In Narratives of Environmental Collapse
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
FROM SAFE HAVENS TO MONSTROUS WORLDS: THE ‘CHILD’ IN NARRATIVES OF ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE KYO MACLEAR A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATION YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO JULY 2018 © Kyo Maclear, 2018 ii Abstract: 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, José Esteban Muñoz, Claudia Castañeda), 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 adult’s 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 children’s culture and education. Moving from Clio Barnard’s feature film The Selfish Giant (2013) to Zacharias Kunuk/Ian Mauro’s documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge iii 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 (including queer worldings and native futures), 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. iv Acknowledgements: To my teachers Kari Dehli, Robert Morgan, Sherene Razack and the late-Roger Simon, who started the ball rolling many years ago. To my friends (speculative thinkers all): Naomi Klein, Nancy Friedland, Hiromi Goto, Kelly O’Brien, David Chariandy, Avi Lewis, Terence Dick, Jack Breakfast, among others. To Ruby Lacsamana, Melissa Dalgleish, Erin Wunker, and Loretta Fiorini, who helped build the material infrastructure that made the thinking possible. To my mentoring companions, Steve Alsop, Mario Di Paolantonio, and Aparna Mishra Tarc, who continue to model beautiful ways of being alert in the world. Special thanks to Steve for the immeasurable kindness, supervisory insight and encouragement he showed me, particularly during the final stage of this project. To Brenda Longfellow and Cheryl Lousley, who tested the work with great attentiveness and delicacy and who held a space for capacious and capricious thinking. To the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for sustenance. To my extended family: Mariko, Michael, David, Yoshi, Mika, Naomi, Sugie, Andrew, Robin, Eliza Beth, Donald, Oren, Sarah, Jason, Ben, Sam, Richard, Mona, Shelley, Paula, Toma, Buster and Bella. Thank you. v Table of Contents: Abstract……………………………………………………………………………............ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….............iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………….v List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………….vii Introduction: The Environmental Imagination Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 The Project……………………………………………………………………………….17 Theoretical Approach…………………………………………………………………….32 Chapter Outlines: The Arc of the Dissertation…………………………………………...37 Conclusion: The walk to a “garden we tend together”…………………………………..39 Chapter One: Selfish Giants and Child Redeemers: Refiguring Environmental Hope in Oscar Wilde and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant Introduction………………………………………………………………………………46 The Child Redeemer……………………………………………………………………..50 Revisiting Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant……………………………………………..55 Reworking The Selfish Giant (2013)…………………………………………………….58 Beyond the Messianic Dream……………………………………………………………66 Beyond Fixes and Fixed Figures…………………………………………………………69 Hope Beyond Redemption……………………………………………………………….72 Chapter Two: Protected or Prepared? Children in a Stormy World Introduction………………………………………………………………………………77 Protected or Prepared?.......................................................................................................83 Exposing a World of Wounds…………………………………………………………....92 Fantastic and Enchanting………………………………………………………………...97 The “Vibrant Matter” of Animation…………………………………………………….104 The Case of Ponyo……………………………………………………………………...109 The Comfortable Horrible………………………………………………………………113 “The Way We Protect Our Kids”……………………………………………………….116 Chapter Three: Something So Broken: Black Care in the Wake of Beasts of the Southern Wild Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..120 A Beastly, All-But-Drowned World……………………………………………………122 A Blast of Anarchic Joy………………………………………………………………...130 Romancing Precarity……………………………………………………………………137 Sacrifice Zones………………………………………………………………………….141 Care in Beastly Weather………………………………………………………………..147 vi Chapter Four: Living with the Weather in Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..153 The Weather…………………………………………………………………………….161 Choral Witnessing………………………………………………………………………167 An Ongoing Requiem…………………………………………………………………..171 From the Grand to the Granular: A Personal Perspective………………………………176 Conclusion: Love and Lifeboating (after Rebecca Solnit) Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..185 Lifeboats………………………………………………………………………………...188 Letters…………………………………………………………………………………...196 Wild Kin………………………………………………………………………………...202 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...208 vii List of Illustrations: Image 1: “The Walk to Paradise Garden” by W. Eugene Smith, 1946……………..6 Image 2: “Kids in Alleyway” by Robert Natkin, ca.1950........................................12 Image 3: “Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City” by Helen Levitt, ca. 1945, printed 1970s………………………………………………………………………15 Image 4: Cover image from The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson (1945)……………………………………………………………………….......….41 Image 5: We Are In This Together by Yumi Sakugawa. Twitter Post. 30 January 2017, 10:58AM.…………………………………………………………………….................207 1 INTRODUCTION The Environmental Imagination “Addressing climate change means fixing the way we produce energy. But maybe it also means addressing the problems with the way we produce stories.” —Rebecca Solnit (2014) NOT SO LONG AGO, I spent some time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I had come to meet a friend and as I waited on the street, by the museum’s gift shop window, I noticed a display dedicated to a book called The Family of Man. The familiar color-gridded cover prompted an onrush of memory. I remembered the first time I fell in love with photography and how this, looking back, was the beginning of my life writing about and alongside pictures. The Family of Man was the first photography book I ever owned. I was ten and the gift came from a family friend. At some point, my old worn copy went missing but for many years the images remained indelibly imprinted in my memory. Notable for me were the images of children—an array of faces, including some that looked like my own. Of course, at the time, I did not know about the embattled ideologies of family, innocence and nationalism that accompanied the book and the original exhibition’s reception but I was a worldly ten-year-old—daughter of a former war reporter, raised on international news and the “ambient hum” of the nuclear crisis—so it didn’t take me long to put it together, that the humans (depicted falling in love, playing, dancing, grieving, fighting, sharing a common fate and a correlating life) were meant to represent something 2 more than themselves.1 Embedded in the titular family of man, they were there to support a larger narrative about human kinship as prerequisite for planetary ongoingness. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had come to The Family of Man a half century late. First issued in 1955, a decade after the bloodshed of World War II and during the onset of the Cold War, its emphasis on universal emotions and the “essential oneness of mankind throughout the world” was a response to the general anxieties of a society living under threat of nuclear warfare and haunted by visions of total and certain destruction. By the early 1980s, when I received my copy, these anxieties had waned but not entirely dissipated. The nuclear Doomsday Clock was still ticking somewhere in the background, ranging from semi-audible to strident depending on the shifting tides of international relations. My