ABSTRACT

Children develop and are socialized according to the social conventions and cultural practices of the society they belong to, so it is inevitable that literary works produced for young audiences will represent explicitly or implicitly those conventions and practices, and be shaped by the ideologies of self and society which inform them. As a child's subjectivity unfolds over time, it will do so in participation with a cultural community (which is itself subject to flux and change), and hence whatever we might think of as “subjectivity” will take many forms. Sakai Naoki has pointed out that “one cannot perceive cultural difference unless as an already determinate object of description” (1997, 121), and this offers a cue to consider how notions about subjectivity can be discerned. According to James et al., a consideration of the dichotomy of identity and difference entails “a process of establishing identity-with and difference-from as a continuous issue of self and status definition and redefinition” (1998, 202). They argue that this distinction is more delicate than the earlier binary between self and other, which “depended on a strong sense of interiority and identity and postulated a locatedness and constancy for categorical systems that enabled the fixity of the other” (202). Identity-with and difference-from are pivotal concepts in children's picture books, and are discernible both within a particular culture and in comparison between cultures. In this chapter, I explore how subjectivity is represented in Japanese picture books and draw some comparisons with thematically parallel Australian picture books. Differing understandings of subjectivity can be observed in the representations of performativity and cooperation.