile, migration and diaspora, together with a shifting understanding of personal and national identity, have created a demand for new narrative forms that would refl ect changing social attitudes to the make-up of contemporary ethnic identities. These new forms are by no means monolithic. However, they could be seen as another form of postcolonial literature, a literature which in one current interpretation seeks to engage politically with the anxieties that result from a marginalized racial and cultural identity. As Linda Hutcheon writes, this move off-center is one of the formal and thematic contradictions or paradoxes of postmodernism: “the ex-centric, the off-center: ineluctably identifi ed with the center it desires but is denied” (60). The suitably postmodern emphasis in recent children’s fi ction, then, is on the marginal, the liminal and the unhomely, to the exclusion of a fi xed, homogeneous identity as it is imposed on the subject by the dominant culture.