Memory, Reproduction, and Cultural Continuity

Literary Text and Films:
Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko
Children of Men
Critical Articles:
"Postmodern Eugenics," Anne Kustritz
"The Human Project: Biological Dystopia and the Utopian Politics of Race in Children of Men and 28 Days Later," Jayna Brown

Questions: How does the representation of the past reflect anxiety over issues of cultural purity and cultural extinction? Particularly, how does this affect the portrayal of sexuality and reproduction?

Thesis: The past comes under constant reinterpretation to meet the needs of the present, as it becomes a venue to discuss present events in a distant plane. The extreme of this rule is in the representation of societies in existential crisis, like the globe in Children of Men, or Native American society in Almanac of the Dead. Since threats to the purity or existence of a culture are based on continuation, reproduction, and by extension, sexuality, are placed under extreme stress.

Quotes:
It takes a certain kind of forgetting for the idea “Wouldn’t it be cool if Native Americans never existed?” to gain traction as the premise of a mainstream novel by a prominent sci-fi/fantasy writer, rather than as the punch line of a racist joke. Thirteenth Child presents a murky racial and eugenic pastiche, erasing its own foundation as part of hundreds of years of colonial dreams of an all-white America and a human future without native people. - Kustritz

The film mourns the death of 1960’s utopianism and implies its impotency, its inability to raise a lasting progeny. Paternity is a source of ambivalence throughout the film. The 1960’s abandoned its children: the anti-nuclear generation in the 1980’s, made up of feminists and other environmental activists camped out at Greenham common, and the late 1990’s WTO protesters, to ineffectual escapism, consumerism and militarism. - Brown

That was something the white man did - worry ahead of time. the white man had had all the radio waves to himself; but funny thing was, white man didn't have anything alive left to say. Clinton wanted black people to know all their history; he wanted them to know all that had gone on before in Africa; how great and powerful gods had traveled from Africa with the people. He wanted black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years... - Silko 416