New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (review)

The choice of the incipit in this book’s title, New World Orders, is a telling one that draws on a long history of the concept. Cecil Rhodes, back in the early twentieth century, gave voice to the idea of forming a single government linking the British Empire and the United States of America. Since that time other world figures have promoted the idea of a unified world government. Some see the idea as diabolical with the force of spiritual evil pushing for a form of socialism that will destroy individual liberty, while others suggest that a new order is the only way to save civilization. The book under review certainly draws on the themes of worlds that are distorted in various social ways, sometimes for the good of humankind and sometimes for its enslavement and or destruction. The authors of this text search the concept of “what if” as they deconstruct a substantial number of texts written mainly for adolescents over the past forty years and generally over the past twenty. They draw on texts and film primarily from the English-speaking world including, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Some films from Japan and Iran also come into the discussion.

Fiction for young people, in its many genres, often explores transformative utopias offering hope of something better than the current world political scene displays, but it also explores dystopian and nonutopian scenarios. Each chapter of the current text considers aspects of these scenarios. Chapter 2 highlights the way that children’s and adolescent literature reflect the global political situation or, rather, hypothesize what would happen if a scenario is taken to extreme. The conclusion reached by the texts explored in this chapter is that the world order will become dystopian rather than utopian. Young people struggle against the ever-increasing regimentation of life as the powerful in society seek to gather to themselves what remains of a society that has been dissolved by war, ecological disaster, or disease. Usually, however, the young protagonist will develop and display previously unknown character strengths that offer hope, if not for the masses, at least for those with inner fortitude. Out of chaos and bondage comes hope. Novels highlighted in this chapter include Shadow of a Hero, Useful Idiots, and The Hungry Cities Chronicles. The latter is not without some subversive humor.

Chapter 3 considers the impact of globalization on young protagonists. It examines how transformations of self occur at both the local and global levels as a result of major political forces. The issues of class struggle during the 1950s in the United Kingdom and Australia come through in both The Fire Eaters and The Red Shoe. The Iranian film Turtles May Fly is a story of children living on the border of Iraq and Turkey prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The viewer is confronted by the fact that this geographic area, far from being monolithic culturally, is made up of diverse ethnic populations. We are asked to look at the ways in which transformations occur through changes to livelihood, culture, migration, and global compression. Films, however, need not be confronting in the violent sense, and seemingly banal children’s films such as Toy Story and Monsters Inc., for better or worse, are often subversive retellings of the American ideal of liberal democracy.

The lure of the lost paradise is the focus of chapter 4. It explores colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial politics by posing questions about invasion, imperialism, displacement, colonial isolation, and the way the past imposes itself on the present. Atlantis and The Sterkarm Handshake look at utopias lost. In both texts the premodern encounters the modern to the detriment of the former. The opposite is highlighted in such books as Deucalion and The Crowlings, which attempt to re-establish a golden, and socially more acceptable, past age.

Human beings must at some stage interact with nature...