Jeunesse - Young People, Texts, Cultures (E-Journal)
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Young Banyumasan Street Traders as Shapeshifters of Modernity: Refreshment, Production, and the Pursuit of Pranks and Jokes in Jakarta
No full textBanyumasan Javanese people of Indonesia are often revered as funnier than other Javanese. Ethnographic accounts herein illuminate how young, Banyumasan street traders in Jakarta perform and participate in laughing, joking, and pranking at work. Intersectional analysis reveals the utility of joking and pranking as heuristics to understand the affective dimensions of status, stigmatization, migrating for work, and growing up in Indonesia. The polysemic nature of jokes and pranks reference camaraderie and othering, incongruities and expectations, agency and oppression, as well as intersubjective relations between young men at work. This view of Banyumasan street traders as urban jokers and jesters, producing and consuming humour “from below” for and about each other, departs from previous scholarship on humour in Java, which has focused on how clown characters in staged shadow puppet (wayang kulit) performances have asserted and perpetuated inequalities through a refined-unrefined (halus-kasar) binary whereby those deemed kasar are seen as lacking something. This article, in contrast, asserts the utility of jokes and pranks to refreshing and regenerating understandings of kasar, what it is to be human, and the temporalities, spatialities, and intersubjectivities of boys growing up and working in Indonesia’s street economy
Children’s Books and Colour Ecstasy: Humans’ Disconnection from Nature and What We Should Do About It
Full text linkReview of:
Gamblin, Kate Moss. Lake: A See to Learn Book. Illustrated by Karen Patkau, Groundwood, 2020.
Lebeuf, Darren. My Forest Is Green. Illustrated by Ashley Barron, Kids, 2019.
Lebeuf, Darren. My Ocean Is Blue. Illustrated by Ashley Barron, Kids, 2020.
Ryan, Candace. Red Light, Green Lion. Illustrated by Jennifer Yerkes, Kids, 2019.
Weisman, Kay. If You Want to Visit a Sea Garden. Illustrated by Roy Henry Vickers, Groundwood, 2020
Blood in the Water: Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic as Children’s Petrofiction
No full textJewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic (2015), written in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, deliberates the special problem of talking to children about oil. How does one tackle the subject of oil when addressing young people? How are children enabled to participate in discourses on petroleum? The novel also reveals a dilemma: the resource that we associate with comfort and progress actually contaminates, wounds, and lays waste to natural and human ecosystems. Caught in the mucky conundrum of oil, Bayou Magic reveals the challenges of talking to children about oil and oil catastrophes. In striving to meet the expectation that children’s fiction should offer a hopeful, if not happy, ending, Bayou Magic resorts to a resolution that “contains” the oil spill but sidesteps the problem of our persisting dependence on oil. But the novel’s allusion to the African deity Mami Wata is significant, as the figure connects the oppression of Black peoples to the exploitation of natural resources. As such, the novel uses fantastical elements not to imply that only something magical or divine can save us from disaster; rather, it signals that projects of environmental justice require openness to and embrace of radically imaginative solutions.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.0.001
“Laugh! I Thought I Should’ve Died”: British Music Hall Humour and the Subversion of Childhood on The Muppet Show
No full textThrough the abundant use of the bawdy, humorous songs of British music hall, The Muppet Show delivered a potent critique of constructed notions of a protectionist childhood. Paradoxically perhaps, the music hall songs, carnivalesque comedy, and frequent depictions of sex, sexuality, and violence also did much to construct The Muppet Show’s intended “family” audience while simultaneously providing a direct challenge to its normative sanguinuptial (blood and marriage) construction. This intergenerational family audience is crucial to the child’s interpretation of The Muppet Show’s complex and contentious content, subject matter that is rarely included in media made for a solely child audience. While the musical sketches open up an interpretive space for the child to encounter, resist, and subvert the range of fluid identities hinted at onscreen, the process is simultaneously constricted by the musical-visual texts themselves and by The Muppet Show’s family-reception context. As such, this case study reveals the inherent tensions of targeting a family audience through music and television
An Analysis of Humorous Devices in Picture Books: A Pictorial Article
No full textThe purpose of this pictorial paper is to demonstrate types of humour found in picture books and how the characteristics of the picture book are deployed in their execution. It was deemed necessary to demonstrate these forms of humour, as opposed to purely analysing existing instances of such humour, to allow the reader the opportunity to experience comic amusement.
