I am grateful to the editor of this journal for the opportunity to respond to Tom Moylan's comments on my Dystopia: A Natural History. There are some serious misapprehensions about my arguments in Moylan's treatment, as well as a failure to engage with some of the central themes of the book. Substantial differences also clearly exist between my approach and Moylan's approach to the subject of dystopia and indeed to scholarly engagement in general. Illuminating these further might well assist students (...) of the subject to further explore the relevant issues.Moylan is chiefly a student of science fiction rather than dystopian fiction as such. His two books are mainly concerned with the period from the 1970s... (shrink)

Jonathan Franzen's The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of essays about climate change, nature conservation, and contemporary culture. They are good essays. But they left me with no new ways to think with about environment, climate, and the future. Perhaps this is the point. The "personal essay," Franzen reminds us, is a form of "honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas" within the structure of a "personal and subjective micronarrative". Its value lies not so much (...) in generating new analytical insights as in finding interesting ways of reflecting on shared experience from a partial and individual perspective.These essays are thoughtful on the distractedness of everyday life for... (shrink)

Regardless of its ontological status and seemingly subsidiary role, the beyond—real, oneiric, imaginary, or otherworldly—constitutes, I intend to argue, an indispensable and complementary component of any dystopian reality. Paradoxically, it may be claimed that what lies outside a given dystopia—beyond its impassable boundaries—determines, ultimately, whether we deal with the Orwellian or the Hollywood type of "bad world."1 Contrary to the latter, the former systematically compromises and eliminates one kind of the beyond after another, leaving its inhabitants with neither space nor (...) time nor discourse that could allow them to imagine that they are behind the confines of dystopia. No matter how far Winston Smith... (shrink)

In 1997, Louisa Schein published her famous article "Gender and Internal Orientalism in China," in which she modified Edward Said's theory of orientalism and transplanted it into the study of ethnicity in contemporary China. According to Schein, Chinese society develops an orientalist view of non-Han people and consumes their ethnic cultures as cultural commodities, which clearly denotes the power of the center over the periphery. While fully acknowledging internal orientalism as a problem, I realize that Schein's theoretical framework, without paying (...) much attention to the specific cultural and economic condition of urban China, cannot satisfactorily explain why... (shrink)

Alex Zamalin's Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism offers the most thorough scholarly survey of African American utopian literature currently available. The scope of the project is ambitious—the book's chapters proceed chronologically from the genre's utopian beginnings in Martin Delany's Blake; Or, the Huts of America, through the anti-utopian turn of the twentieth century found in texts such as George Schuyler's Black Empire, and concluding with the ambiguous utopias and heterotopias of Octavia Butler and (...) Samuel Delany. Unlike recent scholarship on black speculative fiction (andré m. carrington, Sandra Jackson... (shrink)

Dystopias matter because they make us think. They help us to imagine and envisage how the present can change into something very nasty. … Dystopias thus interrogate the now and offer warnings and sometimes prophecies about the future; they are often the jeremiads of utopianism. But sometimes they offer glimmers of hope.One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It's crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. … So (...) by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas. This is the necessary next step following the dystopian moment, without which dystopia is stuck at a level of political quietism... (shrink)

The resurgence of everyday cycling in the last decades across Western cities has engendered lively debates concerning its increasingly relevant role in innovating urban movement toward more sustainable futures. Most cities are building provisions and drafting plans to become more "cycle friendly," and "cycling indexes" are regularly used to rank the best-performing of them, while the World Health Organization has developed a health economic assessment tool to assist evidence-based decision making for cycling investments.1 Meanwhile, the number of cyclists in certain (...) areas of New York has tripled in the past ten years, the number of people cycling to work in London has doubled since 2001, and Paris, the first big... (shrink)

The British Cooperative movement offers a curious case of utopianism in which Robert Owen's program for total social and economic transformation finds its most durable, practical expression in a small shop founded by the "Rochdale Pioneers." The success of the Rochdale model created a national, then international, movement that improved the lives of many working-class people, in multiple ways, in the period between 1860 and 1950. However, despite its undeniable success, the British Cooperative movement increasingly adapted to, rather than transformed, (...) the social and economic order within which it operated: a case of utopia stalled or... (shrink)

If we are dissatisfied with our situation in life, we often dream of how our life could be improved. Most basically, we want a full stomach, decent clothing and housing, and a sense of security, and millions of people in the world today do not now have these things. Throughout American history, African Americans were kept from achieving this most basic decent life, let alone the more complex needs that become possible for those who fulfill the first needs. All the (...) elements of this fundamental vision are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948 but was not ratified by the United States until 1992. Among the rights included in the Universal Declaration are Article 4. No one... (shrink)

"The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin" was an exemplary interdisciplinary event that brought together scholars across the humanities with those working in science and technology studies. Supported by the Chaire Arts & Sciences, École Polytechnique, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, the conference gave utopian studies specialists the opportunity to converse with experts in the philosophy of science, critical ecologists, and political philosophers. Unlike other single-author events this conference was not the product of an existing community of Le Guin scholars, meaning (...) that the delegates were drawn together primarily through their enthusiasm for Le Guin's writing, their interest in theorizing an "ethics for the... (shrink)

Sutton Elbert Griggs wrote the first major African-American political novel, Imperium in Imperio. Imperium is a utopian novel and the first novel to represent the New Negro, a figure that Alain Locke popularized a quarter of a century later. Griggs used the term New Negro to refer to a generation of educated black Americans born after emancipation, a multiplicity of voices that demanded equality at the turn of the twentieth century. The 1890s are often described as the nadir of race (...) relations in the United States, for blacks were disfranchised, legally segregated, and subject to terrorist mob violence in the form of lynching and burning alive. Race war was in the air.Sutton Griggs was born... (shrink)

Based on a 2013 doctoral thesis, Ophélie Siméon's volume in a series edited by Gregory Claeys represents an attempt to write a different kind of study of Robert Owen—"an intellectual biography through a sense of place" —that connects New Lanark more umbilically to his later endeavors. Her avowed intent is to approach this history "from below," utilizing newly available material from the New Lanark Trust archives as well as New Lanark records held at Glasgow University. That said, much of the (...) material captured in Siméon's book is not new but has already been brought out in scholarship going back fifty or more years. What is valuable here is that it is brought together in a concise... (shrink)