Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clémentine Beauvais, Justyna
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe
Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N.
Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Björn Sundmark, Michelle
Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van
Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb
Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal
relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects
generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge,
experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of
global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic
insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each
other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing
need.
Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film argues
that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and
emotional connections between generations by representing
intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on
Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously
highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between
generations. However, Disney-Pixar's Up and Coco instead portray
intergenerational alliances--young collaborating with old, the living
working alongside the dead--as necessary to achieving goals.
The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political
significance of children's culture in the development of generational
intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of
children's literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity,
opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the
culture of childhood.
