Notions Of Childhood Research Articles

Children through the Looking Glass

In recent decades social scientists have taken a renewed interest in Western conceptions of the child, revealing often contradictory notions of children as either lacking or capable, innocent or knowing, vulnerable or dangerous. The fine-art photograph offers visual anthropology a way to explore these contradictions and shifts in attitude. This essay addresses the question through the changing representations of children in 19th- and 20th-century art photography. Reaching back to the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, it examines images of children by Lewis Hine, Edward Weston, Helen Levitt, Sally Mann, Anthony Goicolea, and the Russian collective, AES + F, arguing that in these photographs the child has increasingly been perceived as mysterious and threatening to adult ideas of sexual and social order. The essay concludes with the case of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who among all the noted photographers of children was the only one who brought a child’s perspective to the portrayal of childhood experience. If contemporary photographers have persisted in conveying disturbing and idealized notions of childhood, it may require another Lartigue to restore the balance.

Transitioning from primary-grade classrooms to infant/toddler rooms: early childhood preservice teachers’ growth and challenges

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explores how a group of preservice teachers, all of whom had been well prepared to become primary-grade teachers, made a transition into infant/toddler group care settings. The authors used the teachers’ daily journal entries, individual interview, document analysis (course syllabus, weekly planning sheets), and weekly team planning meetings as data sources. Findings revealed that the teachers initially struggled to work with the infants/toddlers and that their long-held notions of children, teaching, and learning were challenged. Yet, their daily work with the children over 15 weeks of practicum helped them deepen and broaden, and become more skillful and insightful of early childhood education, which the teachers found applicable to primary-grade teaching.

War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten

Reviewed by: War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten Elizabeth N. Goodenough War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars. Edited by Mischa Honeck and James Marten. Cambridge, UK, and Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, 2019. x + 199 pp. Cloth $99.99. Anthropologist Pamela Reynolds declared in 2008 that narratives of children’s experiences in war “have barely entered the archive” (Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War, eds. Goodenough and Immel). In their ground-breaking volume, Honeck and Marten seek to supply missing research around a crucial paradox: How could adults barely a century ago seek to protect children while mobilizing them for political sacrifice? War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars compiles accounts of children’s crises locally, nationally, and across borders against the backdrop of the military buildup and scarring aftermath of two world wars. From Manchuria to Poland to Turkey to the American Midwest, the global reach of these essays reminds us of the present. The collection includes government reports, news articles, school curricula, and Holocaust drawings, all offering fresh evidence of the indoctrination and recruitment of children during times of war. Together these fourteen chapters skillfully conjure up and dissect what growing up felt like during 1914–45, a period Winston Churchill called “another Thirty Years War” (3). The compelling introduction, “More than Victims: Framing the History of Modern Childhood and War,” stakes out topics that historians must address. The co-editors establish “five bodies of scholarship,” including Dominic Sachsenmaier’s “global history trend,” the “total war” paradigm, and children as “the true missing link” for understanding modern warfare (7–10). Shedding light on the complexity of youthful attitudes and socialization, they emphasize diversity in the “intergenerational tugs-of-war” (16) ranging from peace pedagogy to war toys. Whether as eyewitnesses, future defenders, or ideal constructs over which wars are fought, boys and girls portrayed in this book will unsettle the reader’s notions of childhood. Penny Dreadfuls in World War I Germany and patriotic handicrafts from Republican to Communist China promote propaganda through leisure on the home front as well as skills on the battlefield. Examining families and individual children, this book avoids fictional formulations and sociological abstraction. How could public horror also spark happy memories and such “primitive excitement” (11), as Anna Freud defined? [End Page 330] Part I smartly addresses transnational themes alongside ethical questions. The introduction to part I, “Inspiring and Mobilizing,” mentions age and culture-specific responses to wartime involvement of youth. For example, the contention that children should be children (whatever that means) competed with arguments for defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II. Learning to shoot at age eleven gained ascendancy when boys were placed between Home Guard units and an advancing enemy. Though consensus was never reached in this neutral nation, Swedish girls joined in as air surveillance personnel. How the making of these “model citizens” influenced their adulthoods remains a living question. How do we integrate personal details with geopolitical rivalries and genocides? Comparing youth movements and early reading, including alphabet books from the USSR and US during World War II, one must consider how “children were reinventing the meaning of childhood for themselves and the societies they inhabited” (11). The final essay of part I, Honeck’s “Good Soldiers All? Democracy and Discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941–1945” describes youth fervor, setting the stage for part II, “Adapting and Surviving.” Part II thus surveys a dialectic—how adult decision-makers organized and then reacted to the mobilized young. The “alternative sources, produced by children rather than for or about them” (171) expand on ways this next generation altered the nature of war. Giving voice—or space—for “Drawing the Great War” in France, Germany, and Russia illuminates children’s pivotal, first-time role in public life. Youthful enthusiasm confronting conventional ideals acquired agency in “the trope of the patriotic child” (15). Statistics and interviews dramatize childhood as a “relational category,” one played out as sensitive innocents “eagerly sought to participate in—or resignedly submitted to participating in” (7)—the...

