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

Children, it is frequently observed, are our future. So children's literature is especially suited to be a vehicle for the expression of our collective hopes and fears about what the future will look like, the envisioning of the utopian and dystopian possibilities for the world our children will inherit from us. In New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature, Bradford and her co-authors take it as their task to canvas the myriad ways that children's books published over the last twenty years have portrayed the "new world orders" that have emerged since the end of the Cold War, considering "the extent to which [these texts] promote and advocate transformative possibilities, either through constructions of fantastic or realistic worlds (both utopias and anti-utopias) or implied through negative example (as in the many dystopian narratives produced since 1988)" (5). This is, to say the least, an enormously ambitious task, impressively accomplished by these four prominent scholars.

Although the authors do not promise an exhaustive survey of every text that has any utopian resonance published during their time period, the reach and sweep of their work is remarkable. They examine not only the kind of speculative fantasy fiction that one would expect to be the centerpiece of such a study, works like M. T. Anderson's Feed and Nina Bawden's Off the Road, but also picture books such as Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing, contemporary realism such as Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road, historical fiction such as Gloria Whelan's Fruitlands, and films ranging from Disney's Aladdin and Toy Story to the Iranian film Turtles Can Fly. The English language texts included are drawn from Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, with discussions organized around the themes of globalization, postcolonialism, environmentalism, repressive and liberating communities, reconceptualized families, and the posthuman world of cyborgs, virtual reality, cloning, and genetic engineering. To add to this already rich array of material, the scholarly disciplines used to illuminate the focal texts range across utopian studies, cultural geography, literary theory, and environmental and sociopolitical studies. It begins to seem as if there is nothing that, working together collaboratively, these four authors haven't read.

The authors begin by placing their project within our own historical moment, in which concerns about mutual assured destruction and nuclear holocaust in children's literature have made way for concerns about massive climate change through global warming and the intensified surveillance spawned by the war against terror. They offer a number of intriguing empirical generalizations about the content of the works they survey.It is fascinating to reflect on the fact that "Representations of utopian societies are virtually non-existent in children's literature" (11); instead, both utopia or dystopia appear in children's literature "as tropes, modes, themes, or settings rather than as genres" (12). In recent years, children's authors have tended to provide "dystopian visions of dysfunctional, regressive, and often violent societies whose deficiencies nevertheless open up a space for utopia, in that by negative example they gesture towards transformed world orders" (9), rather than constructive models of idealized alternatives. Narrowing the focus to specific subject areas, we learn that eco-critical literature for children typically concentrates attention on a local area and emphasizes the responsibility and agency of individuals, offering, in particular, "narratives about large-scale destruction of pristine wilderness, such as destruction of areas of the Amazon forest, and ecological relationships in small-scale communities—a beach or rock pool in natural environments, or home, street, or suburb in urban environments" (93). Children's authors particularly wax rhapsodic about rain forests as representative of all "threatened pristine nature" (94). Children's texts featuring communities organized around religious beliefs are overwhelmingly dystopian, "representing such societies as antithetical to individual agency, progressive gender relations and egalitarian social practices—that is, as cults or sects, communities gone wrong" (117). Children...