The Colonial Child Hero: Evolution Of Power, Identity, And Representation In Graphic Literature

Abstract

Children’s graphic narratives continue to serve as powerful cultural instruments that shape young readers’ perceptions of identity, belonging, and difference. This paper examines how colonial ideology persists and evolves by analysing three influential works from different historical moments: The Adventures of Tintin, Hilda, and Amulet. While Tintin openly encodes imperial superiority through racial caricature and civilisational hierarchy, Hilda represents a seemingly progressive shift in which the Other, trolls, elves, and giants are reimagined as benign and adorable, yet still positioned as emotionally volatile communities requiring guidance from the white child protagonist. Amulet extends this logic into twenty-first-century fantasy, embedding racial ordering and humanitarian conquest within transmedia world-building and the chosen-child narrative. Across these texts, the child hero remains the central arbiter of morality, knowledge, and civilisation, while non-human or non-Western figures are regulated through rescue, assimilation, or domestication. Drawing on Cultural Studies and postcolonial theory, particularly the work of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Perry Nodelman, the paper traces a genealogy of the colonial child hero and argues that contemporary children’s media does not abandon colonial ideology but normalises it through affect, empathy, and fantasy. The study foregrounds graphic storytelling as an active cultural archive that transmits power relations to new generations of readers.