Topic
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.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on Ge Fei's Jiangnan Triology (2004-2011) and argue that human utopia is humanism, inherent to the awareness of social and historical crises, as opposed to the myths of Nation, Progress or Prosperity.
Abstract: Abstract Researchers have recently shown a growing interest for studies of anti-utopian fictions in Chinese, highlighting their critical value in history, society, and ideology. However the persistence of the utopian spirit beyond these dystopian representations has often been neglected. The present paper aims to explore this underlying utopianism by focusing on Ge Fei’s Jiangnan Triology (2004–2011), as it forms a significant paradigm on the issue, through an appeal for displacement, pointing out the importance in our reflections of moving from topography into the human dimension. This paper seeks to examine how human utopia is featured both in a literary and contextualized way, by arguing that utopianism is humanism, inherent to the awareness of social and historical crises, as opposed to the myths of Nation, Progress or Prosperity.
3 citations
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TL;DR: In the con/texts that this essay takes as circum-Caribbean, there is a complex tradition to the myth-making, myth-mocking appeal of the utopian bent.
Abstract: In the con/texts that this essay takes as circum-Caribbean, there is a complex tradition to the myth-making, myth-mocking appeal of the utopian bent. In his drama of the Haitian Revolution, The Tragedy of King Christophe, Martinique's Aime Cesaire has Vastey state the case both flamboyantly and precisely: "This extraordinary concretion of ours is situated at the focal point of every ebb and flow. That's where God has put us. Our back to the Pacific; before us Europe and Africa, on either side, the Americas." One apparent consequence of such variousness is that the circum-Caribbean forever promises to be, or risks being, itself only in patterns of crossbred genealogies that are as much Taino and Aztec as Hindi, Yoruba, and Congo. Moreover, the aw(e)ful plausibility that matter and mind can be reconstituted in ideal forms has produced its own array of dead ends and fresh beginnings, in circumstances that are shaped as much by Spanish Golden Age comedia as by the space-of-faith opposition that pits Babylon against Ethiopia in Rastafarian symbology. Christopher Columbus was no less engaged, accordingly, when in his third voyage he found himself in the "Terrestrial Paradise" and freshwater spaces between Trinidad and Venezuela, and there conjoined the myth-making, myth-mocking tradition that would be equally manifested when slave-hunting dogs were bred in Cuba or Jamaica for use in Haiti. It is not for nothing, then, that a Derek Walcott would resolutely explore the view that the New World was "wide enough for a new Eden / of various Adams"; or that a Pablo Neruda would conceive of the circum-Caribbean at once as the "waist / where two oceans marry" and as the "gathering place for the tears"-also "of two oceans." Poetics Today 15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:49:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 686 Poetics Today 15:4 The myth-making and myth-mocking identification of the Caribbean/ New World with the utopian bent has a complex tradition. The pushpull consequences have included passing comments on the utopian propensity, as in, say, Roger Garaudy's Alternative Future, with its observation that "the birth of capitalism and the sudden broadening of man's horizon during the Renaissance directly influenced Thomas More to situate his Utopia (1516) in Cuba, Campanella his City of the Sun (1623) in Peru, and Bacon to write The New Atlantis" (Garaudy 1974: 107). The tradition also generated a set of critical filters through which Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, for one, dramatized the conversion and the clash of cultures in his 1598 El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon (The new world discovered by Christopher Columbus). As it is, then, Lope de Vega's comedia is one in which we get to hear the Devil's dystopian complaint at the Court of Providence that the Columbus enterprise would be nothing but an act of usurpation in a world that could be neither moral nor new. "Oh, Blessed court," he protests, "why are you sending Columbus / to renew my evil deeds?" But this curious "boca de maldad" (voice of evil) despair, who begs the court, "No me hagas este agravio" (Do not inflict this injury on me), provokes a response that is couched in terms of manifest destiny: "La conquista se ha de hacer" (The conquest is fated). Thereafter, the pattern of responses becomes one in which "oro," "armas," and "indios espantados" (gold, arms, and terrified Indians) are as foregrounded as "una Cruz grande verde" (a large green Cross [Vega 1965 {1598}: 34-35]). From the beginning, then, dystopian sub/versions were always part and parcel of the onslaught of idealism and the attendant assault on paradise in the Americas. And such is the case in chronicle after chronicle-as is readily apparent in the extraordinary blindness and insight with which Columbus reported on his first Caribbean contacts at "the Great Landing in Barcelona" in April 1493, an event that Alejo Carpentier has aptly described, in The Harp and the Shadow, as the "first great spectacle of the West Indies, with authentic men and animals presented before the public of Europe" (Carpentier 1990 [1979]: 122): I, Christo Ferens [Bearer of Christ], have been in the land of the Great Khan from where the spices come. The people are loving and gentle and fit to be Christians. They are docile and will make good slaves. The distance is not half what the mathematicians would have it. (Foss 1974: 18) Relevant, too, is the con/fusion of values that we get in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's latter-day (1535-57) history of the Indies. From Oviedo, as from the more celebrated Bartolome de Las Casas (although the two men were remarkably divided in their allegiances), This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:49:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Johnson ? Inventions of Paradise 687 we learn that "the New World ... was a victim of the 'conquistadors, who would more accurately be called depopulators or squanderers of the new lands,' and of 'private soldiers, who like veritable hangmen or headsmen or executioners or ministers of Satan [caused] various and innumerable cruel deaths . . . as uncountable as the stars."' Thus did Oviedo pass judgment even as he was himself declaring that gunpowder used against Indians ("dirty, lying cowards who commit suicide out of sheer boredom, just to ruin the Spaniards by dying") should be considered incense to God (Sale 1990: 158; see also Keen 1990 [1971]: 79; Hanke 1971: 106).1 Of course, so conflated a judgment does have a somewhat peculiar affiliation with, say, the view of Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in whose historia of 1552 "the discovery of the Indies" would be represented as "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it" (Sale 1990: 224).2 Ultimately, in the more or less balanced accounts of the Caribbean that result from Derek Walcott's getting down to business in one of his memories-of-the-future "New World" poems, we learn that
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TL;DR: The Witches sub-series of the Discworld series as mentioned in this paper is a collection of ten novels and one short story comprising the Witches subseries, which is largely concerned with the historical imagination of gender, and the major theme of the Witches stories is the protagonists' quest to balance performing the roles expected of them while still pursuing their own desires.
