Power Relations in Creating and Distributing Official Knowledge in Children’s Literature: Historical Picture of Taiwan

Abstract

With a specific focus on power relations in creating and distributing knowledge in society, this study examines the government‐published children’s series Historical Picture of Taiwan produced in Taiwan in the Martial Law era (1949–1987) to uncover ideological assumptions and persuasions permeating both linguistic and visual representations of the history of Taiwan. Drawing on the sociology of school knowledge and critical theories of ideology (Althusser, 1986; Hollindale, 1992), hegemony (Gramsci, 1988), and selective tradition (Williams, 1989), the research investigates the relations between literary representations and contemporary socioeconomic, cultural, and political circumstances. Apple’s (1990) concept of relational analysis is adopted with the analytic methods of constant comparative analysis (Butler‐Kisber, 2010) and ideological analytical approach (Serafini, 2010) to relationally compare and analyze both written texts and images and to relate them to sociohistorical and cultural changes in society.