POSTCOLONIALITY, GLOBALIZATION, AND TRANSCULTURAL PRODUCTION OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN POSTWAR TAIWAN

Introducing The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Neil Lazarus cogently argued that the notion of “postcoloniality” had ceased to be designated as “a historical category”, a mere indicator of a historical moment that can be clearly perceived or understood as “after colonialism”. The contour of the contemporary history of Taiwan, as Fangming Chen shows, derives “not only from the period of Japanese occupation but also from the political authoritarianism of the postwar period”. In analyzing the divergent development and yet interrelated conceptualization of postcolonial discourse and globalization theory, Timothy Brennan, however, suggests that globalization, analogous to postcolonialism, is a term characterized by “a fundamental ambiguity”. The establishment of an editorial task force with a goal to publish children’s books in an unconventional scope and with novel ideas and skills as such, in particular in the early postwar decades, would have been unlikely to take place were it not for the economic aids from the United Nations Children’s Fund.