Abstract: Terry Pratchett (1) Has been writing the satirical fantasy Discworld series since 1983 and has published forty novels. Over thirty years of writing and publishing, the historical context of Discworld, and the broader fantasy genre, has changed significantly, providing a never-ending stream of ideas which Pratchett incorporates into his fantastical world. Simultaneously, Pratchett's style has matured and evolved from mere parodies to engagement with diverse questions of philosophy, history, and politics. Ten novels and one short story comprise the Witches sub-series, which is largely concerned with the historical imagination of gender. Specifically, the major theme of the Witches stories is the protagonists' quest to balance performing the roles expected of them while still pursuing their own desires. This narrative produces interventions into both genre fantasy as well as our own (historical) imagination of gender. Through these interventions, Pratchett demonstrates to readers that gendered narratives play a constricting force in our lives and that freedom comes when we create the power to subvert or break from constructed narratives. I will make my argument in four parts: Firstly I will consider gender in fantastical literature and establish the context of Discworld's intervention; secondly I will examine how historical gender archetypes are transcended by the witches of Discworld; I will then consider the way in which Discworld intervenes in historical discourses on gender, using Judith Butler's application of the Foucaultian concept of genealogy to the history of gender; finally I will draw upon the actions of Tiffany Aching in order to demonstrate Butler's concept of 'subversive performances' as a method by which gender archetypes are transcended. 1 GENDER IN FANTASTICAL LITERATURE AND THE CONSENSUS FANTASY UNIVERSE From Ursula Le Guin's powerful exploration of sexual and gender identity through an androgynous race of humans in The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 to Starhawk's 1993 juxtaposition of a dystopian and patriarchal Los Angeles against a utopian eco-feminist San Francisco in the post-apocalyptic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, gender has long been a powerful source of imagination for fantastical literature. What is important about both of these books as well as the enduring fascination with gender in fantastical literature is the way in which gender is conceptualized and treated by authors. This process has massive implications for the histories and futures which construct their fantastic worlds, just as it does in ours. In 1960, Kingsley Amis went so far as to claim that: the sexes are far less divided in this way than we all make them out to be [and] an ideology which turns one sex into a norm of humanity, and the other into a divergence from that norm, has got a lot to be said against it. [...] [A]s things are, the only kind of fiction in which [ideas like female emancipation] could be deployed is science fiction. (89) (2) Despite this potential of fantastical literature to provide a unique forum for imagining worlds with alternative histories of gender, texts that deal with gender equality and female emancipation are a minority, especially within the fantasy genre. For the majority of popular fantasy, from the modern Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to mythologies of King Arthur and Dracula, gender remains a problematic and conservative force. These popular and cult texts draw upon and constitute an inter-subjective, evolving world with "public domain plot items," which Pratchett calls the "consensus fantasy universe" (Why Gandalf Never Married). Because the consensus fantasy universe is an intersubjective imaginary, it is dependent on each reader's context--to some readers it might look a lot like Middle-earth while to others it might take on the shape of the world of Camelot. Regardless of the specific form it takes, and the particular worlds that shape the reader's and author's context, the consensus fantasy universe represents a mash-up of canonical fantasy worlds. …
3 citations
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11 Feb 2013
3 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, an anthropological theory of praxis is proposed to account for multiple competing imaginations and how and why some become prevalent over others in daily life, in a dialectical process of reflection and action.
Abstract: Across the globe, we are seeing a popular shift of appeal from a liberal‐humanitarian imagination of the world, or even a communist‐socialist ideal, to one that is more conservative and often called ‘right‐wing populist’. In the ethnographic context analysed here, a utopian movement for revolutionary social change, led by Marx‐Lenin and Mao‐inspired Naxalite guerrillas, that once had a wide appeal in parts of India, is superseded by a more conservative utopian imagination of Hindutva forces. In exploring the Indian Maoist case, I suggest that dystopia is embedded within utopia. If those engaged in utopian social transformation seek to challenge prevailing ideology to transform people’s actions, it is equally possible for their utopian imagination to retreat into ritual that not only bears little relevance to most people but may also be potentially harmful and pave the way for other ideals to become prevalent. In analysing this Indian case, the paper suggests that we develop an anthropological theory of praxis, one that deals not only with how imaginations to change the world become realised in practice, but also accounts for multiple competing imaginations and how and why some become prevalent over others in daily life, in a dialectical process of reflection and action.
3 citations