Imagining Intergenerational Justice: Reassessing Generational Crisis in Transcultural Anglophone Literature and Film from the 20th to the 21st century

• Applicant: Kathrin Bartha, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468131780

The term ‘Intergenerational Justice’ has become one of the key concepts of the 21st century and today mostly refers to the rights of future generations for a healthy environment and a stable social order. While justice between generations has emerged as a central problem of our climate changing world, however, the academic field of Intergenerational Justice has largely been theorised in the social sciences and philosophy and, as I argue, evinces a tendency towards theoretical abstraction and eurocentrism. This project seeks to foreground the cultural dimension of justice between generations—an aspect that has arguably been neglected in the field of Intergenerational Justice. I suggest that the arts, and in particular literary and cultural studies, have much to contribute to the discourse of Intergenerational Justice, because ideas of generational identity, justice and sustainability across and within generations are deeply cultural issues. As I show, the field of Intergenerational Justice has so far overlooked the important contributions of the arts and literary and cultural studies for new perspectives, and for fostering an increasing societal consciousness of this subject matter. Vice versa, because no larger comparative transcultural study yet exists, literary and cultural studies arguably lacks a sustained engagement with the field of Intergenerational Justice.My proposed study emerges from the new field of the Environmental Humanities, which is motivated by the question of what the humanities can contribute in times of climate change and the pressing need for socio-eco-political change (the topic of my PhD thesis). Equally, my project aims to connect the important insights of the Environmental Humanities with transcultural, postcolonial, and memory studies, all of which have been concerned with similar questions. I argue that paying attention to cultural production is crucial here, because cultural change and civil society movements often precede political responses.Starting with narratives of (post-) World War I, spanning the 20th century, and reaching up to the present day and into the imagined future, my study seeks to compare Anglophone creative texts across time and in places like the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, India and North America. Such a comparative transcultural study has a two-fold purpose: on the one hand, it aims to strengthen the increasingly global significance of Intergenerational Justice for the 21st century. On the other, it seeks to reflect on the complexities, pitfalls and creativity inherent in the concept of ‘generations’ by exploring culturally different contexts, conceptions and experiences of generational justice. These differences matter, I argue, because they may reveal new perspectives on current youth climate movements and on the field of Intergenerational Justice generally.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position