Onde estão as crianças que estavam aqui? – Antropologia com crianças em instituições

O trabalho procurou colocar no centro dos estudos a experiência de crianças que residem temporariamente em instituições especializadas em acolher. Objetivou-se alcançar noções de criança e família, noções de vida e de cuidado, no contato com crianças e adolescentes acolhidos em instituições de proteção social. Também foi de interesse do trabalho, investir no aprofundamento da prática etnográfica e da escuta de narrativas com crianças. Entre os fios que tecem o debate estão os estudos antropológicos sobre crianças e as práticas especializadas que fundamentam os serviços de atenção à crianças, adolescentes e famílias, no campo da saúde e da assistência social, no Brasil. Trata-se de um campo que se constitui de contextos etnográficos, a partir dos quais se articulam redes e cruzamentos de práticas, mediações, conexões que não podem ser restringidas a ideia de uma delimitação espacial, posto que formam circuitos maleáveis e transitórios.

Men teaching young children: “you can never be too sure what their intentions might be”

ABSTRACTThe teaching of young children (aged between 5 and 9) or Foundation Phase (FP) as it is known in South Africa, is highly gendered and is labeled a ‘woman’s’ job. Globally there have been calls to lessen the gender disparity within the profession by increasing the participation of men. However, apprehensions about men teaching young children can counteract such efforts. In this paper we highlight the concerns emanating from a group of male and female South African primary school teachers about men teaching young children. We focus on a dominant discourse employed by the teachers that invokes essentialist notions of men as violent sexual predators, and simultaneously reinforces notions of children as vulnerable and in need of protection from men. These notions of men conjured up feelings of apprehension amongst the teachers about men as FP teachers. South Africa’s high levels of male sexual violence had especially compelled them to exercise caution when ratifying men as FP teachers. Based on these findings we argue that in order to increase men’s participation as FP teachers, there is need to address the essentialist and homogenising versions of masculinity whilst promoting alternative versions of men and masculinity by shifting away from the reproduction of men as sexual predators.

‘Childness’: An Alternative Approach to the Archaeology of Childhood through Cemetery Studies

Notions of childhood in colonial Australia were informed by a variety of social contexts that varied across time and space and were given material expression in the memorialization of children’s burials. Using data drawn from two studies of nineteenth-century cemeteries in rural South Australia, in this paper, we suggest an alternative way to understand children archaeologically that avoids the trap of essentialism: the notion of ‘childness’. Childness is defined as the multiple conceptions of being, and being labeled, a child. The concept of being a child may be instantiated in different ways according to particular social, cultural, chronological, and religious contexts; childness is the measure of this variation. In Western historical settings, the most likely causes for such variation are the social processes of class and status via the closely associated ideologies of gentility and respectability and their attendant expectations around labor, as well as the shifts they represent in the social ideology of the family. Exploring childness, rather than children, provides an alternative way to approach the histories of contemporary Western understandings of childhood, including when particular types of childhood began and ended, and according to what criteria in different contexts, as well as how boundaries between child and adult were continually being established and re-negotiated.

