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.

“In This Wound of Life …”: Dystopias and Dystopian Tropes in Chenjerai Hove’s Red Hills of Home

Abstract: SummaryThis article is a reading of Chenjerai Hove’s poetry volume Red Hills of Home (1985) as a dystopia. It locates this text within the context of the evolving postcolonial realities of the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence. It argues that the text is informed by a dystopian import and sensibility in which forlornness, hopelessness, angst, bewilderment, pain, and betrayal mark the lived experiences of the mainly subaltern subjects who people its world which is fragmented and framed by larger forces beyond their control. It further argues that Hove mainly employs the figure of a dystopian family, together with the technique of defamiliarisation, to represent not only an existential dystopia, but also a dystopian postcolonial society, and an equally dystopian civilisation. So, it is through dystopia that Hove is able to fashion out a metalanguage with which to critique various aspects of human life and existence, Zimbabwe’s postcolonial conditions, and capitalist modernity. Because of Hove’s nativi...

Of death (and birth) of the universes: gender and science in pamela zoline's "the heat death of the universe”

Abstract: This essay approaches some issues recently raised in the arena of genre-informed criticism on women´s utopias, dystopias and science fiction, and responds to some of those issues, specifically with regard to “the need for further contemporary work connecting feminist SF and science theories, and the potential for critical synergies evoked by situating feminist SF as a creative form of science studies” (MERRICK, 2007). It does so by presenting a reading of Pamela Zoline´s “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), a story which has reached the status of a classic in feminist SF. Privileging an “ethnographic attitude” (HARAWAY, 2003), we look at the ways in which this short story creatively incorporates scientific practices and discourses in its elaborate composition by refashioning and expanding the meanings of the central concept it deals with: entropy. Drawing on earlier readings of Zoline´s text, we further argue that the juxtaposition of science/fiction as constructed by this narrative activates, expands and relativises our ways of thinking about the death (and birth of) universes by stressing the interplay of physical, biological, social, psychological and philosophical forces and perspectives. In order to accomplish this, the central entropy-informed tension between ordered and disordered systems is kept throughout the story masterfully by the deployment of narrative devices that maintain such suspension. Finally, we reflect on this fictional piece in relation to the scientific paradigms it envisions, and its functions on the formation of gender perceptions, paying particular attention to the politics, tensions, effects and stakes at play.

