The Routledge Companion to International Children's Literature

John Stephens, John Stephens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317676065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Demonstrating the aesthetic, cultural, political and intellectual diversity of children's literature across the globe, The Routledge Companion to International Children's Literature is the first volume of its kind to focus on the undervisited regions of the world. With particular focus on Asia, Africa and Latin America, the collection raises awareness of children's literature and related media as they exist in large regions of the world to which 'mainstream' European and North American scholarship pays very little attention.

Sections cover:

• Concepts and theories

• Historical contexts and national identity

• Cultural forms and children's texts

• Traditional story and adaptation

• Picture books across the majority world

• Trends in children's and young adult literatures.

Exposition of the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which children's literature is produced, together with an exploration of intersections between these literatures and more extensively researched areas, will enhance access and understanding for a large range of international readers. The essays offer an ideal introduction for those newly approaching literature for children in specific areas, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in directions for future scholarship.

PART I

Concepts and theories

1

Globalization and glocalization

Anna Katrina Gutierrez

Children’s and young adult literature have been understood and interpreted through, if not shaped by, the effects of economic, political, cultural, social and technological processes on theoretical perspectives. Globalization is a term synonymous with the acceleration of such processes in the late twentieth century and the development of infrastructures in support of transnational connectivity and mobility, albeit with varying degrees of intensity across the world. It establishes a “network society” (Castells 1994, Lorrigio 2004) between First and Third world nations, the hegemonic West and North and developing East and South, and dominant and minority cultures, and foregrounds operations of integration and exchange across disparate spaces. The impact of global connectivity upon representations of subjectivity in narratives for young readers, and indeed upon child and youth culture as a whole, has drawn considerable interest from critics in the field, but critical discourse for non-Western texts has mainly been grounded on Western theories of globalization, culture and subjectivity. Theoretical perspectives from non-Western domains are rarely brought to bear because of the assumption that subjectivity, like globalization, is a Western invention. This essay anchors its overview of research regarding globalization and children’s literature on the development of subjectivity from within a global network society in order to illuminate the critical exchanges between hegemonic/West and non-hegemonic/non-West spaces in the construction and transformation of representations of childhood and adolescence. In viewing globalization as a dialectical process – often uneven but a dialogue all the same – it seeks to elevate the participation of non-Western nations as more than a passive recipient of information and images.

As a phenomenon, globalization is hardly new. Globalizing pressures have existed alongside colonialism and structures of modernity, which explain why it is generally understood as an extension of Western imperialist strategies, which homogenize (and in particular Americanize) economies and cultures. However, others point out that in early international relations until perhaps the age of industrialization, “Oriental” cultural influences heavily flowed into Europe (Pieterse 2000; Tu 2000). Globalization is thus historically a multidimensional and polycentric process that comprises “multiple intentionalities and criss-crossing projects on the part of many agents” (Pieterse 2000: 70). Still others argue that globalization has entered a new phase in which progressive technologies facilitate global relationships across different platforms at an increased rate, creating the sense that time and space have been compressed into a single place (Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; Robertson 1992), that boundaries are blurred and borders are porous, and promoting the “intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole” (Robertson 1992: 8). The term began to define an age only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (Robertson and White 2008), when the literal and metaphorical breaking of barriers between capitalism and communism foregrounded a common desire for increased flows of money, markets and populations across varying spaces. Advancements in communication and information technologies coincided with the end of the Cold War, which contributed to the increased rate of economic and cultural globalization. The internet, satellite television, cellular communication and the like enabled the infiltration of globalist values into the routines of communities and individuals irrespective of national belonging (Tomlinson 2003). These fundamental transformations in sociocultural, trade and industry structures result in new communities and hybrid identities.

Castells’s image of a global network society brings to the forefront the interactions and interdependency of global signs and concepts of nation, and thus is able to show that all three perspectives overlap while remaining distinct from one another. It demonstrates the depth of globalization and the multiple levels it operates on. A matrix of commercial and cultural relations can simultaneously acknowledge Western dominance, move away from Eurocentric viewpoints, and show that informational flows of influence are multidirectional and collaborate in transformative ways. The idea of a network of exchanges further illustrates that distinct localities and cultures are linked via elements of sameness, yet the spaces themselves are not the same, making the impact of globalization uneven across the world. The interplay of differences and similarities concerning globalizing structures and involved nations discloses existing paradoxical pressures between homogeneity and diversity, unification and fragmentation, global and local, modern and traditional flows.

