Description
Book SynopsisThe 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. This title offers a fresh approach to these ideas.
Trade Review"[The authors'] project is a necessary and timely one and some of the chapters are excellent and add a great deal to our understanding of non-western utopianism... Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility is an essential collection for academics and post-graduate students interested in utopia and dystopia today."--Mark Featherstone, British Journal of Sociology "[T]his book not only shows different concepts of utopia and dystopia but also presents an illuminating overview of some historical facts."--Katarzyna Lesniewska, European Spatial Research Policy "The editors' goal in this impressive anthology is 'to open the question', to keep thinking anew, to be open to cerebrating about where we go now with the ideas of utopia and dystopia. This book is a big and helpful step in this inquiry."--Joseph C. Bertolini, European Legacy
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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African Frontier 45 CHAPTER 3: Dipesh Chakrabarty Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India 73 CHAPTER 4: Luise White The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian Independence and the Place of Race in Decolonization 94 CHAPTER 5: Timothy Mitchell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