Molding Nineteenth-century Girls in the Cape Colony into Respectable Christian Women

S. E. Duff. 2015. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.In Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhoods, 1860–1895 (hereafter Changing Childhoods), S. E. Duff explores shifting notions of childhood and, more specifically, the emergence of new ideas about white childhood in the Cape Colony, South Africa, during the late nineteenth century by examining various efforts to convert and educate children, especially poor white children, and improve their welfare. As indicated in the title, Changing Childhoods draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of children who existed alongside each other in the Cape Colony and how they were shaped by a variety of factors, including religion, location, class, race, and gender. While many histories of childhood elide the experiences of boys and girls, Duff pays careful attention to the different constructions of girlhood and boyhood and how gender shaped the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Throughout the book, girls appear not as passive observers but as complex agents shaping and participating in broader social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the Cape.

Mothers’ perception on the notion of childhood embedded in their child-caring experiences

Mothers’ perception on the notion of childhood embedded in their child-caring experiences

“Agent of Revolutionary Thought”: Bambara and Black Girlhood for a Poetics of Being and Becoming Human

In “Gorilla, My Love,” Toni Cade Bambara’s Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon’s utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel’s unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present.

Infância, passagens para um flâneur aprendiz

Este estudo de natureza teórica tem por objetivo analisar as imagens bejaminianas do flâneur e da infância, aproximando-as, para refletir sobre a ideia de um flâneur aprendiz como uma figura que conserva viva em sua percepção do mundo uma sensibilidade que recusa o discurso linear, o que o leva para o caminho indireto na relação com os objetos cognoscíveis. Desses desvios emerge a aura das coisas, da qual pode-se ter a experiência possível com o moderno; a sensibilidade da criança como equivalente à de um flâneur; e uma compreensão sobre a cultura da criança, sendo constituída, em parte, dos restos da história, à margem da cultura adulta, em outra, pelos desvios originado pela ação da criança em seu protagonismo. O protagonismo da criança e o modo desviante como ela se aproxima das coisas do mundo a dotam das mesmas habilidades do flâneur, segundo as possibilidades da criança, os que nos leva a ideia do flâneur aprendiz. Em termos de método, o limiar formado pela aproximação e jogo de imagens entre essas duas figuras têm o potencial de ampliar a compreensão e a importância tanto da imagem do flâneur como da noção de infância na obra de Walter Benjamin.

Sociocultural constructs of children and childhood

Interpretations of the concepts of children and childhood have significantly changed over the past centuries. In the eighteenth century childhood was ascribed a status of a separate phase of human life in which human beings learn, grow and develop. Research conducted within the developmental psychology paradigm based on the notion of childhood’s ‘naturalness’ and on the necessity and normality of development has contributed to the emergence of a universal vision of the child and childhood. This vision has been challenged by the research conducted within the sociocultural paradigm in which childhood, understood as a social construction, is neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies. We focused our attention on the sociocultural interpretations of the concepts of children and childhood. Our aim is, therefore, to show the ways in which children and childhood are understood in a sociocultural perspective. In the introductory part of the paper we briefly describe a universal vision of child development as well as the criticism it met from the supporters of the social childhood studies. In the main part of the article we focus our attention on the issue of social constructing of children and childhood. Sociocultural approach to childhood reveals a multitude and diversity of images of children and childhood constructed by adults in a variety of places, contexts and social spaces.

Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film by Robyn McCallum

Reviewed by: Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film by Robyn McCallum Dr. Haifeng Hui (bio) Robyn McCallum. Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Robyn McCallum’s monograph Screen Adaptations and the Politics of Childhood: Transforming Children’s Literature into Film is an exciting contribution to the area of adaptation studies. Although, as McCallum notes in her introduction, “texts produced for children and teenagers are late to arrive to the ballroom of film and adaptation studies” (3), the twenty-first century nevertheless has witnessed an increasing number of excellent studies of film adaptations of children’s literature. To this end, McCallum’s book productively calls attention to how film adaptations variously remain faithful to, distort, or resist the themes and underpinnings of both classic and lesser-known works of children’s literature. The focus of her book, then, is how key elements of ideology, such as gender politics, culture wars, and notions of childhood, migrate to the new medium of film and undergo changes that are imposed by different social factors such as dominant “Hollywood aesthetic” and national identity. The book’s opening chapter recounts the historical development of adaptation studies by calling attention to the pioneering works of Linda Hutcheon, Brian McFarlane, Robert Stam, Thomas Leitch, James Naremore, and other scholars. It serves as an illuminating introduction for any reader who wants to explore adaptation studies in general and film adaptations in particular. Following the trend toward cultural and ideological contexts of adaptation away from fidelity debates, as proposed by the above scholars, McCallum’s interests encompass the way concepts of childhood are constructed and mediated in the new media and the “signifying practices through which viewers and readers [End Page 305] are positioned” (22). The following chapters are organized around key literary and film genres: classic texts, carnivalesque texts, radically intertextual and/or experimental texts, fantasy and magic realism, and cross-cultural adaptations. They explore the subtleties of film adaptation of children’s literature in its rich historical, social, and especially political contexts. McCallum’s second chapter examines film adaptations of three classic novels that span the first two golden ages of children’s literature: Treasure Island and Chronicles of Narnia. Citing Marah Gubar’s contention that Treasure Island can be read as an anti-adventure and anti-imperialist text, McCallum focuses on the ambivalences and ambiguities within Stevenson’s novel and how they are dealt with in various film adaptations, such as the 1972 Treasure Island (directed by John Hough and Andrew White), the 1999 Treasure Island (directed by Peter Rowe), and the 2011 television series Treasure Island (directed by Steve Barron). In Stevenson’s novel, there is a double-voice between the retrospective, older and wiser narrator Jim and the experiencing focalizer Jim (more naïve), which creates a central ambivalence. Besides, the “gentleman/pirate” hierarchy remains ambiguous and is finally inverted. Most of the film versions are rather conservative, choosing to oversimplify “the classist, imperialist and anti-imperialist metanarratives underpinning that story”(48), but some have kept and even highlighted the complexities and ambiguities of the novel, such as the 2011 Baron version and the 2011 BBC production. Also featuring children protagonists displaced into an “adult” world where they must take on adult roles, the Narnia series poses very different challenges to directors inasmuch the novels are often under-plotted and under-characterized, making it difficult to conform to film audience’s expectations of large-scale spectacular and epic aesthetic. Besides, the novels are metafictive in that the Narnia world and the frame fictional “real” world have different degrees of “reality,” which draws the readers’/audience’s attention to their status as fiction and artifice. The novels are also rich in their historical meanings, alluding to the Cold War context of a post–World War II Britain. However, the Disney film series adaptations directed by Andrew Adamson are aimed more at commercial success and are live-action-oriented and blockbuster in style. Adamson adds long action sequences and plots to “pad-out” the thin narrative, diluting what McCallum calls “Lewis’ pervasive and unquestioning sense of morality and allegorical emphasis...

Affectedness, empowerment and norm contestation – children and young people as social agents in international politics

ABSTRACTIn my contribution to this collection, I aim to expose how the growing transnationalisation of groups of affected persons – in this case children and young people – has brought to the fore normative contradictions and tensions built into the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. More specifically, I will show how the universal notion of children’s rights and a strong global consensus on the ‘scourge’ of child labour has been challenged through the empowerment of affected persons – in this case child workers. Building on critical constructivist thinking on norms, my core argument is that the increasing access of affected persons’ organisations (APOs) to international organisations and high-level events brings with it an increase in norm contestation. Rather than creating new normative contestations, I will show in my analysis, the inclusion of the most affected brings to light normative inconsistencies and ambiguities that have been potentially ingrained in international treaties but hitherto successfully suppressed by powerful norm advocates. The articulation of subversive perspectives on child labour by working children and young people, I will conclude, results in normative tensions and collisions and a reconsideration of seemingly universal values previously taken for granted.