Although the global network was initially based on assumed similarities in consumer behavior, over time its facilitation of capitalist enterprises led to a complex exchange of images, ideas, information and populations that led to the mutual reconstitution of cultural formations in all directions. The belief, then, that globalization creates a homogenous “global culture” is untenable. What occurs is a global localization, or “glocalization”, in which the blending of terms describes the adaptation of a global outlook to local conditions, and the reciprocal reinvention of global signs and local meanings. Robertson (1995) devised the term to internationalize the practice of dochakuka, a Japanese business model that evolved from an agricultural principle of adopting farming techniques to specific landscapes. The glocal encompasses and moves beyond Bhabha’s concept of hybridity (1994), which is too difficult to separate from the hierarchy of colonial power. Such a reading of cultural globalization, and for our purposes child and youth culture specifically, would yield reductive conclusions. With the glocal as the focal point, a more nuanced view of global-local negotiations emerges in which the flows do not simply counter or copy one another but are each a set of multifaceted relations (inclusive of but not limited to gender, age, class, ethnicity, ecology and technology) that achieve transformative effects through a complex dialectic. The boundaries between spaces blur and from their negotiations arise glocal concepts that enrich both spaces.

Global-glocal imaginaries

Literature is a significant space from which to assess cultural shifts caused by socioeconomic and political processes related to globalization and it serves as a place wherein the network society can unfold and be represented as a glocal imagined community. The global-local dialectic also impacts upon the development of subjectivity, such that identity and the self take on global, local and glocal dimensions. Child and youth culture as a whole has been susceptible to the internationalization of trades and markets (Bradford et al. 2008), which have mainly been driven by trends in book, film and toy production in the US and the UK. New technologies have also led to innovative modes of storytelling that pivot around connectivity and reflect the increasing intersectionality of the world. Among these are “hypertextual” and multimodal fiction, web-based forums (such as fanfiction sites), e-books and interactive book apps and toys and, in the gaming world, MMORPGs or massively multi-player online role-playing games (the most famous is World of Warcraft). These types of stories span multiple spaces and split the sense of self so that subjectivity is developed and restructured along several planes at the same time, an experience that Giddens describes as “disembeddedness” (1990: 21).

Subjectivity is defined within the boundaries of the nation state but is also compelled to align with images representative of internationally shared values and qualities. Anchored on a sense of “sharedness” (Strauss and Quinn 1997), these global images are fluid and neutral even when they originate from a specific culture. But Stuart Hall concludes that the global-local dialectic is continuous, and that “what we usually call the global, far from being something which, in a systematic fashion, rolls over everything, creating similarity, in fact works through particularity, negotiates particular spaces, particular ethnicities, works through mobilizing particular identities” (1997: 62). Because of the economic dominance and cultural potency of Anglophone nations, images from many of their franchises, such as the Disney and Pixar films and the Harry Potter books, have come to represent global childhood and adolescence. The national meanings embedded within remain but are refined, and some even stripped away, in order to be relevant to a universal experience. But the last twenty years have witnessed counterhegemonic movements through local adaptations and glocal blends that, as the boundaries between source and destination are blurred and negotiated, reinvent the original and its copies. From these interchanges emerge glocal subjects that potentially enrich child and youth culture, literature and media on national and international levels. Hence, Stephens and McGillis argue for:

a criticism aware that its objects of attention are contingent with historically specific relations to place, history, politics, and aware that the local is now also the ‘glocal’, whereby pressures from globalization for institutional change and social adaptation encounter pressures to preserve local identity and customs. These tensions are especially apparent in sites of cultural diversity and economic inequality.

(2006: 367)

Countercultures can in turn become globalizing forces, as exemplified by the popularity of Japanese anime and manga, led by the development of Asian media markets in the 1990s. Manga and anime are both products and agents of globalization. Tezuka Osamu, hailed as “the Father of anime and manga”, combined techniques from Disney animation and ancient Japanese picture scrolls (Yoshida 2004) to create a unique graphic style able to narratively express the nation’s glocal position. Anime and manga are among the most important cultural exports of Japan and, like Disney cartoons, have been localized in many countries. In effect, these terms can also refer to visual narratives that have been inspired by the Japanese style and yet are stripped of the original national and cultural markers. When non-Japanese manga and anime (labeled “Original English-language”, “international” or “global”), such as Nickelodeon’s Avatar the Last Airbender (2005–2008) and the Canadian manga series Scott Pilgrim (2004–2010), are set beside their Japanese inspirations, it is evident that stylistic modifications had been made to support the themes, ideologies and genre boundaries of the producing nations. Anime and manga, then, are narrative mediums that represent shifts in the perception of childhood, subjectivity and culture from monolithic and stereotypical to glocal and boundless.

