ABSTRACT In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy, though making an appeal to the middle class, also seeks to combine progressivism with an ethos of aristocratic cultural dominance as a way to civilize the masses and make socialism appealing to patricians. Eschewing a hereditary aristocracy, Bellamy endorses a cultural one, finding the imperative to do so in optimistic notions of American social mobility. Instead of portraying socialism as a threat to the elite, Bellamy invites the Brahmins of Boston and, by extension, of America to view socialism as a path to universal acceptance of upper-crust refinement. Read from this perspective, Looking Backward suggests unsettling realities: that America is essentially a class-conscious society; that its capitalist economy, though merit-based in theory, fosters the dynastic concentration and transfer of wealth; and that if the hereditary beneficiaries of industry cannot be persuaded that a nationalized economy is to their personal advantage, it is unlikely to happen.
ABSTRACT Utopian literature generates a tension between an abstract vision of a perfect world and the lifelike details that render that vision tangible. While such instrumental use of detail appears to align utopian form with realism, the resemblance is deceptive: in utopia, details gain meaning by pointing away from the present (“not yet”); in realism, they point toward it (“and yet”). I demonstrate how these conflicting modes of being and representation illuminate the fates of two couples portrayed in Wong Bik-wan’s (黃碧雲) short story, “Lost City” (失城). Set against the imminent 1997 Hong Kong handover, the story follows one couple’s pursuit of a better life via perpetual migration, a “blueprint” utopian project that ends in self-destruction. In contrast, another couple remains in the decaying city, their endurance of a flawed present yielding a quiet, post-utopian form of grace. Juxtaposing the two storylines, I suggest that meaningful engagement with historical forces may lie not in the utopian designs of a perfect future, but in the difficult, quotidian practice of inhabiting a world that is already lost.
ABSTRACT Utopian desire expresses itself through design, in particular the design of new communities that might produce truer and more human ways of living. The past three decades have seen many new proposed cities. But the latest round of planned cities seems designed as expressions of wealth, power and impunity from the laws of humanity and nature. We have seen efforts by the mega-rich and absolute rulers to carve out private territories within existing countries. What do these projects, so representative of our “new gilded age,” say about the possibilities and dangers of utopian city planning?
ABSTRACT This article calls for a general theory of the right-wing utopia. It argues that we can best understand reactionary utopianism by interrogating the right’s basic assumptions about the concept of utopia, including its presuppositions about utopian imagination, utopian change, and the utopian literary form. In contrast to left-wing utopias, utopias of the right suggest that a better society will be achieved when an elite group such as white men or capitalist entrepreneurs frees itself from hindrances that prevent it from exercising its innate potential and realizing its true identity. In other words, the left-wing utopia is structuralist while the right-wing utopia is essentialist. Furthermore, whereas left-wing utopias demand self-transformation, right-wing utopias imagine a processes of self-amplification in which the chosen few become a purer and therefore more powerful version of themselves by removing alien impositions and eliminating foreign parasites that inhibit their self-expression. These differences are reflected in their opposing approaches to literary form. As critics such as Fredric Jameson have argued, the left-wing utopia is negative, provisional, and critical. The right-wing utopia, however, affirms and strengthens an already-existing identity by creating concrete images of an ideal world that the author believes should not be questioned.
ABSTRACT This article suggests that, for the contemporary reader, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus appears to incorporate some of the elements that would later flower into the genre of the literary dystopia. These elements include an alienated protagonist who recognizes the oppressive nature of their world, the manipulation of language as part and parcel of a repressive system, and the work’s reliance on hyperbolized metaphor. Most importantly, a necessary precondition to the creation of a dystopia is displacement, temporal or spatial. Titus Andronicus departs from our familiar reality by creating a Rome that is estranged from history. While some scholars have set the drama in the late empire, others insist that it does not take place in a recognizable historical period and instead presents a pastiche of moments from Roman history. In its contradictory sense of a hyper-historicized Rome that is not an effacement of history, but a kind of intensification, and in its inclusion of other dystopian elements, Titus Andronicus represents a pocket of spacetime, similar to the vaguely evoked Rome of some dystopian novels. The play’s evocation of a mythologized, ahistorical Roman past creates a bubble universe bathed in violence, subverting the idealized Renaissance image of classical Rome.
ABSTRACT This article considers what might be learnt from revisiting classical social theory in the context of contemporary utopian studies. More specifically, it returns to the early twentieth century and to the work of Max Weber in order to consider how Weber’s profound reflections on the themes of asceticism, religion, human excellence, and science might be used to reframe and reevaluate a classic dystopian text whose concerns can be seen to overlap with those of Weber, namely, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. By placing Huxley and Weber into dialogue, the article sheds new light on aspects of Huxley’s novel, including its treatment of the role of the ascetic ideal within modern culture, the status and value of modern science, and the relationship of each of these to the pursuit of existential meaning. In doing so, the article demonstrates the relevance of classical social theory to the analysis of dystopian literature.
ABSTRACT Even when the genre attempts to imagine far-flung futures, and despite a(n ostensible) divorce from the context of historical imperialism, contemporary science fiction (SF) colony sim games have continued to function under and reify epistemological frameworks that see capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism as natural laws instead of sociocultural choices that go on to color the games’ expression of race, sexuality, and gender, as well as economy, ecology, and futurity. In short, colony sims seem epistemologically unable to imagine a society of the future materially different from the society of the now, potentially foreclosing possible futures even as they imagine them.
ABSTRACT Discourse on queer women in India has gained momentum in recent years, making lesbians a political, cultural, and literary subject. Life writings of such subjects imagine and embody possible queer futures within cultural productions, functioning as “utopian performativity.” In this study, the work of India’s foremost “out” lesbian writer, Suniti Namjoshi, Goja: An Autobiographical Myth (2000), is analyzed in parallel with K. Vaishali’s Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India (2023), exploring the envisioning of a future for South Asian lesbians beyond present limitations and how utopian thoughts guide their lives. Informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of queer utopia as a horizon of possibility, this article addresses the tensions hindering a queer utopia “here” in India, as well as the “impossibility” of imagining it elsewhere, while highlighting the turn toward memoir writing as a utopian strategy to understand lesbian subjectivities in India.
ABSTRACT Marxists disagree about the relations between utopian thinking and political action. One tradition, represented best by Theodor Adorno, warns of the dangers of trying to fight for the realization of utopian imaginings; the other tradition demands strategic, practical, collective mobilizing for change. In literary and cultural studies today, Adorno’s case against political action is the one that prevails. In our own historical moment, however, the fossil fuel profiteers, trying to make us believe that they are all-powerful and unstoppable, have poured millions of dollars into persuading the public to avoid taking action on climate change. This essay makes a case for taking action toward the realization of partial utopias.