Infância e limiar em Walter Benjamin

Este estudo de natureza teórica busca evidenciar aspectos da infância presentes na obra de Benjamin, a partir da ideia de limiar. Encontramo-nos com ela em lugares do pensamento onde o filósofo se detém sobre a importância das zonas limiares e dos locais de passagens para uma experiência com o moderno. Tais lugares do pensamento sinalizam e indicam marcas que contribuem para conferir à infância sua modernidade, bem como abrem caminho para pensar os sentidos da infância no tempo presente. Nossa hipótese é de que a ideia de infância é atravessada por núcleos conceituais e imagéticos importantes na obra do autor, como força mobilizadora, tanto desses conceitos como da ideia de infância. Foram encontrados sinais de um pensamento que brinca com as noções constituintes da imagem da infância da qual fala o autor. É justamente esse "brincar filosófico" o que aproxima a noção benjaminiana de infância de ideias densas e conceitos importantes, no contexto de suas reflexões, como a noção de limiar.

Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur

Reviewed by: Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur Sonya F. Zabala (bio) Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur. California: Stanford University Press, 2017. Digital ISBN: 9781503603110. 304 pages. $65. Zur's Figuring Korean Futures is a study of the emergence and the development of children's literature in postmodern era of Korea, and it explores how notions of childhood became a symbolic meaning of Korean nationalism. The book begins with a central question: How did a specific, modern form of children's literature emerge in Korea and how did this emergence impact the consciousness of people who were negotiating contested spaces between a Japanese military occupation and a Western intellectual imperialism, and an independent national Korean identity. In looking at the child as a symbol for Korean nationalism and childhood as a social construct, Zur discusses how the concept of the child moved from the periphery to the centrality of Korean culture, which captured a point in time when children became visible, and intellectually and affectively distinct from adults. From a critical perspective, Zur's work offers an analysis of the social, political, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain children's literature in postcolonial Korea. Zur traces pre-European contact ideology and the literary artifacts of tongsim—the natural, unadulterated "child-heart," (pp. 48–98) to its first textual and visual production in children's periodicals in colonial Korea. Zur argues that children's literature written at the height of modernity emerged while under Japanese occupation beginning at the end of the Korean dynasty in 1910 and lasting until 1945 at the end of World War II. Adult authors during this time period celebrated the child as a protagonist for the future. This time period in Korea prompted the production of a children's literature, and transcribed visual and textual images that centered around past, present, and potential futures. Zur further argues that children's literature in modern Korea was affected by East and West intellectualism, and educational and psychological discourses more generally. The first three chapters explore how notions of childhood in this genre became symbolic for Korean nationalism. Zur presents two frameworks of childhood: the politics and aesthetics of youth and the emergence of stylized text and images shaping the development of children's periodicals. First, the aesthetics of youth is explained as the child entering a different world from that of adults all together. The concept of tongsim (child-heart) was thought to be innocent and pure, a heart that was considered a space of "privilege" which was affectively closer to nature than "acculturated [End Page 204] adults" (p. 6). Second, the politically and ideologically motivated bond between child and nature as opposed to overt political messages and symbols represented a "discursive shift" (p. 49) in children's literature creating the conditions for tongsim. Here, the concept of tongsim positioned youth as central agents for nationalist and future identity against a Japanese military occupation, and alongside child-friendly text and images. For example, images of "playing soldier" captures a 6-year-old boy holding a rifle and at war with a chicken (p. 131). The image is followed by the words of its poem, "He comes after the chicken,/Toy rifle aimed high,/In hot pursuit of his enemy" (p. 132), reflecting an aspirational childhood toward adulthood and simultaneous wartime sentiment. The following two chapters illustrate the use of literature to create a pro-Japanese imperial and assimilationist identity. Chapter 4 begins with an examination of a proletarian-styled thought and aesthetic sought to capture the imagination of the oppressed. Zur posits, however, that socialist magazines failed to capture the child-heart and the intellectual and emotional developmental capacities of children. Chapter 5 highlights the militaristic rhetoric at the height of Japanese imperial policies. This rhetoric celebrated war along with attempts to eradicate Korean language and culture. For example, Korean children were forced to assume Japanese names and Japanese was made the official language of instruction. Wartime rhetoric, illustrations, and poetry also predisposed Korean children to see themselves as part of the greater Japanese empire and a more modern Korea. The final...