Glocalizing subjectivity

Readings that examine the effects of international connectivity on children’s texts need to consider whether or not these narratives can be analyzed from outside the framework of the nation state and national literatures, and what might be learned from the possibilities and problems that arise from taking multiple vantage points. Contemporary texts for young readers generally center on the infiltration of capitalism into developing spaces and the effects of modern technology, urbanization, commodification and consumerism on local environments and public and private histories (Bradford et al. 2008; McCallum 2009). The approaches these narratives take range from a binary logic to one that fosters integration. The former is based on a self-Other spectrum that advocates nationalism and segregation, while the latter promotes diversity, adaptation and hybridity often portrayed as a utopian multiculture or a glocal blend. As postcolonialism, multiculturalism and postmodernism are discourses concerned with heterogeneity, these have become the main tools through which these relationships are addressed (Stephens 2008; Gutierrez 2013; Eoyang 2007, 2012). Through these lenses, subjective agency emerges intersubjectively from the dialectic between the self and the impersonal systems that operate through it, mimic its functions, and ultimately fragment it.

The Australian picturebook Old Magic (Baillie and Wu 1996), for example, demonstrates the pressures children face when negotiating the global and local images that inform their lives. Omar and his kakek (Bahasa for grandfather) exemplify extreme and opposite reactions to the Western modernity of Australia, their new home country. Omar responds with an eager and indiscriminate assimilation. He scolds his grandfather for clinging to the “old magic” of Indonesia. When kakek, clad in turban, a sarong over wide trousers, and a jacket marked with a star and crescent, offers his grandson a spinning top that signifies his connection to their native land, Omar rejects it. His trendy baseball cap and football uniform and the skateboard and basketball he carries signify his preference for fast-paced modernity over memory and tradition. Di Wu’s blend of Chinese and Western illustration techniques gives a foreign, dreamy cast to the Australian habitus. The effect makes Omar feel as unanchored to the landscape as his grandfather even though his appearance locates him in Western culture.

His kakek’s despair prompts Omar to remember the night markets, shadow puppets and provincial tranquility of Indonesia in light of the availability of TV, pizza and computer games. The neutrality of modern youth culture pales in comparison to the local color of his memories. Omar realizes that the answer is not in forsaking one over the other, as that would lead to homogenization without depth or cultural isolation, but to develop an identity from within a balanced dialogue. He creates a dragon kite with Western materials (including wire, ribbons and table tennis balls) that “would never be seen in a jungle village…but perhaps they would allow the magic to work here” as an expression of glocal innovation. Omar invites his kakek to fly the kite with him, whose reply “Let’s swallow the sun” affirms the ability of children and youth to blend and empower their global and local affiliations. The isomorphism of their bodies as they “played the great kite” across the sky underscores the connectedness they achieved. That Omar still wears his headphones while his kakek remains in traditional clothing visualizes the multiple flows that enrich their interrelation and the unifying effect of glocalization.

Philip Reeve’s Hungry Cities Chronicles (2001–2006), although from outside the focused countries of this collection, is worth a critical look for its representations of the changing complexities of the network society and the impact of global-local and West-East exchanges on subjectivities. Globalizing processes and their emergent dichotomies are embodied in the tensions between mobilized and static cities. The relationships between the cities are metonymic of the evolution of social formations in response to contradictory pressures towards the preservation of the nation state and towards decentered internationalism. Because of a geological cataclysm caused by a devastating war between the American Empire and Greater China, cities west of Eurasia become “Traction Cities” that trade with, but more often prey upon, one another in order to survive in a world with depleted natural resources, while the Indian sub-continent and China continue to be separate and static. Reeve’s cities are cyborgian entities that arose from the blended concept “Municipal Darwinism”. Their technological ecosystems caution readers against the increasing interdependency of people and processes, with the endless mobility of the “hungry cities” forming homologies with deterritorialized global market and capitalist models of the USA and Britain (McCallum 2009). In Mortal Engines, the first book in the quintet, the traction city London intends to breach the Shield Wall that protects the “anti-tractionist” cities with ...