Therefore, this paper is written and illustrated in the manner of a picture book, using the convention of the form, such as characters, setting and word/image interplay. It is imperative that this paper should be read as a picture book would, with the reader considering both words and pictures together simultaneously and extracting meaning from their experience of the two working together.
Please continue to turn the pages and wait for your lecturer to arrive
Le rire : formes et fonctions du comique dans la fiction africaine pour la jeunesse
No full textCet article étudie les différentes manifestations du comique ainsi que leurs fonctions dans quatre œuvres fictionnelles pour la jeunesse en Afrique : l’album Tout Rond de Fatou Keïta et les romans Les confidences de Médor de Micheline Coulibaly, Pain sucré de Mary Lee Martin-Koné et Awa la petite marchande de Nafissatou Niang Diallo. Il part de l’idée que l’inscription du rire dans la littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse participe de sa dimension didactique, mais produit également une expérience esthétique. À travers l’analyse des rires moqueurs des personnages, il met particulièrement en évidence des conditions dans lesquelles la dérision apparaît légitime, inévitable, excluant l’Autre ou révélatrice de la profondeur du psychisme humain
The Pop-Up against Coronavirus Project: Child-Made Movable Books Evoking Smiles, Tears, and Hope
Full text linkIn this essay I discuss the Pop-up against Coronavirus Project, initiated by the Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo based in Turin Italy. It is a research, conservation and educational foundation devoted to movable books, especially pop-up books. Their work with children is in conjunction with their museum of School and Children’s books (Museo della Scuola e del Libro per l’Infanzia). When the outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy in late February 2020 prevented the academic conference they had organized from occurring, the foundation immediately turned their attention to working cross culturally with and for children, engaging Italian, Chinese and later Dutch artists and paper engineers to devise working models of different types of pop-ups. I give an account of the inception of the project, discuss the materials provided on their site, and examine some of the images of the homemade artifacts made by children and their families in Italy and China
“I Love Romance!” Adolescent Girls Critique the Depiction of Love and Romance in The Hunger Games
No full textIn this qualitative study, nine adolescent girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen (M=12) reacted to how romance is depicted in The Hunger Games book and film series. Although some researchers have found the series ending disappointing, arguing that it reinforces post-feminist, repronormative and heteronormative ideas, most of the participants in this study felt that the inclusion of romance was appropriate for protagonist Katniss Everdeen, stating that this did not take away from what they saw as the “girl power” message of the series. Study participants believed that authors write heterosexual romance as a way of appealing to adolescent girl readers; several girls, however, expressed their desire to see this change. Furthermore, study participants provided alternative endings to the series that did not always include heterosexual romance or marriage for Katniss, thereby providing a nuanced critique of heteronormativity and gender roles in the series.
DOI: 10.1353/jeu.0.001
The Social and Historical Effects of Laughter in Revolutionary Ireland: The Case of Our Boys
No full textThis article examines the social and historical effects of laughter as stimulated by and depicted in Our Boys in the crucial years leading up to the Anglo-Irish War. Our Boys was a juvenile periodical edited by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, who aimed to teach Irish youth how to behave and articulate their interests within the terms of reference established by nationalist, Catholic discourse. Laughter was provoked and represented in Our Boys with this objective in mind and thus came to possess a formative and ideological dimension. The investigation focuses on how laughter in the periodical constructed both ideologies and subjectivities