Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications ed. by John Stephens (review)

Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film, edited by John Stephens, makes a valuable and timely contribution to international children’s literature criticism in an increasingly globalizing world. Bringing together eleven essays on children’s literature and film in nine countries across Asia, this collection increases the visibility of conventionally underrepresented Asian children’s literature (and literary criticism) in the English-speaking world. The essayists’ contributions provide transcultural perspectives that challenge the dominion of Western epistemology in international children’s literature studies. Ultimately, Stephens’ collection encourages open dialogue between East and West on a vexed concern of children’s literature: the concept of subjectivity.

In his Introduction on “The Politics of Identity,” Stephens argues that the academic discourse on subjectivity in children’s literature studies has been shaped and naturalized by a few studies on this topic. In particular, Stephens cites Robyn McCallum’s definition of subjectivity in Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction (1999), which has influenced subsequent criticism. In that book, McCallum wrote that “subjectivity is an individual’s sense of a personal identity as a subject—in the sense of being subject to some measure of external coercion—and as an agent—that is, being capable of conscious and deliberate thought and action” (qtd. in Stephens 2). Such a Western conceptualization of subjectivity, Stephen suggests, does not simply transfer to non-European cultural narratives. Stephen argues that imposing Western theories onto Eastern literary criticism reinforces Eurocentrism and Western hegemony. The epistemological incomparability between East and West suggested by Stephens thus opens up a space for cross-cultural dialogue and becomes the founding premise here.

The contributors therefore address the similarities and differences between versions of subjectivity in East and West and question whether concepts of subjectivity are “global, local, or glocal” (Stephens 5). Following Stephens’ opening salvo, Anna Katrina Gutierrez attempts to synthesize the global and local into a middle ground—the glocal—as “collaborative conceptual blending” (21). By examining variants of the Otherworldly Maiden tale from East and West, Gutierrez argues that this global tale type in which an otherworldly maiden metamorphoses into an earthly wife represents a model of the glocal heterotopia as a composite of spaces, such as the human and divine, East and West, and local and global. For Gutierrez, glocal subjectivity is formed through the negotiation and balance between elements within the glocal heterotopia.

Unlike Gutierrez’s chapter, which aims at formulating a theory of glocal subjectivity transgressing national boundaries, the remainder of the collection emphasizes culturally and historically specific national contexts instead of a generalized global. Lifang Li, for example, studies the influences of sociopolitical movements on child subjectivity in China from the early twentieth century to the present; Suh Shan Chen and Ming Cherng Duh examine several works by an eminent Taiwanese fiction writer, Huang Chun-ming, and characterize the postcolonial condition of Taiwanese subjectivity as “fluid, contingent, and ever-changing” (211).

The contingency and relationality of subjectivity is a central theme in essays by Miyuki Hisaoka, Sung-Ae Lee, Christie Barber, and Mio Bryce. Barber investigates the construction of masculinities in two Japanese adolescent films, Go and Blue Spring, and argues that both films represent masculine subjectivity as dependent upon context and relationships. The abjected Korean Japanese protagonist of Go develops his subjective agency in relation to his father and a lover who challenges Japanese hegemonic masculinity, whereas the low-achieving male high school students in Blue Spring take part in a self-destructive, violent competition that leads to one boy’s suicide; Barber looks at how both films represent intersubjectivity and critique Japanese society’s inability to accommodate nonhegemonic masculinities.

While the collection’s essays represent diverse national cultures and histories in Asia, many of them also share the idea of subjectivity as contingent and position it in opposition to Western subjectivity. In “All Is Relative, Nothing Is Reliable,” her study on Japanese manga, Bryce explains that the Western perspective defines subjectivity as a...