WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today we offer a repeat of our interview with Rebekah Sheldon, author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe. This was a live show recorded in our studios. I have taken the opportunity to update our underwriting as well as adjust the sound mix.
The TOPICS discussed in the program might now have more resonance than even in 2017 as we can now add a pandemic to the list.
- Figurations of the child, the reproductive woman, the future, and the planet under global warming.
- Against survivalism (and literary environmentalism) and “reproductive futurism” and how the “child” is made central to those political articulations in the Anthropocene.
- What we mean when we talk about the human and how this is changing in the face of the unleashed energies of climate change; the death of “humanism.”
- Somatic Capitalism as “the way of all flesh.”
Sheldon explores representations of this perilous future and the new figurations of the child that have arisen in response to it. Analyzing catastrophe discourse from the 1960s to the present—books by Joanna Russ, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy; films and television series including Southland Tales, Battlestar Galactica, and Children of Men; and popular environmentalism—Sheldon finds the child standing in the place of the human species, coordinating its safe passage into the future through the promise of one more generation. Yet, she contends, the child figure emerges bound to the very forces of nonhuman vitality he was forged to contain.
GUEST
Rebekah Sheldon is an assistant professor in the English Department at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her critical work focuses on American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on speculative and science fiction and also queer theory, childhood studies, speculative philosophy, and feminist new materialism. Her first book is The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016, which considers the child figure under conditions of environmental threat.
Live Version: In the Name of the Future
RELATED
Somatic Capitalism: Reproduction, Futurity, and Feminist Science Fiction by Rebekah Sheldon
Double Agency: Knowledge | Performativity by Rebekah Sheldon
A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (pdf)
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
MUSIC
The Postal Service, “We Will Become Silhouettes”
The Decembrists, “The Calamity Song”
Tom Waits, “The Earth Died Screaming”
Daft Punk, “Technologic”
The Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin
Executive Producer: Kade Young
