Oh help! Oh no! The international politics of The Gruffalo: Children’s picturebooks and world politics

Lee Jarvis, Nick Robinson

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Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalReview of International Studies
Early online date11 Apr 2023
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 11 Apr 2023

Keywords

  • Popular culture
  • Global politics
  • children's literature
  • International Relations Theory
  • The Gruffalo

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