ABSTRACT
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.
