Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Introduction: Fashion in Utopia, Utopia in Fashion

Abstract: Editorial paper for the guest-edited special issue Utopia and Fashion “Utopia and Fashion” comes at a time when the fashion industry faces a self-inflicted crisis that forces it to fundamentally rethink its own future. The desire to address the wrongs of the status quo and imagine alternatives and future possibilities has always been the driving force behind utopian thinking. The production of this special issue, “Utopia and Fashion,” at a time when the future of our relationship with fashion is being so widely discussed is not motivated by a wish to find “a stick with which to beat contemporary fashion,” which, according to fashion historian Aileen Ribeiro, has often been the case in utopian writing.19 On the contrary, this special issue is intended to be an initial contribution to what we hope could become a long-term dialogue regarding both the role of fashion in utopian thinking and the potential of utopian thinking to reimagine and inspire better futures for fashion. Included in this issue are three articles with a historical focus; two of these examine the role of fashion in selected utopian and dystopian texts, while the third explores more radical early twentieth-century visions of nudity as liberation from the oppression of dress. The other contributions engage with the critical issues surrounding fashion production and consumption. In addition to the essays in the “Articles” section, we include contributions from contemporary artists and designers whose practices, in different ways, challenge how fashion and clothing are currently used, experienced,and appreciated. By including the “Artist Statements” section, we aimed to bridge the often unhelpful gap between theoretical discussion and practical implementation and so complement some of the discussion in this issue with tangible examples of how fashion and our relationship with clothes can be rethought through art and design practice.

Fear and the Spiritual Realism of Octavia Butler's Earthseed

Abstract: A crumbling social order where violence and cruelty spring f rom fear is the p redominant dystopian condition. The emergence of intolerant religious movements in response, movements that promise deliverance but bring new forms of authoritarian rule, is also a staple of the dystopian novel. What is rare is to imagine an alternative religious response to fear and alienation. This is perhaps the most important achievement of Octavia Butler’s Parable series and one that is often overlooked. Butler’s Earthseed is neither a comforting palliative for pain and uncertainty nor a political tool to manufacture workable consensus. Rather, it is a coherent, nondogmatic belief system that reflects many of the essential assumptions and tenets of alternative understandings of Christianity as outlined by writers and theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Marcus Borg, Elaine Pagels, and Parker Palmer.

The Idea of Development in Africa: A History

Abstract: In The Idea of Development in Africa, Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon examine development theory and practice over time, asserting that development “arose directly out of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism” (275). This text not only situates development in a historical setting but also explains key theories and connects the past to the present. Ultimately, Decker and McMahon conclude, “Despite the rhetoric on saving, helping, and equalizing, the development industry has done more to maintain global and local inequalities than it has to dismantle them” (16). Thus they make a compelling argument for rethinking established development paradigms by centering the futures and visions that Africans have for themselves.This work builds on a body of literature that has focused on how the construction of both development expertise and the objects of development have been political projects. Unlike previous scholarship, Decker and McMahon emphasize the origins of what they call “the development episteme itself,” shifting the standard narrative away from the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions and instead locating those origins in Enlightenment philosophies and the “civilizing mission.” In doing so, the authors argue that the “logic of difference and differentiation is built into the foundations of development,” and they then show how these ideas have shaped policy and practice up to the present (4–5).Relying largely on published scholarly works, published primary sources, online reports, and news media, along with limited oral histories and archival research, The Idea of Development is broken down into three parts. Part 1 examines the origins of the development episteme in the nineteenth-century world, emphasizing its imperialist setting, knowledge production, and racist ideologies, and closing with a chapter calling for decolonizing development. Part 2 explores how these ideas have shaped colonial and postcolonial development practice in Africa, with chapters on the importance of science, African contestations of development, economic development theories, and nongovernmental organizations. Part 3 focuses on some specific development “problems” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Here Decker and McMahon take residential spaces, education, health care, and manufacturing as their case studies.This work is at its strongest when centering African ideas, explaining difficult concepts, and tying the past to the present. The section on African communities' vernacular notions of progress illustrates, for example, how various societies “have generated their own diverse meanings of development” (5). The authors' explanation of knowledge production—noting that “its collection and construction by individuals was deeply subjective”—will be especially helpful for undergraduate readers (42). Perhaps most important, this work emphasizes that the racist underpinnings of early colonial development have endured in more recent development discourse that distinguishes between the “developed” West and the “developing” countries of Africa.Such contributions will be of interest to students and scholars alike. The focus on the genesis and earlier history of development, as well as the accessibility of the writing, make this an especially appealing book for teaching. Readers of Agricultural History will also find much of relevance in this volume. With sidebars on the Amani Research Institute, the Tanganyikan groundnut scheme, usufruct land tenure, Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, and pastoralism, there is ample space devoted to agricultural development. Various chapters, particularly in part 3, delve into additional questions related to agriculture, such as land resettlement, agricultural commodities, and irrigation schemes.The book not only provides rich insights into an impressive number of development topics, but it also covers the history of development in Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. Writing such a sweeping history is no easy task and necessarily entails making some omissions. This monograph does tend to emphasize the more distant past as well as the present, with the mid- to late twentieth century—particularly, the rise of neoliberalism and the implementation of structural adjustment programs—garnering less attention.Even so, this is an important work and will be essential teaching material for courses on the history of development. The authors strike a delicate balance between writing a history that pushes scholarly understanding forward, while also making this work accessible to students. The epilogue persuasively argues, “Development is not the powerful edifice it claims to be; it is a holdover of colonialism that is quickly losing relevance in our current world” (288). The Idea of Development in Africa is a smart and engaging study, which will be of interest to scholars and students of African history, development history, agricultural history, and labor history.

