Robyn McCallum

New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature

New World Orders shows how texts fro children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international childrens texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures for child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalisation, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman.

The Struggle to be Human in a Posthuman World

Over the preceding chapters, we have discussed many possibilities for new world orders, some utopian but more often dystopian. One of the possibilities facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the prospect that we are entering a posthuman era in which many of the binary concepts used to make sense of experience in the past will no longer function. Western culture, dominated as it has been by liberal humanist principles, has traditionally been underpinned ideologically by binary oppositions between concepts such as natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on. Such binarisms have been increasingly critiqued, first by post-modernist deconstruction of how they function within Western culture as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, and second, through posthumanist reconceptualisations of the oppositional boundaries underpinning dominant conceptual paradigms. Thus, during the last few years a new range of concepts has begun increasingly to enter children’s literature — the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, cloning, and genetic engineering. In short, children’s books and films have begun responding to the posthuman, the focus of this chapter.

Reweaving Nature and Culture: Reading Ecocritically

One of the more extreme polarities of utopian and dystopian representation appears in the relationship between nature and culture in depictions and interpretations of ‘natural’ environments. This is not a concern which in itself emerges as a consequence of a post-Cold War ‘new world order’, but the range of discourses falling under the broad titles of ecopoiesis and ecocriticism emerged slowly and sporadically in the last quarter of the twentieth century from even broader discourses about ‘the (natural world) environment’ or simply ‘nature writing’. There were, however, some significant confluences. As an analytical discourse, ecocriticism became identified as a distinctive — albeit loosely defined — field in the first half of the 1990s. The collapse of the East-West binary also coincided with a growing acceptance across the world that global warming was a fact, not a theory. Hence, the coincidence of an identifiable critical discourse emerging at the same time as major changes in global political structures resulted in a palpable shift of emphasis, and for almost a decade until the advent of the ‘war on terror’ environmental issues, especially global warming, were widely perceived as the greatest threat to the continued survival of human beings. Environmental issues — habitat protection (and celebration of wilderness), ecosystem conservation, pollution prevention, resource depletion, and advocacy of harmonic balance between human subjects and natural environments (as opposed to an anthropocentric hierarchy of humans and nature) — became major social concerns.

Masters, Slaves, and Entrepreneurs: Globalised Utopias and New World Order(ing)s

In Julie Bertagna’s Exodus (2002), Noospace is superior to the old cyberspace. In Noospace young people literally jump into a new cyber world and race at frightening speed through the gleaming maze that traverses the New World, with its endless pattern of connections: ‘A living world of info and data within each pattern. All of it endlessly changing and mutating and repatterning. All dying and recreating every microsecond’ (Bertagna, 2002, p. 245). Welcome to global utopia: the ultimate adventure!

‘Radiant with Possibility’: Communities and Utopianism

When, in 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her now-infamous pronouncement ‘There is no such thing as society’, she was enunciating an idea which has been formative in the development of neoliberal politics — that individuals are solely responsible for their lives and that they have (or ought to have) the capacity to be and do what they most desire. In line with this principle, the political directions of many Western nations during the 1990s were characterised by assaults on social welfare systems, the privileging of corporations and an emphasis on market forces. Writing The End of History (1992) soon after the disintegration of the USSR, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed euphorically that ‘as we reach the 1990s, the world as a whole has not revealed new evils, but has gotten better in certain distinct ways’ (1992, p. 12), chief among them the collapse of communism and of totalitarian forms of government. Fukuyama promoted capitalism as ‘the world’s only viable economic system’ (p. 90), the indispensable condition of modernisation and of the ‘worldwide liberal revolution’ (p. 39) which he believed would result in the spread of democracy.1

Conclusion: The Future: What are Our Prospects?