How the Reader Matters. Autobiographies of Childhood for Young Readers

In the 1990s, autobiographies of childhood were one of the most importantpublishing trends. These autobiographies challenge the Romantic notionof childhood, thus contributing to the contemporary societal debate aboutchildren and childhood in crisis. Taking into consideration that ideas aboutchildren and childhood are at the heart of children’s literature, it is remarkable that autobiographies of childhood for young readers go unnoticed in the discussion.

Contemporary Notions of Childhood and the Function of Children’s Media in Palestine

Abstract This paper maps out constructions of childhood as reflected in debates about the provision children’s media and various screen-based initiatives in the West Bank. It identifies key issues affecting children’s media in Palestine, through an analysis of the changing discourses of childhood in Palestinian society and the ways in which these discourses are articulated in academic and public debates, and in strategies for children’s screen media. Analysis and findings are based on fieldwork undertaken in April and May 2014; this included participant observation and interviews with stakeholders in the children’s cultural sector in the West Bank cities of Ramallah and Nablus. In this paper, I conclude that protectionist discourses based on western Romantic and Lockean constructions of childhood dominate discussion on childhood and the media, and hence children’s television space is ‘occupied’ by adults (parents and producers). Children are constructed as vulnerable and passive victims of their society and are not credited with possessing the tools to play an active role in their own learning.

Exploring connections between the social construction of the child and health practices

This article seeks to correlate the different social meanings attributed to children with health actions directed toward this group starting in nineteenth-century Brazil. The study reviews the literature based on the social concept of "being a child" and its correlation with policies and practices in public health and child care, focusing on actions undertaken within the framework of primary health care. Three different conceptions of the meaning of "child" were identified. The interrelations between transformations in the social construction of the notion of child were investigated, along with the different political and technological proposals involving children in Brazil, indicating the contemporary challenge of developing care technologies that will strengthen children with regard to rights.

Transgender young people’s narratives of intimacy and sexual health: implications for sexuality education

Sexuality education as pedagogy is often fraught by the perceived requirement to balance the informational needs of young people with an investment in notions of childhood ‘innocence’. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than in sexuality education that seeks to be inclusive of transgender young people, often resulting in the failure of such education to address the needs of such students. In an attempt at addressing the relative dearth of information about what transgender young people would like to see covered in sexuality education, in this paper we explore transgender young people’s accounts of intimacy and sexual health and consider what this means for school-based sexuality education. To do this, we analyse discussions of intimacy from the perspectives of transgender young people as narrated in a sample of YouTube videos. We conclude by advocating for an approach to sexuality education that largely eschews the gendering of body parts and gametes, and which instead focuses on function, so as to not only address the needs of transgender young people (who may find normative discussions of genitals distressing), but to also provide cisgender young people with a more inclusive understanding of their own and other people’s bodies and desires.

The Polemics of Real and Imagined Childhood(s) in India

This essay attempts to map historical, literary and social constructions of childhood in India and to explore ways in which these differ from Western-dominated, globalised attitudes to childhood. Evidence about Indian childhood is drawn from across a narrative spectrum including children's books and films and some adult writing and media. Notions of childhood are different within and across the cultures of the world; while there is no ‘correct’ version of childhood, many have common features and sometimes the influences of one culture can be strongly felt in another. In India, for example, a dominant construction of childhood was imported through Western education. 1 After Independence (1947), Indian children's literature in English became caught up in the mass postcolonial project of nation-building. As part of becoming emancipated from colonial rule, a dominant image of the child in fiction based on Western childhood had to be replaced by one that is hybrid and multicultural. This construction of Indian childhood is now itself being buffeted by forces of cultural homogenisation. 2