Child

In the conclusion of The Child to Come, the book asks, ‘What happens when the life figured by the child--innocent, self-similar human life at home on a homely Earth--no longer has the strength to hold back the vitality that animates it?’ This chapter looks at two kinds of texts that consider this question: Anthropocene cinema and Young Adult Fiction. By focusing on the role of human action, the Anthropocene obscures a far more threatening reality: the collapse of the regulative. In relation, both children’s literature and young adult literature grow out of and as disciplinary apparatuses trained on that fraught transit between the presumptive difference of those still in their minority and the socially necessary sameness that is inscribed into fully attained adulthood.

Labor

The fifth chapter considers the anxious fantasy of life’s withdrawal in contemporary sterility apocalypses. These fantasmatic representations—principally Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and the science fiction franchise Battlestar Galactica—hinge on the miraculously restored fertility of a woman of color. Ultimately, these works serve to highlight the history of racialized labor and enforced reproduction.

Face

The introduction of the book lays out the historical and theoretical stakes of its project. It works to chart the movement from the child-in-need-of rescue (characterized by Henry James’s 1898 novella Turn of the Screw) to the child-as-resource by the way of Kazou Ishiguro’s 2005 Never Let Me Go. As Carolyn Steedman argues in Strange Dislocations, scientific accounts of physiological growth and development were central to the construction of the child as well as to evolutionary thought, a congruence expressed in recapitulation theory. In essence, the link forged between the child and the species helped to shape eugenic historiography, focalized reproduction as a matter of concern for racial nationalism, and made the child a mode of time keeping.

Birth

The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.

Future

The first chapter considers the predictively foreclosed temporality through which popular environmentalism gains its sense. It reads the child as a crucial affective and conceptual technology allowing environmentalism to disavow its central insight that matter is mobile. It also looks into and compares the disavowal to feminist new materialist accounts of the queerness of matter.

Planet

The third chapter works through an extended reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road. It explores the way that post apocalyptic narratives engender a split figuration of the salvific child against the uncannily impersonal Earth--or what is called, alongside Luce Irigaray, the revelation of the chora behind the veil of the oikos.