Part of
Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults: Moving storiesEdited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 170–192
Edited by Karen Coats and Gretchen Papazian
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 13] 2023
► pp. 170–192
Chapter 8The affective construction of Chinese child citizenship in Little Friend, 1945–1949
After the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese society underwent a transition in imagining the nation and its citizenry. The visual and textual narratives in the long-running children’s periodical Little Friend highlight these changes as its post-war content features affective mechanisms to enlist children in a labor-oriented proletarian citizenship that emphasizes collectivism. Drawing on affect’s stickiness and retrospective way of working (Ahmed), the chapter details Little Friend’s affective crafting of a Chinese child citizenship through the periodical’s representations of laboring and disciplined child bodies, as well as its geographical discourses. This crafting, the chapter argues, served as a means to encourage children’s empathetic identification with the anticipated citizenship and the imagined nation during the late Republican period.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The history of Little Friend
- A visually formulated promise in the physical labor
- Geographical empathy
- Conclusion
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Notes -
References
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