We face an uncertain future and calls for change tug at our consciousness. As the preceding chapters have argued, change is occurring at an unprecedented rate and on a global scale. Many of the texts we have discussed not only reflect current societal, environmental, and political changes, but extrapolate the impact of change to an unknown and unimaginable future. While change is an inevitable constituent of civilisation as we have known it, in the past few decades the world has been transforming at a bewildering pace: we have witnessed the demise of the bipolar arrangement of global politics of the Cold War era; the emergence of a global marketplace; mass migration, displacement, and relocation; the dissolution of nation states; new forms of family and community; an information explosion; rapid technological advancement; and increased global warming. These changes engender insecurities and fears, as well as offering new opportunities and ambiguities. In particular, the rapidity and intensity of new technologies and globalisation present enormous challenges in terms of posthumanism, ecological sustainability, and the utopian goal of a stable and just world order.

Ties that Bind: Reconceptualising Home and Family

The subject of ‘families’ has long been a dominant topic of children’s literature and films. While literary and filmic representations of families are impossible to catalogue, they invariably align with other contemporary social and political discourses which position the institution of ‘the family’ as both a problematic and an ideal social construction: problematic in that ‘the family’ is not a fixed, known entity, but a formation that is always in the process of construction; and ideal in that families carry the burden of the utopian promises of a better future promulgated by governments, nations, and religious idealists. Thus, family is often metonymic of the State and other forms of governmentality in that it stands for the collective desires, dreams, and political visions of a new social order of the future.

A New World Order or a New Dark Age

The phrase ‘a new world order’ has been used by politicians from the early years of the twentieth century to describe the new political dawning, the end of the old warring world, and a new beginning. Woodrow Wilson is credited with being the first US president to proclaim the optimism of a ‘new world order’ at the end of the First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’. Again at the end of the Cold War, other leaders (Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, President Mikhail Gorbachev, and President George H. W. Bush) spoke of a new world order, and outlined their various visions for a world shaped by tolerance, human rights, superpower cooperation, north-south alliance, and an end of military conflicts. By the time of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, ‘new world order’ rhetoric had been replaced by other concepts: ‘globalisation’, ‘end of history’, ‘clash of civilisations’, and ‘the war on terrorism’.

Children’s Texts, New World Orders and Transformative Possibilities

The changing global politics we pointed to in Chapter 1 call for a thorough examination of the rhetoric of utopian imaginings and speculations in children’s texts, and of the ways in which these texts participate in what Ruth Levitas has termed ‘the education of desire’ (1990, pp. 7–8), especially in so far as they mediate ways of regarding the world and offer shape to children’s anxieties and aspirations. In this chapter, therefore, we will consider the variety of themes and narrative forms in which the concept of ‘new world orders’ and ‘transformative utopianism’ are brought into conjuncture. Representations of utopian societies are virtually non-existent in children’s literature, where such representations swiftly disclose themselves as critical utopias (rejecting utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream — see Moylan, 1986, p. 10). Gloria Whelan’s Fruitlands (2002) or William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer (2000) are notable examples of narratives in which communities ordered and orchestrated ostensibly for the good of all members are revealed, through the perceptions of young enquiring minds, to be repressive patriarchies organised to serve the self-interests of those in control.

The Lure of the Lost Paradise: Postcolonial Utopias

Contemporary children’s texts in English are produced both in former colonies such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and also in nations which were formerly colonising powers, such as Britain (see Bradford, 2001, 2007). Moreover, modern societies (in particular the United States) have since the Second World War engaged in neocolonial processes and politics that have effected new forms of conquest, seeking to produce a world order based on international capital and Western conceptions of democratic government. Formulations of nationhood and cross-cultural relations in many children’s texts are thus shaped by colonial histories and by a plethora of contemporary debates centring on colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial politics, including the extent to which citizens of postcolonial nations should take responsibility for the consequences of past acts of invasion and violence; the ethics of the ‘war on terrorism’, especially in relation to its impact on the citizens of nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran; and the projected ‘clash of civilisations’ which, according to Huntington, will inevitably take the form of a contest between ‘the West and the rest’ (Huntington, 1996, p. 33).