From Safe Havens to Monstrous Worlds: The 'Child' in Narratives of Environmental Collapse

Children are widely used as emotive symbols of our shared ecological future, evoking concerns for the next generation as well as the philosophical stakes and challenges of politically addressing climate change. The 'child' as redeemer anchors the dream of transforming and healing the troubled world and functions as a beacon against the foreclosure of human history. My doctoral study examines the cultural ubiquity of the child redeemer figure in contemporary Western narratives of environmental collapse. Literature and film serve as objects for a theoretical investigation that is informed by post-colonial, critical post-humanist and ecocritical conceptions of childhood, nature and narrative. Following the work of other scholars of childhood and futurity (Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Mari Ruti, Jos Esteban Muoz, Claudia Castaeda), I ask how we, as adults, might respond to children in a manner that does not reproduce the old idea of childhood innocence nor allow the adults flight of fantasy into redemption or leave the 'child' to his/her own devices. Can the 'child' exceed his/her metonymic function? What are the possibilities of delaminating the climate change story from the imperatives of a redemptive and sentimental humanism? Specifically, my project addresses the fiction of universality, which continues to thrive in the hothouse of childrens culture and education. Moving from Clio Barnards feature film The Selfish Giant (2013) to Zacharias Kunuk/Ian Mauros documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2010), each of the four chapters in this dissertation is concerned with dramatizing the limits of heroic environmental storytelling modes, which tend to emphasize the individual in isolation and thereby threaten the fragile, collective, slow labor of forging a common world and a post-carbon future. Heroic reifications and fairy-tale endings may offer consolation, I propose, but they are inadequate to address the social, structural, and ecological crises we currently, and unequally, face as nations and as a species. Shifting towards collective ways of storytelling climate change, I introduce visionary, intergenerational survival stories that give imaginative form to climate grief and resistance and address the lived and heterogeneous experiences of children in a climate-impacted world

Selfish Giants and Child Redeemers: Refiguring Environmental Hope in Oscar Wilde’s and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant

In this paper, I explore how stories of lost and broken worlds have been tied to hopes about the redemptive possibilities of a new generation. I historicize and complicate the idea of children as environmental stewards of an imagined planetary future. I investigate the issue further by examining the particular figure of the child redeemer and our “investment in the image of the child as a sign of the future, as defence against loss of significance in the world” (Lebeau 179). Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and Clio Barnard’s recent film adaptation of Wilde’s book will be the objects of my discussion. Barnard’s film, set in the post-industrial landscape of Bradford, England, offers child protagonists who unsettle the familiar fantasy of redemption and invite us to think past sentimental and nostalgic arguments for ecological preservation (premised on preserving an unjust world as it is). While it is important not to topple the myth of childhood innocence only to resurrect another myth of childhood agency, I am interested in these moments of refusal and how they point to the limits of a sentimental ecology.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2018.000

Brenda Joy Lem : Fan Ngukkei

Maclear's interpretation of Lem's exhibition - large scale photographic portraits silkscreened onto cloth banners, film loops and a small wooden shrine - addresses notions of personal and collective memory, family history and home. Includes list of works. Biographical notes. 9 bibl. ref