Imagining Intergenerational Justice: Reassessing Generational Crisis in Transcultural Anglophone Literature and Film from the 20th to the 21st century
Final Report Abstract
‘Intergenerational Justice’ has become a key concept of the 21st century. Having especially gained traction around the turn of the millennium with an increasingly instable climate, IJ may well become, an “intellectual leitmotif of the new century” (Tremmel 1). As evinced in global movements such as Fridays for Future, today it mostly refers to the rights of emerging and future generations for a safe social and environmental future. While this basic need remains the central problem of our climate changing world, not all cultures have conceived the current environmental crisis as a shortfall of the older generations. Although the climate movement has reverberated across all continents, the perception of a generational antagonism is, by and large, a discourse of wealthy ‘Western’ countries, predominantly of the Global North. Moreover, there is also a global demographic dimension to Intergenerational Justice: while there is a tendency in wealthier industrialised countries towards ageing societies, making migration an increasing necessity, the African continent has been hailed as the world’s youngest continent, with 40% of all Africans aged under 15. This project seeks to explore the transcultural dimension of justice between generations—an aspect that has been neglected in popular discourse, as well as in the field of Intergenerational Justice. Through literature, the aim is to investigate generational crises of the past 100 years indifferent cultural and historical moments (such as post-War Asia, the postcolonial Caribbean, post-Apartheid South Africa and trans-Indigenous Oceania) in order to explore what they can teach us about the current ‘planetary’ intergenerational crisis that is both a topic as well as a structural tension. Comparing generational conflicts across cultures and specifically, across the Anglophone world, I propose that the arts have much to contribute to the discourse of Intergenerational Justice because ideas of generational identity, rupture and cohesion are deeply cultural issues. My hypothesis is that, in a multipolar world, formerly neglected understandings of generational interconnectivity and large-scale temporality—that have especially been put forward by various marginalised cultures—are increasingly moving into the centre of global attention. Drawing on prominent generational terms such as the ‘Lost Generation,’ the ‘Bornfree Generations,’ the ‘Stolen Generations’ and ‘Multi-species Justice’ from various disciplines, this project seeks to highlight generational solidarity that emerges in moments of crisis. I contend that creative works have always complicated dominant narratives of generational antagonism, both troubling ‘mainstream’ conceptions and fortifying these conflicts as ‘real’. From a larger perspective, this project investigates what the humanities can contribute to the pressing concerns of climate change and the Anthropocene (the topic of my PhD thesis). Rooted in the Environmental Humanities and its central premise that the creative arts and humanities have great power to shape change, my project is motivated by the question of how political change can be achieved. Equally, I aim to connect the important insights of the Environmental Humanities with transcultural, postcolonial, and memory studies, all of which have been concerned with similar questions. The broader argument is that, in a climatically changing world, a longer timescale and a broadened understanding of place, or what could be called ‘generational time-space’ needs to be recognized as a central tenet for politics, economics, and society. Paying attention to cultural production is crucial here, I propose, because cultural change and civil society movements often precede political responses.
Publications
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Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature. Routledge.
Bartha-Mitchell, Kathrin
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Notes from a classroom: Teaching Anglophone transculturality amidst environmental devastations. The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature, 155-184. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Bartha-Mitchell, Kathrin & Stork, Michelle
