The Innocence Project

Abstract This chapter charts the rise of a subgenre of dystopian fiction in which adults try to create a better future for their children by cordoning them off from the outside world. Toni Morrison’s Paradise, for example, imagines freeing young people from a past shadowed by slavery and segregation by isolating them in an all-Black town; her project thus engages with the discourse of reparations as articulated most recently by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The subgenre as a whole, which includes classic Young Adult novels like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Hollywood films like Pleasantville and Captain Fantastic, and literary fiction like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, criticizes the conformity and supervision entailed by safety. But both Morrison’s Paradise and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village recognize that freeing young people is a more complex proposition, one that sometimes forgoes and sometimes depends on safety.