ABSTRACT

This chapter anchors its overview of research regarding globalization and children's literature on the development of subjectivity from within a global network society in order to illuminate the critical exchanges between hegemonic/West and non-hegemonic/non-West spaces in the construction and transformation of representations of childhood and adolescence. Globalization is historically a multidimensional and polycentric process that comprises "multiple intentionalities and criss-crossing projects on the part of many agents". Literature is a significant space from which to assess cultural shifts caused by socioeconomic and political processes related to globalization and it serves as a place wherein the network society can unfold and be represented as a glocal imagined community. The global-local dialectic also impacts upon the development of subjectivity, such that identity and the self take on global, local and glocal dimensions. South African habitus as a glocalized space is established when the Ugly Duckling is taken in by an African farmer and his donkey.