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.

Environmental dystopias: Margaret Atwood and the monstrous child

Abstract: The future of childhood is often described in terms of utopian thinking. Here, the turn is towards dystopia as a fertile source of wild imaginings about the future. The dystopian literary fictions featured here act as a message and are projections of an uneasy future requiring a reader to see the present differently. Such projections make reading dangerous as they create an alternative world often disorderly and dismissive of contexts that are familiar and safe. In these scenarios, the child is often a key figure. In the work by Atwood (Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam), the world is an environmental nightmare. The focus is on MaddAddam, in which the child is an object of desire and both monstrous and redemptive. A reading of MaddAddam as a posthuman text is undertaken and it is argued that Atwood's dystopia creates a discourse of monstrosity (both weird and beautiful) that contaminates thoughts about the child/children/childhood and the future.

Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract: 2 Those who see Offred as a rebel, such as Michele Lacombe, Hilde Staels, and David S. Hogsette, cite her irony, her language play, her insistence on retaining personal memories, and even the fact that she \"wrote\" the Tale in the first place as subversive.1 For Coral Ann Howells and others such as Hilda Staels, storytelling is Offred’s means of survival and resistance, reinforcing her identity and challenging those who would silence her (93). The problem with this view is that she did not in fact \"write\" anything; as numerous critics have reminded us, the text we have is a much later reconstruction — by male scholars with not very feminist opinions — of audiotaped fragments. Offred commits nothing to paper because she cannot and she would be in serious trouble if she tried. Similarly, Jeanne Campbell Reesman argues that Offred’s \"voice offers a moving testament to the power of language to transform reality in order to overcome oppressive designs imposed on human beings\" (6). While it may be true that Offred transforms her own reality, Gilead remains as fictionally real as ever, and as the Historical Notes tell us it gets even worse after Offred’s account (e.g., 316). Carol L. Beran says that \"Offred’s power is in language\" (71), but we need to ask how much power that truly is. If this is resistance, as J. Brooks Bouson notes, it is a very silent and ineffectual kind (147).

Eco-Dystopia: Reproduction and Destruction in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Abstract: This essay argues that Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake participates in a vibrant debate among scholars of science, animal, and feminist studies. Though traditional readings of Oryx and Crake emphasize the novel’s critique of capitalist science, this essay demonstrates the ways in which the novel criticizes ecotopianism. By critiquing both capitalist science and ecotopianism, Oryx and Crake highlights the complexity of knowledge production and cautions the reader against sweeping plans for the elimination of suffering, regardless of whether those plans are driven by economics, science, or environmentalism.

Immigrants, Racial Citizens, and the (Multi)Cultural Politics of Neoliberal Los Angeles

Abstract: THE CHANGING RACIAL LANDSCAPE OF LOS ANGELES EVIDENT BY THE 1990S EMERGED under the shadow of dramatic economic and social changes that were decades in the making. The deindustrialization of Los Angeles, most memorably the shutdown of Bethlehem Steel, marked the decline of what had seemed to be a stalwart industrial economy; it contributed to accelerating rates of unemployment in working-class communities and a massive reduction of the formerly unionized, mainly male, workforce (see, e.g., Oliver et al., 1993; Soja, 1996; Sassen, 1998). For example, between 1990 and 1992, over 600,000 jobs were lost in Los Angeles County, most of which were held by African-American men. The concurrent growth of the service sector and light manufacturing (such as the garment industry) offered work opportunities to over 2,800,000 Asian and Latino immigrants who had come to Los Angeles during the 1990s. (1) With the growth of these communities, Los Angeles became the first and largest U.S. city without a claim to a white majority population. This reality gave rise to a multiculturalist discourse of inclusion and anti-immigrant nativist fervor that was reflected in the greater militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the demand that only English be spoken in schools and in government offices, and the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, which tried to deny undocumented immigrants access to health care and education. (2) This article will explore the contradictory and paradoxical claims of the multiculturalist discourse in Los Angeles, which racially differentiated Asian and Latino immigrant populations from each other and from fully enfranchised citizens. These demographic and economic changes in Los Angeles were accompanied by representations of Los Angeles as a uniquely American space during the 1980s and 1990s. It is figured as emblematic of the achievement of wealth, progress, and inclusion in the U.S., but also as a space of (racialized) conflict and a dystopia of Third World encroachment. (3) An analysis of Los Angeles, which Saskia Sassen (2001) believes exemplifies a "global city," demonstrates the convergences and contradictions of neoliberal globalization; multiculturalist discourses that define nationalist cultural politics in the era of neoliberalism also contribute to this study. (4) Multiculturalism emerged in the late 1980s and quickly became the dominant discourse to address the lack of racial diversity in media representations, curriculum, and in telling national history. Proponents argue that multiculturalist projects are a corrective to histories of racial repression that marginalize the cultural contributions of people of color, an erasure with ongoing, broad political implications. It is imagined as a continuation of the civil rights projects of the 1960s and 1970s, although this version is softer and easier to digest. Antiracist critics of multiculturalism, while agreeing that intervening in curriculums and emphasizing diversity are important, worry that multiculturalism represents "racism not as a form of institutional inequality, but as a matter of different mutually exclusive ways of life which must be preserved" (Davis, 1996: 45). Angela Davis (Ibid.) argues that women's rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and native sovereignty rights are regarded as beyond the purview of multicultural politics because they are not part of "cultural traditions." In this article, I argue that multiculturalism organizes difference and shapes political imperatives to erase material histories of oppression by discursively and politically situating the civil rights history of the 1960s as the "true" beginning of a U.S. (multicultural) nation. Legal scholars Rachel F. Moran (1998) and Kevin R. Johnson (1998) offer excellent analyses of how the gains of the civil rights movements are inadequate to address Latino conditions. The civil rights paradigm in Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny, they argue, privileges the particular African-American history of segregation. …