Unmasking ideology in Malay children's literature

• Main Author: Muhammed Shahril Bin Shaik Abdullah
• Other Authors: Brendan Luyt
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Social Sciences
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/173389
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Children’s literature serves as a good pedagogical tool to inform and integrate children into the social world. In fact, as put across by one children’s author, children’s books represent interventions in society’s debate about bringing up children. This thesis aims to examine some of these interventions and bring to light the ideological underpinnings of those texts written for children, particularly picture books published in the Malay world. It argues that the glaring paucity of Malay children’s literature criticism, to say nothing of picture book criticism, is due to the infantilization of the picture book genre. This has led to the prevailing assumption that, because picture books are produced for emergent readers who are seen as immature and inexperienced, they are not and must not be influenced by ideology and politics. As will be seen from the analyses of the existing picture books selected for this study, however, content produced for children can generally be identified under two very distinct ideological categories. On one hand are conservative picture books that stay true to the educative and morally didactic origins of children’s literature; and on the other are those that can be considered progressive, to some extent even radical. While those involved in the production of the former ensures that the status quo on virtues and values such as good manners, obedience, filial piety and traditional gender roles are maintained, the authors involved in the latter are going the opposite direction to subvert the status quo in ways that ensure the developmental needs of children are catered for and that cultural texts such as picture books are produced in the best interest of neither the adult nor society, but that of the child. This thesis seeks to (1) to unmask the ideological underpinnings of selected picture books produced in the Malay world; (2) to deliberate on how these ideologies contribute to either the disenfranchisement of the child or the development of the child’s agency; and (3) to make a case for progressive children’s literature. To achieve these objectives, three major themes will be discussed in terms of how they are portrayed in the picture books from either a progressive or conservative worldview: power relations, gender representation, and religious orientations.