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.

Science fiction: A post-pandemic wilderness

Abstract: Paul McEuen relishes the final instalment of Margaret Atwood's sweeping trilogy about a dystopian world devastated by a 'hot bioform'.

“At Home with Zoe”: Becoming Animal in Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things

Abstract: This paper focuses on Charlotte Wood’s 2015 dystopian novel The Natural Way of Things. Set in an unnamed place in the Australian outback, it recounts the story of 10 girls in their late teens and early twenties who are kept prisoners by a mysterious corporate organisation for their sexual involvement with an array of powerful men. The novel’s title invites two main readings: the first, and perhaps more obvious, along gender lines; and the second, which will provide the backbone to my analysis, within the framework of the natural world, the animal kingdom in particular. The Natural Way of Things has been described as a study in contemporary misogyny and the workings of patriarchy. The ingrained sexism of society—the insidious, normalised violence against females, often blamed on them, glossing over male responsibility—is undoubtedly the central topic of Wood’s work. Without losing sight of gender issues, my approach to Wood’s novel is inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theories on the continuum nature–culture and the primacy of zoe—“the non-human, vital force of life”—over bios, or life as “the prerogative of Anthropos” (Rosi Braidotti). According to Braidotti, the current challenges to anthropocentrism question the distinction between these two forms of life, highlighting instead the seamless connection between the natural world and culture and favouring a consideration of the subject as embodied, nomadic and relational. My reading of The Natural Way of Things in light of Braidotti’s insights will be supplemented by an analysis of the novel in the context of transmodernity, both a period term and a distinct way of being in the world theorised by critics such as Rosa M. Rodriguez Magda and Marc Luyckx, who emphasise the relational, interdependent nature of contemporary times from a more human-centred perspective. The Natural Way of Things is also a story of female empowerment. This is especially the case with Yolanda Kovacs and Verla Learmont, the two protagonist women, who step out of their roles as victims and stand up to their guards. My analysis of the novel will revolve around these two characters and their different reactions to confinement and degradation. I conclude that although a more zoe-centred conception of the human subject that acknowledges the human–animal continuum should definitely be welcomed, literally “becoming animal”, as Yolanda does, deprives one of meaningful human relationality, embodied in the novel in Verla’s memories of her caring, empathic relationship with her father.

Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic

Abstract: A reprint from a 2018 issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature devoted to Marlon James, this essay engages two of the West Indian writer's novels, John Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women, under the rubric of the Gothic. By shifting focus from the violence of James's novels to the generic elements this violence engages, the essay argues that James's engagement with the Gothic better accounts for these two novels’ attention to issues of excessive violence, doubling, and feminine abjection and the way they perform a metafictional critique of the notion that nationalism can produce equitable sovereign subjectivity. While the Gothic offers James's interest in coercion, abjection, and the absence of choice a precise frame for rendering a world structured by neoliberalism, James also reworks the Gothic by offering a queerly affirmative version of its at times misogynistic interest in gender distinctions. Indeed, by ending all his novels with women as the figurative last person standing, James subverts the notion of the feminine abject as the Gothic trope associated with primordial chaos, presenting it instead as a possible way forward at a moment when the historical present is not seemingly graspable by existing paradigms.

Education as Utopian Method: Reimagining Education for a Post-alienated Labor World

Abstract: In this chapter, I employ a conception of Utopia as a method to examine the question; What could education become in a post-alienated labor world? Contemporary education has become a tool of social reproduction remaking the capitalist relations of production and their attendant inequalities. However, we are quickly approaching a moment in which the capitalist economy will no longer require the kind of workforce or reliance on technical rational knowledge it has required in the past. In this scenario, an education can be imagined that is freed from the constraining logic of the capitalist economy. Through the application of a utopian method, education becomes a kind of creative social practice in which a playful and imaginative conversation merges with real changes in the world. In a Utopian method, a wisdom of human flourishing is the intentional outcome of a hopeful struggle. This requires that the utopian practices of conversation, and imagination articulate a design space for the locus of fused horizons. A utopian method leads to a democratic multiplication of educational forms and the expansion of technique. No longer harnessed to the dystopia of a ‘one best system of schools’ education flourishes in the diversity that is human experience.