Utopia/Dystopia

Conditions of Historical Possibility
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-691-14698-0
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 227 mm, Gewicht: 462 g

The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gordin, Michael D

Tilley, Helen

Prakash, Gyan

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Gesellschaftstheorie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Futurologie (Interdisziplinär)
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtsphilosophie, Philosophie der Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time 1

PART ONE: ANIMA

CHAPTER 1: Fredric Jameson

Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future 21

CHAPTER 2: Jennifer Wenzel

Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the Nineteenth- Century Southern African Frontier 45

CHAPTER 3: Dipesh Chakrabarty

Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India 73

CHAPTER 4: Luise White

The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian Independence and the Place of Race in Decolonization 94

CHAPTER 5: Timothy Mitchell

Hydrocarbon Utopia 117

PART TWO: ARTIFICE

CHAPTER 6: John Krige

Techno- Utopian Dreams, Techno- Political Realities: The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom 151

CHAPTER 7: Marci Shore

On Cosmopolitanism, the Avant- Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Central Europe 176

CHAPTER 8: David Pinder

The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and the Street in Modernist Urbanism 203

CHAPTER 9: Igal Halfin

Stalinist Confessions in an Age of Terror: Messianic Times at the Leningrad Communist Universities 231

CHAPTER 10: Aditya Nigam

The Heterotopias of Dalit Politics: Becoming- Subject and the Consumption Utopia 250

List of Contributors 277

Index 281

Über Autor(innen)

Michael D. Gordin is associate professor of history at Princeton University. Helen Tilley teaches history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Prince- ton University.