Abstract
The place of children in societies is a question that we have been grappling with in many forms, maybe nowhere more creatively and visibly than in the products of our imaginary complexes, such as films. Educational theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux (2012) describes a contemporary crisis about youth and considers youth as potential cultural and pedagogical 'border-crossers or outlaws'. Our complex contemporary engagement with the concept of youth coincides with an increasing awareness of, firstly, the genderedness of our world and, secondly, of anthropocene planetary ecological states of crises. In this article I consider two girl-centred films, both with young female protagonists, where the convergence of these discursive forces is depicted in the narrative context of the current renewed appreciation for indigenous cultures, particularly those of the global south. The films are New Zealand director Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002) and Disney's animated film Moana (2016). There are clear similarities between the films, and the Disney creators have openly credited Whale Rider as influential in their creative process. I particularly consider how these two films, when read together, engage with ideas of cyclical mythological time, the leitmotifs of exploration, gender and colonisation, and with the trope of monstrousness or monstrosity as metaphors for paradoxical and complex living in an age of increasing complexity and anxiety.
Highlights
Recent increasing emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems coincides with an awareness of the current age of the anthropocene, into which the world has entered largely because man has been perceived as the proverbial centre of the universe
The term anthropocene was coined by Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe our contemporary era, which ‘could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane
A social grouping (“youth”), that until fairly recently often had been little more than ideologically disregarded, is held up as the salvation of societies, cultures, and even the planet. This revolution in our thinking about children, and their social and political significance, broadly coincides with our increasing anthropocene awareness of the impact human life has had on our planet and its ecology
Summary
Recent increasing emphasis on indigenous knowledge systems coincides with an awareness of the current age of the anthropocene, into which the world has entered largely because (western) man (here carrying both the gendered meaning of maleness and the more general lexical meaning, denoting humankind) has been perceived as the proverbial centre of the universe. Since Crutzen first introduced this term, discourses about planetary calamity, climate change, environmental degradation and social decline, as a direct result of the damaging influence of humankind (“western”, “consumerist” and “neo-liberal” are often implied, if not overtly cited), have become ubiquitous, to the extent that they have even given rise to new terminologies, and a new ideological zeitgeist, of “apocalypse fatigue”, “climate anxiety” and “environmental/eco anxiety” Amid this more general planetary anxiety, reports regularly appear about individual cultures and languages that are dying out. A social grouping (“youth”), that until fairly recently often had been little more than ideologically disregarded, is held up as the salvation of societies, cultures, and even the planet This revolution in our thinking about children, and their social and political (and economic) significance, broadly coincides with our increasing anthropocene awareness of the impact human life has had on our planet and its ecology. We engage with our anthropocene terror in more subtle ways, in other types of narratives, such as children’s films
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