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Harmony, Home and Anthropomorphism: Representation of Minority Nationalities in Contemporary Chinese Ethnic Children’s Literature

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, Chinese ethnic cultures have balanced precariously between a passion for authentically-defined ecology in ethnic territories and a nationwide obsession with economic development, and this affects how ethnicity is represented in Chinese children’s literature. Within a context of growing homogeneity and vanishing minority cultures, this essay investigates contemporary Chinese ethnic animal literature for young adults through the lens of subalternity. Examining key concepts of harmony, home and anthropomorphism facilitates an understanding of how ethnicity and animality are translated into each other in selected children’s stories. A close reading and analysis of the texts reveals how the representation of Chinese ethnicity works through animals on one hand, and ethnic adolescents on the other, and how the ethnic predicament is accentuated by issues of identity, spaces and the assimilationist agenda.

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Correspondence to Chengcheng You.

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Dr. Chengcheng You is a lecturer at the School of Translation, Jinan University, Zhuhai, China. Her recent publications include two book chapters in New Directions in Children’s Gothic (2017) and Child Governance and Autonomy in Children’s Literature (2017) and a forthcoming article “Liminal Encounters: Ethics of Anthropomorphism in the poetry of Levertov, Szymborska, and Fulton” in Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal.

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You, C. Harmony, Home and Anthropomorphism: Representation of Minority Nationalities in Contemporary Chinese Ethnic Children’s Literature. Child Lit Educ 49, 499–515 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9318-6

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