I'd be interested to hear what you think of ChaplinJS - it's very small, but it does this kind of compartmentalized event thing really well. You can listen for events using @delegate in each view and subview, which is just a map to $.on using that view's DOM container.
The app the blog is based on is actually implemented in chaplinJS in production. It is a big improvement over Backbone, but it doesn't have the conceptual clarity of React. I actually moved to React because I was not satisfied with the chaplin solution.
