Event
Read Behind Images: How Picture Books Reinforce Stereotypes with Dr. Juwen Zhang
3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA
Asian America Across the Disciplines Series presents Read behind Images: How Picture Books Reinforce Stereotypes with Professor and Author Dr. Juwen Zhang, Willamette University.
In this talk, based on his personal experience and recently published book, Translating, Interpreting, and Decolonizing Chinese Fairy Tales, Dr. Juwen Zhang explores how racist stereotypes have deeply ingrained themselves into our lives. He discusses how we may unwittingly perpetuate these stereotypes and emphasizes the importance of cultivating a new awareness of anti-racism. Dr. Zhang highlights the need to critically examine the ideological agenda within the translation of folktales and to seek more equitable and respectful approaches to cross-cultural communication and translation. Through a detailed analysis of a Chinese tale and its English translation and a popular adaptation in a picture book, he demonstrates how anti-Chinese stereotypes subtly influenced the author and illustrator of the picture book, and argues that the picture book, in turn, has further disseminated these harmful stereotypes to generations of children in the US and many other countries.
Featured Speaker
Juwen Zhang is Professor of Chinese and Folklore at Willamette University, Oregon, with his Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He was President of the Western States Folklore Society, and a Fellow of the American Folklore Society (a position he later resigned). His research interests span a wide range from Asian American folklore and folklore theory to folkloric identity and the study of oral narratives. With a focus on recognizing ideological agendas and developing concrete approaches to anticolonialism and antiracism through the study of folk and oral traditions and translation, he has recently published several articles and books, including Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (2021); Epidemics in Folk Memory: Tales and Poems from Chinese History (2021); The Magic Love: Fairy Tales from Twenty-First Century China (2021); The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales (2022), and Translating, Interpreting, and Decolonizing Chinese Fairy Tales: A Case Study and Ideological Approach (2024).