Utopian Studies

The essay focuses on the manifesto as a utopian genre and presents the category of the critical manifesto as a way to understand some of its internal differences. The analysis centers on a comparison between a traditional example of the form, Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and a critical version that rethinks both the form itself and the content of its claims, namely, Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Moylan’s concept of the critical utopia will be borrowed to explicate Haraway’s further development of the traditional manifesto’s form and content.