TY - JOUR
T1 - Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics
AU - Jarvis, Lee
AU - Robinson, Nick
N1 - Supplementary material: The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000098. Video Abstract: To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000098
PY - 2023/4/11
Y1 - 2023/4/11
N2 - The article explores the importance of children’s picturebooks – a seemingly-insignificant site of global politics – through an original reading of The Gruffalo. It argues that this text provides an important, polysemous, vernacular theorisation of global politics which: (i) reproduces the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (ii) simultaneously destabilises this reading through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (iii) offers opportunity for a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through its parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, we broaden research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for critically interrogating the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.
AB - The article explores the importance of children’s picturebooks – a seemingly-insignificant site of global politics – through an original reading of The Gruffalo. It argues that this text provides an important, polysemous, vernacular theorisation of global politics which: (i) reproduces the international as a pessimistic, anarchical world populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (ii) simultaneously destabilises this reading through evocation of the social production of threat; and, (iii) offers opportunity for a more fundamental decolonial critique of the international through its parochial privileging of its protagonist’s journey through a ‘deep dark wood’. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, we broaden research on popular culture and world politics through investigating a surprisingly neglected example of the former. Second, theoretically, we demonstrate the work such texts perform in (re)creating and (de)stabilising (knowledge of) global politics. Third, we offer a composite methodological framework for critically interrogating the context, content, and framing of complex texts like The Gruffalo.
KW - Popular culture
KW - Global politics
KW - children's literature
KW - International Relations Theory
KW - The Gruffalo
U2 - 10.1017/S0260210523000098
DO - 10.1017/S0260210523000098
M3 - Article
JO - Review of International Studies
JF - Review of International Studies
SN - 0260-2105
ER -