When the best of intentions take us down that well-known road, how can we survive the law of unintended consequences? An alien physicist, a lonely old woman, a space-faring maintenance worker, and others answer that question in these stories.

Central to the idea of a perfect society is the idea that communities must be strong and bound together with shared ideologies. However, while this may be true, rarely are the individuals that comprise a community given primacy of place as central to a strong communal theory. This volume moves away from the dominant, current macro-level theorising on the subject of identity and its relationship to and with globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual’s relationship with utopia so as to offer new interpretive approaches for engaging with and examining utopian individuality. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture, and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature.

This anthology is a symposium on queer space and queer utopias. Through the presentation of empirical work by contemporary queer theorists this book aims to create a critical dialogue about the emergence of queer spaces and the ways in which they aim to further queer futurity.

Radical political thought of the 20th century was dominated by utopia, but the failure of communism in Eastern Europe and its disavowal in China has brought on the need for a new model of utopian thought. This book thus seeks to redefine the concept of utopia and bring it to bear on today's politics. The original essays, contributed by key thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Nancy, highlight the connection between utopian theory and practice. The book reassesses the legacy of utopia and conceptualizes alternatives to the neo-liberal, technocratic regimes prevalent in today's world. It argues that only utopia in its existential sense, grounded in the lived time and space of politics, can distance itself from mainstream ideology and not be at the service of technocratic regimes, while paying attention to the material conditions of human life. Existential Utopia offers a new and exciting interpretation of utopia in contemporary culture and a much-needed intervention into the philosophical and political discussion of utopian thinking that is both accessible to students and comprehensive.

In this book, Morris explores the intersection of curriculum studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalysis, using the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation. Arguing that memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed, she examines the ways in which the Holocaust is represented in texts written by historians and by novelists. For both, psychological transference, repression, denial, projection, and reversal contribute heavily to shaping personal memories, and may therefore determine the ways in which they construct the past. The way the Holocaust is represented in curricula is the way it is remembered. Interrogations of this memory are crucial to our understandings of who we are in today's world. The subject of this text--how this memory is represented and how the process of remembering it is taught--is thus central to education today.

Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

This collection addresses the important function of utopianism in social and political philosophy and includes debate on what its future role will be in a period dominated by dystopian nightmare scenarios.

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters argues that Huxley is not a man of letters engaged in politics, but a political thinker who chooses literature to spread his ideas. His preference for the dystopian genre is due to his belief in the tremendous impact of dystopia on twentieth-century political thought. His political thinking is not systematic, but this does not stop his analysis from supplying elements that are original and up-to-date, and that represent fascinating contributions of political theory in all the spheres that he examines from anti-Marxism to anti-positivism, from political realism to elitism, from criticism of mass society to criticism of totalitarianism, from criticism of ideologies to the future of liberal democracy, from pacifism to ecological communitarianism. Huxley clearly grasped the unsolved issues of contemporary liberalism, and the importance of his influence on many twentieth-century and present-day political thinkers ensures that his ideas remain indispensable in the current liberal-democratic debate. Brave New World is without doubt Huxley’s most successful political manifesto. While examining the impassioned struggle for the development of all human potentialities, it yet manages not to close the doors definitively on the rebirth of utopia in the age of dystopia.

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.

In this book, Eva Brann sets out no less a task than to assess the meaning of imagination in its multifarious expressions throughout western history. The result is one of those rare achievements that will make The World of the Imagination a standard reference.