Domestic Dystopias: Big Brother, Wife Swap and How Clean is Your House?

Abstract: This chapter examines the representation of domesticity in three contemporary televisual texts: the Channel 4 reality shows Big Brother (2000-), Wife Swap (2003-) and How Clean is Your House? (2003-). These programmes share an objective to demystify domesticity-to deconstruct the myth of domestic bliss and to expose an underside of domestic discontent. Popular culture is saturated with images of home, most conspicuously via the inherently domestic medium of television. In turn, reality television, says Germaine Greer, “is popular culture at its most popular” (2001, par. 4) and, as such, it has exploited the contemporary preoccupation with domesticity to excess: property, interior design, cookery and parenting programmes are pushing the traditional family sitcom from its domestic pedestal. Crucially, however, viewers are enticed to the reality television programmes discussed here not by the idealized images of home that defi ne so many popular representations of domesticity but, rather, by an invitation to indulge in overtly negative portrayals of the domestic. Here, reassuringly baked, caked and icing-sugared idylls of home clash with the shamelessly contentious and acrimonious conceptions of Channel 4: if Big Brother contrives a deliberately dysfunctional household, Wife Swap delights in family discord and confl ict, while How Clean is Your House? positively relishes offensive displays of domestic sloth. And such perverted depictions of domesticity represent high appeal for viewers; for there appears to exist, as this chapter explores, equal escapism in glimpses of the dystopian as in fantasies of the utopian. Introducing this discussion of domesticity is Henrik Ibsen’s own infamous portrayal of home. With its connotations of control, performance and observation, the motif of the doll’s house is central to a dialogue between feminism, domesticity and reality television-it is a model of the domestic that is reproduced and renovated in these contemporary texts. In turn, Ibsen’s celebrated heroine is the everywoman of this discussion: Nora has become synonymous with feminist domestic discourse and she provides a salient starting point for a reading of these contemporary texts. Feminism itself provides effective fuel for ‘home fi res’: the gender politics of domesticity feeds an enduring and infl ammatory debate and, whencombined with popular culture, ignites the fi ery confrontations that are sweeping reality television.

Casablanca Meets Star Wars: The Blakean Dialectics of Blade Runner

Abstract: Director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples warn that their adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is "a philosophical film," and they can be accused of attempting the real film adaptation of Moby Dick in that respect. For in the immodest guise of a noir/science fiction thriller, Blade Runner leaps from impeccable intricacies of mise-en-scene to questions about the nature of man, God, and beast, the meaning of existence, and the workings of the universe. It is to be expected that a film which intersects with the works of Philip K. Dick grapples with metaphysics, and it follows that in the eyes of many critics. Blade Runner is as pretentious and confusing as are Dick's novels. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the consistency with which the film exceeds Dick's feat of integrating metaphysical suppositions with style and form. In both Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream dialectical opposition is form and content; the hierarchal relationships of apparent contraries are self-consciously deconstructed for thematic purposes. The film expands this formulation by presenting the conflict of opposing styles and genres: film noir vs. expressionism and film noir vs. science fiction. Furthermore, the film's narrative mode poses additional reconciliatory demands on its audience as the classical narrative meets with the poetic. Blade Runner subverts the narrative act of the viewer (the urge for causal and temporal connection) as it depends upon that urge. The subsequent conflict posits the view that unity exists in a chaotic world, but is infinitely expunged by fragmentation. In other words, if we wish to speak in terms of theme, Blade Runner, is "about" coming to terms with the polar oppositions of the world and of the human psyche. It is also about the moral and perceptual ambiguity which results from this dual existence. The central supposition of dialectical contraries and the subsequent ambiguity is supported by a film in which apparent black and white poles bleed all over the screen into a permeating noir fog. The roots of the metaphors which flesh out the film's plot can be traced through Dick's research for his novel Man in the High Castle. He claims he was given the idea of Do Androids Dream while sifting through Nazi records. He writes of his discovery: There is amongst us something that is a bi-pedal humanoid. morphologically identical to the human being but which is not human. It is not human to complain, as one SS man did in his diary, that starving children are keeping you awake. And there, in the 40s, was born my idea that within our species is a bifurcation, a dichotomy between the truly human and that which mimics the truly human. Consequently, on one level. Blade Runner is about human duplication and empathy. The viewer is thrust into a future in which man can create a being in his own image through genetic engineering, an echo of the Frankenstein theme.2 This being not only mimics the truly human, but begins to exceed its creators in human passion and empathy. Throughout his works Dick creates worlds in which concepts can be dramatized by metaphor. This is not to say that he creates allegories for his beliefs; rather, he creates worlds where philosophical questions can be animated and allowed to play among themselves and between his readers and the text. This play is intensified in the world of Blade Runner. After the opening establishment of the eye motif and dystopian Los Angeles, for example. Holden finds Leon while interviewing for infiltrated renegade replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. The scene sets up the dichotomy of replicant vs. human, and blurs the distinction between the two. Antitheses are blended into ambiguity as the blade runner cop is emotionless and perfectly groomed and the suspected replicant is round-shouldered, scruffy, and unshaven with a receding chin and protruding midriff. Immediately the spectator's expectations are frustrated in trying to differentiate the human from the nonhuman. …