Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War Anastasia Ulanowicz (bio) Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel, eds. Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008. In Society Must Be Defended, a series of public lectures delivered at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1976, Michel Foucault argues that all modern social institutions are predicated upon war. According to Foucault, war is not an isolated occurrence that punctuates history; rather, war is a permanent condition that influences dynamics of power within social institutions. If one takes Foucault's thesis into account, then one must also grant that childhood—one of the most privileged concepts in modern Western society—is not exempt from the processes and consequences of war. Although individual children might (problematically) be presumed innocent, childhood itself—as both an intellectual category and as an actual condition—is never innocent of war. Indeed, for a considerable percentage of the global population, the experience of childhood is also the experience of war: at this very moment, children serve as soldiers, forced laborers, human shields, trafficked subjects, prisoners, informants, orphans, and "collateral damage." Even the most sheltered of children living in affluent and ostensibly peaceful nations are not beyond the reach of war's choking tentacles: not only are they both the subjects and objects of propaganda, but, according to the logic of Foucault's argument, their very performance of citizenship implicates them within structures of power based on war. The complex and enduring relationship between childhood and war serves as the subject of Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel's edited collection, Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War. As the editors note in their preface, Under Fire was "conceived as a much larger project, which had its genesis in long-distance discussions between the late Mitzi Myers and Elizabeth Goodenough about the relationship of the war games children play to the secret spaces they create" (ix). These discussions soon led to Myers and Goodenough's co-edited issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, (24:3, September 2000) entitled "Violence and Children's Literature," and later, to a conference on childhood and war at Princeton University in 2003. This present collection serves as the culmination of these various efforts, and is dedicated to the memory of Myers, its genitor. Under Fire is divided into four sections. The essays included in the first section, "Hearts and Minds," analyze the ways in which children's [End Page 105] books—and more generally, popular discourse—have employed the figure of the child in the service of wartime propaganda. The second section, "Representing Trauma," evaluates the literary and visual rhetoric at work in depictions of childhood experiences of war. Each of the essays in this section strikes a clear and productive balance between theoretical discussions of trauma and close, analytical engagement with primary texts. For example, in her essay, "Picturing Trauma in the Great War," Margaret Higonnet draws on extensive archival research to demonstrate how French First World War-era propagandistic picture books conflated children's perceptions and traumatic experiences with those of soldiers. By exposing such a conflation, Higonnet usefully problematizes the boundaries between individual and collective trauma and, moreover, draws attention to the ways the figure of the child has been used to represent trauma. (The word "infant," she reminds the reader, derives from the Latin infans, meaning "without speech"—a term that gestures toward the inaccessibility of trauma to full linguistic representation [118]). This section also includes Myer's interview of the celebrated "YA" author, Robert Cormier. Although the topics covered in this interview—for example, censorship and the allegorical representation of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War in novels such as Tunes for Bears to Dance To and The Chocolate War, respectively—may be familiar to Cormier's readers, this interview is distinguished by its richly collaborative character. In the course of the interview, Myers does not merely ask leading questions, but elaborates on and contests Cormier's statements in a manner that dramatizes the exchange between reader and text and scholarly critic and author. In the third section, "The Holocaust in Hindsight," contributors address the literary and ethical implications of...