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.

Dystopian Narratives: Encounters with the Perverse Sadomasochistic Universe

Abstract: In a number of dystopian novels that I explore, including Orwell’s (1949) 1984 and Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World, I identify themes of soul murder, destruction of differences, murder of reality, and attacks on the parental couple as a generative twosome. In my view, dystopian fiction captures, thus, many facets of the perverse sadomasochistic core. I demonstrate that the leaders of dystopian societies are fueled by a desire to debase and eventually eliminate the feeding mother, the Oedipal father, and the creative parental couple by becoming god-like creators of a new and idealized fecal universe. Although dystopian narratives tend to locate the catastrophe in a future social disaster, they represent a psychological breakdown that has already occurred in the past and is, therefore, present in the individual’s internal world. The dystopian narrative enables this internal catastrophe to be projected into a future plot and a cast of characters that stand for both victims and perpetrators in the int...

Dystopian Cybernetic Environment in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract: Cybernetics is particularly well-suited to cultural history since it resonated with an American cultural mood that included World War II anxieties and worries that communism indicated that human beings could degenerate into unthinking, perfectly intelligent machines. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) illustrates people who become enslaved to a controlling system of cybernetics that carries out its power through time and war. In this study, I examine Slaughterhouse-Five in which the cybernetic system creates a dystopian society and reduces human beings into obedient robots. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five demonstrates that cybernetics as a metaphor for control of the mind leaves no space for individuals to decide for their own lives. This analysis investigates the ways through which cybernetics manipulates human beings in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

A Study of Fashion Influenced by Dystopian Ideas

Abstract: This study investigates the relationship between dystopian ideas and fashion since the century and examines the social meaning of fashion influenced by dystopian ideas. From the 1900s to the 1950s, the idea of dehumanization by authoritarian governments and technology gave rise to fashion for freedom and self-introspection, which includes surrealistic fashion and beat style. In the 1980s and 1990s, a society marked by monopolistic power and the hi-tech control of humans was regarded as dystopia. It influenced a fashion that expressed dehumanization by hi-tech means such as cyberpunk style and designs that depicted or used electronic elements. The ongoing fear of ecological disaster since the late century also influenced designers to present collections concerned with environmental problems. Designers have created designs with printed messages on environmental issues or designs that express environmental devastation, and protective designs that use hi-tech fabrics or mechanical devices. Fashion influenced by dystopian ideas expressed contemporary fears, provided a critical view of society through defamiliarization, and sought problem-solving actions and alternatives to change or cope with the dystopian situation. Dystopian fashion gave society a chance to face contemporary problems and pursue a better society.

Hope in Dystopian Times: In the Heart of the Valley of Love and the Limits of Cold War Racial Liberal Ocularcentrism

Abstract: This essay situates Cynthia Kadohata’s 1992 novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love alongside the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission Report) to explore the afterlife and the counterlives of US Cold War racial politics. Scholars have argued that the Cold War was characterized by a marked interest from the emerging liberal state to address an ongoing racial crisis, most notably signaled by the 1960s urban riots. Rather than simply approach the Kerner Report as state policy that resolved urban crisis, this essay reads the report as a dystopian text that cultivated an antiracist mode of perception through an affect of fear that fixed acts of “seeing” race through bodily difference and urban space. Subsequently, I study how In the Heart ’s critical dystopia provides alternative modes of perception to engage with the vexed role of visibility as a regulative and emancipatory force. By positioning Kadohata’s critical dystopia against the logics of the Kerner Report, I rethink the genre to invigorate the politics of visuality and hope for retheorizing urban insurrection, cross-racial solidarity, and antiblack racism.

National Identity as the Arena of Constellations of Nationalism and De-Nationalism in American Dystopian Novels

Abstract: This study aims to dismantle how national identity becomes the arena of a constellation of Nationalism and de-nationalism in some dystopian fiction. The national identity described as a factor forming Nationalism is one of the fields of Nationalism and de-nationalism that always appears in American dystopian novels. A mutually beneficial two-way relationship between the state and the people is essential to build state nationalism. The fading of Nationalism as a result from government’s oppression was revealed by Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Westerfeld’s Uglies, Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Roth’s Divergent. The main problem of this article is to find out how the national identity becomes the arena of constellations between Nationalism and de-nationalism. The significance of this study is to reveal the Nationalism and de-nationalism through the constellations of national identity through American dystopian novels. Using Derrida’s deconstruction theory, the constellations appear in binary opposition as follows: country versus people; ruler versus society; regulation or oppression versus freedom; power versus weakness; independence versus dependence; intelligence versus stupidity; manipulative party versus receptive party; and global versus local. The main finding of this analysis in that the oppression and totalitarianism of the Government have eroded people’s identity, which turns the sense of Nationalism to de-Nationalism.