Flights of Fantasy? Or Space-Time Compression in Asian-Australian Picture Books

Abstract

Metaphors of hybridity and the like not only recognize difference within the subject, fracturing and complicating holistic notions of identity, but also address connections between subjects by recognizing affiliations, cross-pollinations, echoes and repetitions, thereby unseating difference from a position of absolute privilege...such metaphors allow us to conceive of multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation. (Felski 1997, p.12)

While the concepts of space and time affect people universally, they occupy a dominant position in childhood experience by virtue of their fluidity. For a growing body that is rapidly being redefined in space as clothes, furniture and developmental phases are outgrown at what seems to surrounding adults to be an exponential rate, but that often feels to the child waiting for the next long-off birthday to be agonisingly slow. thus, space and time are understood experientially in complex but often unexamined ways. This fluidity of space and time is likewise central to but also often uncritically recognised in the representational spaces of the picture books that children consume. in order to engage with the conceptual, semiotic and socio-political dimensions of the space-time continuum in picture books, this paper will assess two stories that negotiate physical and psychical depictions of migration. the analysis will proceed by looking at the ways in which hybridised space operates as a function of power and subjectivity central to the project of mediating narratives about Asian-Australian diasporic cultures. My analysis here relates only to textual representations of migrant experience, rather than judgements about identity politics per se; and suggests ways in which diasporic experiences are negotiated across space and time in picture books.