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The book explores the fundamental and multifaceted dialectic between utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares within American culture. The utopian mindset in constructing and imagining different futures for society is reflected in a wide range of differential cultural texts and narratives such as novels, short stories, political discourses and treatises, journalism and scholarly and intellectual debates. Often these combine social criticism and satire, political rhetoric, religious belief systems, and biblical metaphors. Approaching the topic from various angles and throughout different historical periods, the essays in this volume collectively show how fascinating and rewarding the exploration of this utopian discourse of for an understanding of American culture.
The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]
This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis’s "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford—came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.
From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, "The birthday of a new world is at hand," America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world's first truly cosmopolitan civilization. In Beyond the Revolution, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America's greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another's ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture.
Publisher's description: “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran. Yet for all the talk about the liberalizing force of the internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian regimes are effectively using the internet to suppress free speech and democracy. What's more, the latest research shows that greater access to information pacifies a population as much as it incites it to revolution. If we in the West are to promote liberal ideals, we'll have to do more than fund Facebook. In this book, blogger and social commentator Evgeny Morozov tackles these issues with relentless energy and analytical savvy. Marshalling a compelling set of case studies, he shows why we must stop thinking of the internet and social media as instant cures for repression, and how, in some cases, they can even threaten democracy.
This collection provides a thorough representation of the early and ongoing conversation between Gothic and theory - philosophical, aesthetic, psychological and cultural.
Among the predominantly Hebrew collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls are twenty-nine compositions penned in Aramaic. While such Aramaic writings were received at Qumran, these materials likely originated in times before, and locales beyond, the Qumran community. In view of their unknown past and provenance, this volume contributes to the ongoing debate over whether the Aramaic texts are a cohesive corpus or accidental anthology. Paramount among the literary topoi that hint at an inherent unity in the group is the pervasive usage of the dream-vision in a constellation of at least twenty writings. Andrew B. Perrin demonstrates that the literary convention of the dream-vision was deployed using a shared linguistic stock to introduce a closely defined set of concerns. Part One maps out the major compositional patterns of dream-vision episodes across the collection. Special attention is paid to recurring literary-philological features (e.g., motifs, images, phrases, and idioms), which suggest that pairs or clusters of texts are affiliated intertextually, tradition-historically, or originated in closely related scribal circles. Part Two articulates three predominant concerns advanced or addressed by dream-vision revelation. The authors of the Aramaic texts strategically employed dream-visions (i) for scriptural exegesis of the antediluvian/patriarchal traditions, (ii) to endorse particular understandings of the origins and functions of the priesthood, and (iii) as an ex eventu historiographical mechanism for revealing aspects or all of world history. These findings are shown to give fresh perspective on issues of revelatory discourses in Second Temple Judaism, the origins and evolution of apocalyptic literature, the ancient context of the book of Daniel, and the social location of the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls.