Lexington Books The Child in World Cinema (Children and Youth in Popular Culture)

This collection seeks to broaden the discussion of the child image by close analysis of the child and childhood as depicted in non-Western cinemas. Each essay offers a counter-narrative to Western notions of childhood by looking critically at alternative visions of childhood that does not privilege a Western ideal. Rather, this collection seeks to broaden our ideas about children, childhood, and the child's place in the global community. This collection features a wide variety of contributors from around the world who offer compelling analyses of non-Western, non-Hollywood films starring children. Review Debbie Olson's extensive twenty-two chapter collection The Child in World Cinema assembles a range of international scholars to examine representations of children and childhood across the globe. The work importantly extends study on Western media about children and youth to encompass the child image in non-Western cinemas, these spanning from South America, through India to New Zealand. Moving away from Western perceptions of childhood, the broad coverage of this volume not only addresses on-screen culture-specific issues in its subjects of study, including, for example, the one-child policy in China and child abandonment in Japan, but also historical traumas that have shaped portrayals of childhood. The insightful and detailed analyses comprising this anthology make a comprehensive, thorough and significant contribution to international scholarship on children and childhood in cinema and will be invaluable to scholars of child and youth representation, Third World Cinemas, and Childhood Studies.--Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhamption A valuable text for readers interested in cinematic representations of childhood. Comprehensive, wide-ranging and truly international in scope, it successfully moves beyond the geopolitical parochialism that has characterized much of the prior scholarship in this area. While encompassing films both iconic and relatively unknown in Western criticism, the basic question of how the screen image of childhood reflects dominant social and cultural practices remains central throughout the book.--Noel Brown, author of "The Children's Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative" About the Author Debbie Olson is assistant professor of English at Missouri Valley College.