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.

‘You just know when the world is about to break apart’: Utopia, Dystopia and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

Abstract: In her article ‘Survivor’s Tale’ Sarah Hall, the author of The Carhullan Army (2007a), states that ‘[f]or its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster’ (Hall, 2007b). Raffaella Baccolini expresses a similar sentiment asserting that the function of dystopia ‘is to warn readers about the possible outcomes of our present world and entails an extrapolation of key features of contemporary society’ (2003, p. 115). The Carhullan Army can be seen as a proper attempt to imagine a possible and plausible future for the historical circumstances under which the author is writing. In the future society depicted by Hall, one can identify an amplification of contemporary Britain, a dystopian portrayal of what it might become, crippled by economic collapse, fighting resource wars and introducing increasingly draconian legislation to control a deteriorating domestic security situation, all set against a backdrop of escalating global warming and rising sea levels.

Escaping the Panopticon: Utopia, Hegemony, and Performance in Peter Weir's The Truman Show

Abstract: Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) has been studied as an example of Debord's theory of the spectacle; as such, many theorists have shown how Truman is a com- modifi ed object constructed for "entertainment" for the masses, also noting how we ourselves are complicit in the consumption of media that dehumanize. In this essay, the author argues that, while a decided exemplar of postmodernism's "society of the spectacle," the fi lm is also a corporealization of poststructuralist Michel Foucault's ( Discipline ) concept of the panopticon , illustrating how a consideration of social spaces (mental, medical, penal, laboral, educational) yields a fuller understanding of Truman's predicament as (un)knowing prisoner/performer. Through an analysis of power, ideology, hegemony, and whiteness as they are re-presented in The Truman Show , we can more thoroughly articulate Truman's condition as a panoptic object who is regulated and hegemonized under the watchful eyes of a Master—himself synecdochic of Authority, Reason, and Truth—and those of a voracious public. The result is an indeterminate, postmodern, dystopian vision of mediated masses and the power apparatuses they/we wield through the act of watching .

Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia

Abstract: Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic films that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.

Maternal back/grounds in Children of Men: Notes toward an Arendtian biopolitics

Abstract: This article intervenes in readings of Cuaron's Children of Men that privilege the psychic and political trajectory of the film's anti-hero, Theo Faron. Inspired by comments about the importance of the cinematic background and the biopolitical order it represents, I engage the material, corporeal dimensions of in/fertility in the film and take the 'race/reproduction bind' (Weinbaum) as central to biopolitical analysis. I interpret the miraculously pregnant illegal immigrant, Kee, in relation to two intersecting strands of fiction and theory: a lineage of dystopian speculative fiction on the one hand, and transatlantic studies on the other. Through a sustained consideration of 'grounds' and 'backgrounds' as they appear in both strands of work, I generate a more elastic conception of 'background'. Such an analysis opens up new angles of approach for biopolitical theorising by foregrounding two figures - the reproductive female and the child - that embody generativity in excess of the now familiar biopolitical category of Homo sacer, or bare life (Agamben). I conclude by showing how the film resonates with Hannah Arendt's enigmatic principle of natality as a possible point of departure for biopolitical analysis. I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future. - M argaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale , 84 In this sense, in its need for beginners that it may be begun anew, the world is always a desert. - H annah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203 In his response to the film adaptation of P.D. James's story of a childless and dystopian Britain, Slavoj Žižek observes that Children of Men (Cuaron US/UK 2006) is a film in which 'the background persists' ('Clash'). Zahid Chaudhary, too, argues that the film's 'structure of visibility (is one) in which the back- ground of the frame, rather than the putative object of cinematic focus, carries the weight of signification' (80). Both thinkers are interested in how the film's background coheres into a violent, uncannily familiar biopolitical order - one in which camps and cages are symptoms of national lockdown and the words 'homeland security' justify the forcible confinement of refugees. My aim here is to extend critical discussion of Children's cinematic background by focusing on

Future Tense: The Problem of South African Apocalyptic Fiction

Abstract: In addition to introducing this seminar of five contributions concerning South African apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, this article contextualizes and surveys the history of our literature of pessimistic prediction. It characterizes the representation of ‘dark horizons’ as predominantly the expression of white political, cultural and existential anxieties. Given this understanding, the argument considers the ideological valence and import of this literature. In particular, it explores relations between political history and affect, suggesting that apocalyptic prediction depends on a teleology that inhibits an ethical understanding of the complexities of South African political history. The article goes on to consider the creative and critical dangers of circumscribing the apocalyptic imagination and concludes with a defence of public pessimism.