Abstract
In this passage, 15-year-old “American” (KOTGD 40) Alexander discusses an alternative paradigm of national belonging with his grandmother, Kate, in regards to the following terms: landscape, economy, and ecology. As Alex discovers the nation built upon “ecology,” he meanwhile reflects upon his own nation of the United States and its value of the “economy.” It is Alex’s travels within the kingdom that allow him to participate in a shared vision of a sustainable future that emphasizes “ecology,” interdependent communities, and biodiversity over ever-increasing consumption and economic self-interest.
The landscape was like a dream, untouched by modern technology. Land was cultivated behind slow and patient buffaloes. Emerald rice paddies glowed on terraces that had been carved out of the sides of the mountains. Unfamiliar trees and flowers grew on the berm along the road, and in the background rose the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.
Alexander made the observation that the agricultural methods seemed far behind the times, but his grandmother pointed out that not everything is measured in terms of productivity, and added that this was the only country in the world in which the ecology was far more important than the economy.
—Isabel Allende, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon 1
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Notes
Isabel Allende, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 2004), 136.
Isabel Allende, La ciudad de las bestias (Barcelona, Spain: Areté, 2002), 49.
This translates to “the young American” in Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 52.
Isabel Allende, El reino del dragón de oro (Madrid, Spain: Areté, 2003), 45.
This translates to “his Brazilian friend Nadia Santos” in Isabel Allende, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 2004), 54.
Bryan L. Moore, Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 195.
Richard A. Slaughter, Futures beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight (London, UK: Routledge, 2004), xxii.
Also see Ken Wilber, foreword to Futures beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight, by Richard A. Slaughter (London, UK: Routledge, 2004), xxi–xxii.
For an excellent discussion about Future Studies, see Wendell Bell, “What Do We Mean by Futures Studies?” in New Thinking for a New Millennium, ed. Richard A. Slaughter (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), 3.
Isabel Allende, “Book Description: Kingdom of the Golden Dragon,” Harper Collins, http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Titles/29678/kingdom-of-the-golden -dragon-isabel-allende-9780007177486 (Accessed August 27, 2011). Notably, J. K. Rowling was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2010 and Isabel Allende was nominated in 2011.
Isabel Allende, “Q&A: About the Book,” Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 2004), 7.
Isabel Allende, City of the Beasts, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Collins, 2002).
Kathy H. Latrobe and Judy Drury, Critical Approaches to Young Adult Literature (New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 2009), xi.
Gail Zdilla, “The Appeal of Young Adult Literature in Late Adolescence: College Freshmen Read YAL,” in Young Adult Literature and Adolescent Identity across Cultures and Classrooms: Contexts for the Literary Lives of Teens, ed. Janet Alsup (New York: Routledge, 2010), 195.
Also see Roberta Seelinger Trites, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 102.
University of Florida Digital Booktalk, “City of the Beasts,” University of Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, http://digitalbooktalk.com/?p=44 (Accessed August 21, 2011).
See Web English Teacher, “City of the Beasts,” Web English Teacher, http://www.webenglishteacher.com/lit-a.html (Accessed August 18, 2011), and TeacherVision, “Forest of the Pygmies Bilingual Reading Guide,” TeacherVision, http://www.teachervision.fen.com/tv/tvsearch.php?keywords=forest+of+the+pygmies&go.x=0&go.y=0&sitesearch=1 (Accessed August 27, 2011).
See Rachel Falconer, The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 3.
Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 21.
Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 11.
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), xviii.
See Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3.
Glen A. Love, “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 229.
William Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 76.
Laurence Coupe, “General Introduction,” in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London, UK: Routledge, 2000), 5.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), xlvi.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1949), 202.
A. L. Herman, Community, Violence, and Peace (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 73.
Noël Sturgeon, “‘The Power is Yours, Planeteers!’ Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Children’s Environmental Popular Culture,” in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. Rachel Stein (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 262.
See Frederic Jameson, “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future,” in Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, ed. Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 43.
Janet Alsup, “Introduction: Identification, Actualization or Education: Why Read YAL?” in Young Adult Literature and Adolescent Identity across Cultures and Classrooms: Contexts for the Literary Lives of Teens, ed. Janet Alsup (New York: Routledge, 2010), 9.
Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone,” in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, ed. Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, 2007), 17.
Philip Swanson, “Magical Realism and Children’s Literature: Isabel Allende’s La Ciudad de las Bestias,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (Woodbridge, UK: Tamasis Woodbridge, 2005), 170.
Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 251.
See Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (London, UK: Routledge, 1997), 88.
Val Plumwood, “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 504.
Filomina C. Steady, “Introduction,” in Environmental Justice in the New Millenium: Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights, ed. Filomina Chioma Steady (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5.
One contemporary example of using the legal system to combat environmental destruction is Bolivia’s 2011 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra), the world’s first law ever to grant nature equal rights to humans. In legal terms, this means granting legal personhood to the ecosystem. See John Vidal, “Bolivia Enshrines Natural World’s Rights with Equal Status for Mother Earth,” The Guardian, April 10, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worlds — rights (Accessed February 12, 2012).
William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 107.
Isabel Allende, “About the Book: Q & A,” in Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 2004), 9.
Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, “Introduction: Toward a Global Consensus for Ethical Action,” in Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, ed. Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2010), xvi.
See Martha Westwater, Giant Despair Meets Hopeful: Kristevan Readings in Adolescent Fiction (Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 2000), 24.
Verena Andermatt Conley, “Hélène Cixous: The Language of Flowers,” in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. by Laurence Coupe (London, UK: Routledge, 2000), 149.
Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, ed. David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 187. George Lipsitz draws from Kristeva’s “Women’s Time” to argue that “monumental time” is embodied in women’s physical experience of reality. See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 229.
Cary Wolfe, “Old Orders for New,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 514. This also reflects Bolivia’s 2011 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.
See Cary Wolfe, “Old Orders for New,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 514.
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© 2013 Bonnie M. Craig
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Craig, B.M. (2013). Future Sustainable Landscapes of Belonging. In: Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337580_7
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