Unstable Statuses, Fleeting Identities: Re-introducing East Asia's Children

Abstract:Historians of East Asia, particularly those based at Western institutions, have only just begun to study children and childhoods in earnest. This Special Issue considers three young authors' approaches to the historical study of children within and right at the institutional edges of religion, pedagogy, and nation building. Rather than reinforcing binary opposites between flesh-and-blood children on the one hand and symbolisms of childhood on the other, the present authors carefully ponder where on various continuums the children they study ought to be placed––of children as autonomous actors or victims of discipline and punishment, as objects or agents of Christian proselytizing, sexual desire, and revolutionary nation building. My critical introduction aims to highlight how these histories matter and how they ought to complicate the histories of pretty much everything.