Children’s Literature as a Site of Cross-Civilizational Analysis: Hong Kong in Crisis after 2019

Authors

• Faye Dorcas Yung Schwendeman, University of TsukubaFollow

Keywords

Hong Kong, children’s literature, cross-civilizational analysis, nationalism, counter-memory

Abstract

This paper applies Liah Greenfeld’s cross-civilizational framework to Hong Kong children’s literature published from 2017 to the present, with emphasis on post-2019 works. Existing scholarship argues that 2019 marked the crystallization and mass diffusion of Hong Kong national consciousness; a nationalism lens therefore helps explain the intensified production of Hong Kong-centered narratives, civic pedagogy, and Cantonese-language transmission. I argue, however, that nationalism does not fully account for a crisis register that becomes salient in parts of the corpus: texts that frame the conflict as a struggle over singular truth, counter-memory, and intolerable contradiction, and that assign to ordinary people a duty to preserve record under coercion. Through close reading of narrative and paratextual materials across five clusters of texts, I show a trajectory from place-based self-representation to civic-national pedagogy (often under diaspora conditions) to counter-memory projects. Children’s literature thus emerges as a productive site for cross-civilizational analysis.

Recommended Citation

Yung Schwendeman, Faye Dorcas (2026) "Children’s Literature as a Site of Cross-Civilizational Analysis: Hong Kong in Crisis after 2019," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 95: No. 95, Article 11.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol95/iss95/11