Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children's literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an exemplary practitioner as well as subject. This attitude is on display especially in the Philosophy for Children or P4C movement, which got its start in the United States in the early 1970s and has since spread to other countries and continents. P4C has affirmed children's literature as important philosophical work as part of its commitment to keeping philosophy fresh and relevant. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children's classics, especially Lewis Carroll's Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children's literature in key ways. After examining the P4C movement, the book turns its attention to theory for beginners and especially in the form of illustrated or graphic guides. These guides have many influences but emerged from the anticolonial and Marxist work of Mexican activist and author-illustrator Eduardo del Rio, aka Rius. Rius' Cuba Para Principiantes, or Cuba for Beginners (1970) kicked off the Beginners graphic series,
emphasizing the self-teaching of political-critical awareness. The genre gradually went mainstream, losing the political edge of the earlier titles and becoming a kind of intellectual self-help literature. If philosophy is for children, and theory is for beginners, as the book argues, then children's literature might also be
described as a literature for minors, and perhaps even a minor literature as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. The third and final chapter pursues that idea, proposing more specifically that children's and young adult literature can sometimes function as queer theory for kids.
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Citing theorists who have found inspiration in "non-elite cultural materials" (Houston Baker drawing on the blues, Jack Halberstam on animation), Kenneth Kidd's generative and useful book considers what it would mean to ground a critical theory in books for young people. An ideal spokesbook for the public humanities, Kidd's lucid, accessible Theory for Beginners explores why small books are so good at raising big questions. By estranging the familiar and cultivating a sense of wonder, children's literature - Kidd shows us - teaches us not just how to read but how to read the world.
