Barnsley, V. (2016) The postcolonial child in Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 51 (2). pp. 240-255. ISSN 1741-6442
Abstract
This article offers a consideration of the figure of the child in Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), a vibrant but urgent ecological drama motivated by the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It examines how a film that on its release was praised as an American survival story focused on a feisty young heroine can be more productively understood through a postcolonial lens as a radical vision of world ecology underpinned by a complex critique of childhood, development, and marginality. Exploring how vectors of racial, economic, and environmental relations intersect in the film’s fantastical form, the focus is shifted from survival to the connectivity that the precarious postcolonial child enables amongst actual and mythological animals and between past, present, and future time-worlds. As such, the child de-centres the contemporary notion of the human and the tenets of development, progress, and mastery over nature that hold it in place. By delineating the material coordinates of the film in terms of the capitalist, neo-imperialist world-system and analyzing how its mixing of the real and the fantastic elaborates upon the causes and responses to environmental disaster, the article shows how the postcolonial child provokes new approaches to ecological relations
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016 |
Keywords: | Child; disaster; ecocriticism; Hurricane Katrina; postcolonial film; race |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 23 Sep 2016 13:24 |
Last Modified: | 13 Mar 2018 09:40 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989415626206 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Sage |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0021989415626206 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:105115 |