Utopia/Dystopia

by Gordin, Michael D.; Tilley, Helen; Prakash, Gyan

• ISBN13: 9780691146980
• ISBN10: 0691146985
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-23
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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/Dystopiaoffers 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.

Author Biography

Michael D. Gordin is associate professor of history at Princeton University. Helen Tilley teaches history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Prince- ton University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time	p. 1
Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future	p. 21
Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the Nineteenth-Century Southern African Frontier	p. 45
Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India	p. 73
The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian independence and the Place of Race in Decolonization	p. 94
Hydrocarbon Utopia	p. 117
Techno-Utopian Dreams, Techno-Political Realities: The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom	p. 151
On Cosmopolitanism, the Avant-Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Central Europe	p. 176
The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and the Street in Modernist Urbanism	p. 203
Stalinist Confessions in an Age of Terror: Messianic Times at the Leningrad Communist Universities	p. 231
The Heterotopias of Dalit Politics: Becoming-Subject and the Consumption Utopia	p. 250
List of Contributors	p. 277
Index	p. 281
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