AustLit

'Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children's literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children's books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose's rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children's literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children's texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.' (Source: Author's abstract)

'Popular film texts are powerful means by which Western societies construct, maintain, protect and challenge concepts of childhood and youth-hood. As a context where audiences learn about the self, their culture, and their place within it, popular film is understood here as pedagogic, that is, as a space where key lessons about the formation of subjecthood might take place, and at what costs. This article takes into account scholarship on popular culture as pedagogy, challenging narrow notions of popular film as a simple transmission of knowledge. Focused on how pedagogies might be at work, this article explores the use of humour, repetition, otherness, becoming and sentimentality within a selection of Australian films, and how they orientate audiences towards knowing the youth subject in particular ways. Questions of generation and how it is constructed as a commonsense battle between ‘young’ and ‘old’ are considered through the coming-of-age films, The Rage in Placid Lake (2003), Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger (2008), Crackers (1998) and Spider & Rose (1994).'

Source: Author's abstract.