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Anthropocene Childhoods: Speculative Fiction, Racialization, and Climate Crisis by Emily Ashton (review)

2024; Volume: 51; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2024.a931157

2327-6207

Climate Change Communication and Perception

Reviewed by: Anthropocene Childhoods: Speculative Fiction, Racialization, and Climate Crisisby Emily Ashton Anna McFarlane Children at the End of the World. Emily Ashton. Anthropocene Childhoods: Speculative Fiction, Racialization, and Climate Crisis. Bloomsbury Academic, F eministT hought inC hildhoodR esearch, 2024. x+ 198 pp. $170.95 hc, $52.65 pbk, $0 open-access. Emily Ashton's debut monograph is part of the F eministT hought inC hildhoodR esearchS eries, a significant series in the field of childhood studies. The series aims to move the discussion from focusing on individual children to a more posthumanist model, taking into account the complex more-than-human systems and nonhuman entanglements that encompass concepts such as humanity and childhood. Taking this remit as a starting point, Ashton produces a book that weaves together a posthumanist perspective on the figure of the child with a number of apocalyptic science-fiction texts, situating her work in the context of sf studies and creating an interdisciplinary approach that will be of interest to many scholarly fields. Ashton draws on Lee Edelman's key text, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive(2004), to analyze the figure of the child as the future guarantor of the contemporary status quo. She also notes Rebekah Sheldon's development of Edelman's work, which more specifically situates the child as a figure of reproductivefuturism and points to a move from seeing the child as someone for whom the world must be preserved, to seeing the child as a potential savior (a figure that Ashton sees in the children taking part in school strikes to save the climate, à la Greta Thunberg), ultimately asking: "instead of the child-figure failing to suggest a future, the Anthropocene makes thinkable that there is no future for the child. So, in a bit of a twist, what if the appeal is not for the future or even for the child but for the end of the world?" (15). Sheldon's and Edelman's positions have already been developed in some interesting conversations with speculative fiction, particularly in Heather Latimer's writings, and it is exciting to see them applied and developed in the field of childhood studies, and in the depth that a full monograph allows. Ultimately, Ashton is arguing that reproductive futurism becomes a kind of "cruel optimism" (following Lauren Berlant) in the age of the Anthropocene—placing hopes for the future in the figure of the child ultimately disguises the need for real action in the present. As per its subtitle, the book foregrounds the issue of race alongside its interests in childhood studies and science-fiction studies. Ashton clarifies her interests when she writes that "the main focus in this book is on racialized child-figures in speculative texts of literature and film that story the end of the world through some sort of climate-related disaster" (5). In bringing race into the discussion, Ashton draws on critical race studies, intersectionality, and indigenous studies, producing a complex figure of the child at the end of the world. Ashton's focus on racialized and Indigenous children dovetails perfectly with her argument, in that racialized children have neverbeen representative figures of the (white supremacist) future. These are children who have often been denied the innocence of childhood, [End Page 307]judged older than their years, and sexualized or seen as violent. This has echoes of the point made by Kathryn Yusoff among others that Black and Indigenous communities may have already experienced an "apocalypse"; as Ashton puts it, they are "communities that have already had their worlds ended" (31). Ashton's work therefore offers a welcome corrective to investigations into the figure of the child that tend to focus on the child/adult binary, thereby flattening out other elements of difference that may exist within those figures—particularly the imbalance between the members of Anthropos who have been responsible for consuming resources and those who have been treated like a resource to be consumed or an inconvenience to be removed from the land. Speculative fiction is used here to help Ashton "consider how the end of the world can mean otherwise: it can be the...