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.

Underworlds and Otherworlds in The Thousand and One Nights

Abstract: While concepts of utopia and dystopia are foreign to the world of The Thousand and One Nights, there are nonetheless several tales that portray a world or universe fashioned in a manner that shares some similarities with utopian ideals; that is, an all-encompassing vision of perfect coherence and order. The story of ‘[Hdot]āsib Karīm al-dīn and the Queen of the Serpents,’ along with its enframed stories of ‘Bulūqiyā’ and ‘Jānshāh,’ and the story of ‘The City of Brass’ contain Islamized versions of a widely-diffused literary topos: the descent to the underworld. These ‘underworlds’ or otherworldly realms represent visions of the universe shaped by a renunciant, ascetic view of the individual's relation to God. The stories present a theological vision and a geographical space that embodies that vision. Like other literary descents or quests, then, these Islamic versions also result in an awareness of the protagonist's (and by extension, the reader's) own mortality. The nature of these particularly ...

The Struggle between Utopia and Dystopia in Writing for Children and Young Adults

Abstract: I find two governing principles in children’s writing, particularly science fiction. The first is the child’s warning to the writer: “If nothing happens in this story, it’s boring!” No matter how intellectually stimulating to the constructor of a future world an idea may seem, if it does not connect with the young reader, it will not work. Above all, there must be a gripping plot that answers this question: “What would happen if all this went wrong?” In other words, dystopia creates plot! But, acting as a rein on the writer’s imagination of worlds spoiled and broken through human greed and hubris, there is the dictum that I came across early in my writing life: “You may lead a child into the darkness, but you must never turn out the light.”

Shakespeare and the Undead

Abstract: The postmodern collapsing of generic restrictions has enabled Shakespeare to migrate much more comprehensively across previously sealed boundaries, into popular genres such as crime fiction, paranormal romance, dystopian fable, and supernatural fantasy. New methods of consuming literature have transformed the nature of readership into an interactive participation. In contemporary fiction, Shakespeare is as likely to be found killing vampires, as writing poems and plays. This chapter is centered on the work of the Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture Research Project. The project relates the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change. This work reveals the creative potentiality of a Shakespeare liberated from the academy and thrown wide open to diverse communities of users.

Environmental dystopia versus sustainable development utopia: roles of businesses, consumers, institutions, and technologies

Abstract: This chapter contrasts an environmental dystopia scenario with a sustainable development utopia scenario. The dystopia is here labeled “1984” in order explicitly to evoke George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) repressive totalitarian regimes – which might result from global environmental catastrophe. The original forecast for “1984” was, in effect, perpetual war among super-powers. H. G. Wells’ vision of the future might be characterized as “anarchy” rather than structured perpetual war (Rothbard, 2013). The utopia is here labeled “Brave New World” in order to evoke Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) satire of scientific and social progress. The dystopia is a “nightmare” and the utopia is a “dream” (Scott, 2017). Utopian thinking may even involve a “leap of faith” going well beyond a “dream” (Kingstone, 2017). The dystopian nightmare would be an environmental “waste land” (Podgajna, 2014). The purpose of the contrast is to help sharpen understanding of two extreme alternatives for the future: either the world environment, whether slowly or more dramatically, begins to fail toward a global catastrophe tipping point; or the world environment, whether slowly or more dramatically, begins to improve away from such a global catastrophe tipping point (Morello, 2012; Russill, 2015). Some scientific estimates concerning the achievement of the climate change goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement in force November 4, 2016 (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2015) are quite pessimistic (Associated Press, 2016; Jones and Warner, 2016). This skepticism concerning governmental policy change outcomes presumably throws greater burden on businesses, consumers, non-governmental institutions,

After the Event: Toward a Post-Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit

Abstract: ON THE LIMITS OF THE EVENT Habit, Structure, Event: recent theory would privilege the later concept over the former two. As concepts, habit and structure suggest fixity, rigidity, inattentiveness, unconsciousness--certainly not the stuff of which radical political transformation is usually made. If anything, habit and structure are typically understood to be akin to ideology. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus as an embodied conception of ideology in which a person's class position is marked by a series of unconscious dispositions, habits, and beliefs. Similarly, Althusser invokes the idea of structure to theorize the workings of capitalism and the reproduction of its conditions of production. Event, as a concept, on the other hand is transformational, sexy, revolutionary. It is the unpredictable, the new, the contingent, that which gives us hope in the face of capitalism's overwhelming systematicity. Certainly this is how the concept has functioned in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. (1) Yet, what are the conceptual limitations that structure the concept of the event itself? What if its alterity to all structure, which makes it excellent for negating the present, also limits its ability to imagine the future. What if the emphasis on the event's novelty suggests that the concept is haunted by the very forms of capitalist innovation and novelty that it is designed to negate? What if our refusal to think beyond the event is symptomatic of the capitalist colonization of the future that Maurizio Lazzarato argues is central to the logic of financialization and debt? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, it does not negate the event so much as mark its limits as a concept. The event is thus both necessary and insufficient. A genuine left alternative will need to think what the anti-capitalist or post-capitalist future holds after the dynamic negation produced by the eruption of the event. In doing so, we may find ourselves returning to those very unsexy terms that the theory of the event seemed to negate: habit and structure. Such is the gambit of the following essay. Rather than merely figurations of containment, ideology, and constraint, habit and structure can also be concepts around which we can organize a post-capitalist or anti-capitalist future. IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT Empire and multitude; capitalism and schizophrenia; reification and utopia; fundamental fantasy and its traversal; the virtual and the actual; being and event; one and zero: much radical theory seems to be caught in a binary logic. This binary logic is absolutely necessary even as it is regularly eschewed. While perhaps only Jameson and Zizek are honest enough to locate the generation of such a logic at its Hegelian source, theory seems, at its most radical, to require a negative force powerful enough for, as Benjamin Noys puts it, "a practice of the necessary destruction of existent positivities" (Persistence 14). (2) Given the way in which capitalism, and its attendant aesthetic and philosophical mode, what Mark Fisher terms "capitalist realism," works to colonize the present and the future, such a negation (conceptual or actual, violent or, hopefully, non-violent) seems fundamental to imagining, and more importantly, producing a different, just, and sustainable future (7). Thus we have the proliferation of theories of the event in the present. There are any number of ways we can read this proliferation. At its most dispiriting, theories of the event seem willfully counterfactual. They are a way of holding on to the possibility of a radical break, a locus of unpredictable possibility and revolutionary change in a period (whether we call it capitalist realism, post-postmodernism, neoliberalism, or just more of good old postmodernism) that seems only fixated on an ever-worsening more of the same. If dystopia, with its four horsemen, financialization, austerity, biopolitical control, and environmental devastation, seems to be the only game in town (and here is where a periodization that distinguishes our own moment from the giddiness of eighties, and nineties, postmodernism or neoliberalism makes sense), then theories of the event are a way to still hold open the possibility of something other, something better, some global possibility that is not just a slow slide into collective suicide. …