"Saya Anak Malaysia: Responses to Local and Global Issues in Malaysian Picturebooks" 

Global publication trends of children's literature in the last two decades of the twenty-first century have indicated a clear recognition of the role of children’s literature as a tool for empowerment, and as a means of providing children with a voice for the expression of self-definition and agency. The scholarship of contemporary childhood studies and youth literature reflects a similar impetus (Stephens 2013, Beauvais 2015, and Seelinger Trites 2018), all of which emphasize subjectivity, agency, and autonomy as prominent themes. In line with the view that young people should be guided to understand and appreciate their roles as active global citizens to deal with the numerous challenges of the future as stated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the need to expose young people to the 17 SDGs is essential. To facilitate this, children’s literature and its many virtues can be harnessed to create a strong awareness of sustainability, health, and social issues, topics that are readily present in a diverse range of children’s picturebooks from Malaysia. Using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theories from literary, gender, folklore, as well as cultural studies to analyse selected Malaysian children’s picturebooks, this paper will demonstrate how Malaysian youth literature can be used to engage children in discussions of sustainability, health, and social issues. The textual analysis will revolve around four specific SDGs, namely SDG 3 (good health and well-being), SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 15 (life on land), and SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions), as found in the following books: Kimberly Lee and Liyana Taff's What If? (2020), Emila Yusof’s My Mother’s Kitchen (2012) and Legendary Princesses of Malaysia (2017), Kimberly Lee’s Boys Don’t Fry (2023), Dendangan Hep et al.’s Why Can't We Take More? (2023), Ammi’s Guardian of the Hornbills (2024) and The Music of Inner Land (2024), Jainal Amambing’s Longhouse Days (2011), and Awang Fadilah’s Land Below the Wind (2011).

Keywords: climate action; gender equality; health and well-being; cultural diversity; Malaysian children’s literature; sustainability.

Sharifah Aishah Osman is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she teaches courses on Youth Literature and Nineteenth-century British Literature. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Boston University, U.S.A. Her areas of expertise are Children’s and Young Adult Literature in Malaysia, and Nineteenth-century British Literature. She also has research interests in women’s writings, feminist youth literature, and folklore studies. Her recent publications have appeared in The Asian Family in Literature and Film: South Asia, Southeast Asia and Asian Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies (Routledge 2024), Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, and Southeast Asian Review of English (SARE). She is co-editor of The Asian Family in Literature and Film, Volumes 1 and 2 (Palgrave Macmillan 2024, with Bernard Wilson), The Principal Girl: Feminist Tales from Asia (Gerakbudaya 2019) and The Principal Girl Redux (Gerakbudaya 2023, with Tutu Dutta). She is currently working on two projects: an academic monograph on feminist folktales and folk tale adaptations in Malaysian youth literature, and a research project on sustainability, health, and social issues in Malaysian children’s literature.

"Encounters with Otherness: The Picture Books of Baek Heena"

In 2020, the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award went to South Korean picture book artist, Baek Heena, only the second author from an Asian country to win this award. Including her first book, Cloud Bread (published in 2004), she has produced 14 picture books and some of these have been translated into one or more of at least 11 languages. Circulation through translation can be very uneven – for example, Baek’s books are widely available in Spanish but at present only three are available in English, and not the most recent. However, while I want to address the international circulation of Baek’s work, my concern here is not with translation, but with the qualities of that work, why it merits wide attention, and the nature of its interactions between global narrative forms and Asian places and people.

Directed at an audience primarily in an age range of four to ten years, the books address a general, and global, concern of picture books with the expansion of childhood experience from the domestic sphere into a wider world and hence with an empirical and imaginative encounter with otherness. The appeal of Baek’s books in many cultures can be attributed to the visual effects of her highly innovative production techniques, but this would be less effective without the glocalised nature of her stories. I draw here on the concept of glocalisation to explore how an interaction of global and local scripts in picture books enables a blending and mutual enrichment – for example of well-known, international story types and local cultural practice and artifacts. The paper will consider a selection of Baek’s books, from her earliest (Cloud Bread) to her most recent (Happy Birthday, 2024). 

Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas range across Asian cinema, adaptation studies, trauma studies, Korean diaspora, and Korean literature, film and TV drama. She is the author of 40 book chapters and journal articles. Her recent publications include “Past in the present: film and TV drama, Korean families, and the palimpsestic Neo-Confucian family schema” (in The Asian family in literature and film: changing perceptions in a New Age-East Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and “Coming-of-age in South Korean Cinema” (in The Oxford handbook of children's film, OUP, 2022).