Imaginary Ethnographies by Schwab Gabriele;

Author:Schwab, Gabriele;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

5 War Children in a Global World:

Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering Soul

The perennial losers . . . in the aggressive restaging of the new world order were certain categories of “superfluous” people, among them peripheral peasants, indigenous peoples, and poor children. The dependent and “supernumerary” child of the poor and marginalized populations of the world has emerged as one of late capitalism’s residual categories—its quintessential nonproductive, “parasitical,” Other.1

—Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent

The figure of the child has always been pivotal in cultural attempts to define the boundaries of the human. If, as Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent argue, late capitalism casts the child as parasitical Other, this signals a growing tendency to reduce the definition of the human to economic production and productivity. But as Sharon Stephens argues in Children and the Politics of Culture, in the structuring of modernity, children also function as “symbols of the future.”2 The following reading of Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering Soul3 focuses on the figure of the child, including the child as a symbolic marker of the future of the human.

Operation Wandering Soul was published in 1993. Beginning with Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood,4 first published in 1982, the 1980s and 1990s saw a flood of publications on the crisis, endangerment, and disappearance of childhood. Postman’s study was followed by such books as The Rise and Fall of Childhood (1982), Children Without Childhood (1984), Innocent Victims (1988), Stolen Childhood (1989), Broken Promise (1989), and finally Children in Danger (1992).5 In 1989, the United Nations ratified its Declaration on the Rights of the Child, and since the 1990s a variety of conferences on “children at risk” and “war children” have supplemented the pervasive cultural concern with the vanishing of childhood. Symptomatic of a more encompassing species anxiety in the face of precarious planetary survival, this cultural imaginary of disappearing children provides the backdrop for Richard Powers’s “imaginary ethnography” of childhood in Operation Wandering Soul.

Powers constructs his narrative with a layering of stories and textual materials dating back to the Middle Ages. The novel’s contemporary setting is Los Angeles, featuring a group of destitute children at the pediatric ward of a Watts hospital. In charge of their care, surgical resident Richard Kraft and his lover, therapist Linda Espera, unfold before the children’s eyes the world’s bleak history of childhood with a myriad of stories of migrant and disappearing children, including The Pied Piper and Peter Pan, the medieval Children’s Crusade, the transport of children to Auschwitz, and finally the evacuation of the children during the Blitz in London. Their stories portray the fate of war children who perish under the never-ending transgenerational legacies of violence. The novel’s apocalyptic ending stages a hallucinatory rescue mission in which a delusional Kraft escapes with the children from the hospital in an exodus designed to prefigure the dystopian vision of the final “departure of children from planet Earth.”6

Operation Wandering Soul maps out a comprehensive global history of war children, supplementing and juxtaposing the stories from the early colonization of eastern

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