New York City as an Urban Specter in John Rechy's City of Night

Abstract: The world of Times Square was a world which I was certain I had sought out willingly --not a world which had summoned me. And because I believe that, its lure, for me, was much more powerful. John Rechy, City of Night (53) JOHN Rechy is primarily a Los Angeles novelist, and his Bodies and Souls (1983) is easily one of the best novels ever written about that city. Along with other novels like Numbers (1967), Marilyn's Daughter (1988), and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), Rechy has probed eloquently and efficaciously the human geographies of Los Angeles with an intense narrative discourse that few others have matched. (1) But Rechy's inaugural novel, The City of Night (1963), is strategically situated in New York City in its first long segment (approximately one fifth of the novel) after the introit involving the narrator's El Paso roots. One can speculate on the reasons for this: Rechy's own personal circumstances (after all, aren't all first novels essentially autobiographical?); the way in which parts of the novel were written for independent publication and many of the most important literary reviews are located in New York, making it reasonable to set a narrative in that city; and the way in which New York--well, really, Manhattan--in the sixties, while not free of homophobia and systematic police persecution, was the epicenter of the gay movement. This is true to the extent that, after World War II, also certainly long before but perhaps with less intensity, New York was where one ended up to reinvent oneself, no matter what the reasons were. The much vaunted, and much lamented, anonymity of the city, its seemingly infinite universes of human experience (including infinite and alluring sub-universes), the many ways in which it was the creative capital of the country, and the many but always legitimate economic opportunities were features that drew the restless in and enfolded them in its constantly mutating dynamic. To be sure, later for Rechy, City of Night and his subsequent fiction, Los Angeles will, as it had for other writers, also take on this role. But the dynamic is different, with the sun-drenched pollution alternating with a contaminated Eden to generate a sense of degradation and despair quite different from whatever the ugliest sides of New York represent. Certainly, however, the most important aspect of the presence of New York (that is, throughout here, really Manhattan) in Rechy's novel turns on the way in which New York City had, by the sixties, become both an emergently visible gay mecca and a gay dystopia. What I mean by this is that, first of all, New York had always had its extensive history of gay life (I am using the term "gay" here to designate the social subjects of all ranges of the concept of the queer), which had intensified with World War II and the function of New York as a transfer point on the East Coast of so many young Americans being transported to Europe, which prompted the development of sociocultural venues that one might assume such a concentration of wandering individuals would require, such as, quite simply, bars and dives. Secondly, I am referring to the way in which, with the rootlessness provoked by the war, the enormous changes in American society after the war (which included the beginning of a demand for minority rights of all stripes), and postwar prosperity, there was a confluence of factors that allowed New York to play a role as the first U.S. city with a vibrant gay life (see Chauncey; Kaiser for major accounts of New York gay life). While other U.S. cities quickly followed in assuming the role of "gay U.S. capitals," New York was always the prima inter pares in this regard (White inventories U.S. gay capitals and their distinctive features). Concomitantly, we are speaking here of the sheer numbers of individuals involved, coupled with growing demands for rights and recognition, and abetted by important New York intellectual circles (but not all of them: the infamous review of City of Night in The New York Review of Books, one of the city's newest literary trusts, demonstrated this [Chester; see Rechy's "Complaint" thirty years after Chester's review]). …

Review: My Name is Legion, For we are Many

Abstract: Legion By Kelly Richardson Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, New York February 16-June 9, 2013 As an exhibition title, Legion snugly fits around this collection of Kelly Richardson's video works. Including ruined landscapes that nod to the morbidity of human relationships with nature and technological "reality," her work addresses the marks of the human army that has scarred its way across the earth. However, "legion," recalling both biblical demons and mass militant forces, reflects not the work, but the audience. Richardson affirms that as humans, we are the legion responsible for shaping the scenes set austerely in front of us. Through works like Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), Legion explores the contemporary human relationship with environmental detriment. A thirty-minute video projection of a too-green hillside filmed in the English Lake District, Exiles evokes the pleasantries of nature; sounds of birds and bullfrogs imbue the scene with life, evoking ecosystems and natural community. However, Richardson overlays this hillside lake with continuously falling, digitally rendered balls of fire reminiscent of meteoric acid rain. Projected on a screen just big enough to encroach upon the human scale, Exiles typifies Richardson's address of environmental misuse. Though they are installations, her projected pieces read more like cinematic screens, windows, or portals--firmly placing scenes in front of the audience. Richardson uses the prescriptive "What if ..." of dystopian science fiction films to combat the eeriness of a hyperbolic hypothetical future with familiarity, gently leading viewers into sad acceptance of the state of the environment. Rather than making abrasive assertions designed to shock or blame, Richardson soberly levels with the audience, employing a dichotomy of doom and hope. The audience accepts the scenes of melancholy degeneration and understands that it is too late for anger. Knowing this, however, denies viewers satisfaction, and compels them to crave change. In front of these projections, their own shadows invade the image, and they confront the reality that they are part of the great army that has caused the depicted damage. However, a hopeful beam of light on a hilltop grants that the human legion also has power to rectify this injury. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This quiet, confrontational activism parallels Richardson's updated notion of the sublime. In her works, the majesty of untouched nature is present only as a ghost behind a veil of devastation. This new sublime looks unlike the wild and uplifting grandeur of nineteenth-century landscapes. The viewer no longer soars off a cliff over a glorious river valley. Richardson instead places viewers on solid, damaged ground stretched out accessibly before them. Nature remains overwhelming, but the sublime landscape becomes like a picture of a great beast brought down by a horde of insects. …