Utopia/dystopia : conditions of historical possibility

302 Pages·2010·1.09 MB·English

by  Prakash

Utopia/Dystopia
Publication in partnership with
the Shelby Cullom Davis Center
at Princeton University
Other Books in the Series
The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life,
edited by Kevin Kruse and Gyan Prakash
Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City,
edited by Gyan Prakash
U topia/Dystopia
CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL POSSIBILITY
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley,
and Gyan Prakash, Editors
Princeton University Press ■ Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Utopia/dystopia : conditions of historical possibility / Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and
Gyan Prakash, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14697-3 (hbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-691-14698-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Utopias—History. 2. Dystopias—History. I. Gordin, Michael D. II. Tilley, Helen,
1968– III. Prakash, Gyan, 1952–
HX806.U777 2010
335(cid:2).02—dc22 2010010267
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Electra
Book designed by Marcella Engel Roberts
Printed on acid-f ree paper (cid:3)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time 1
PART ONE
anima
1. Fredric Jameson
Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future 21
2. Jennifer Wenzel
Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the
Nineteenth- Century Southern African Frontier 45
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty
Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and
Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India 73
4. Luise White
The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian Independence
and the Place of Race in Decolonization 94
5. Timothy Mitchell
Hydrocarbon Utopia 117
PART TWO
artifi ce
6. John Krige
Techno- Utopian Dreams, Techno- Political Realities:
The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom 151
7. Marci Shore
On Cosmopolitanism, the Avant- Garde, and a Lost
Innocence of Central Europe 176
8. David Pinder
The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and
the Street in Modernist Urbanism 203
vi CONTENTS
9. Igal Halfi n
Stalinist Confessions in an Age of Terror: Messianic
Times at the Leningrad Communist Universities 231
10. Aditya Nigam
The Heterotopias of Dalit Politics: Becoming- Subject
and the Consumption Utopia 250
List of Contributors 277
Index 281
Utopia/Dystopia

Introduction
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley,
and Gyan Prakash
Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time
Utopias and dystopias are histories of the present. Even before we begin to
explain that sentence, some readers may feel a nagging concern, for the very
term “utopia” often sounds a little shopworn. It carries with it the trappings of
an elaborate thought experiment, a kind of parlor game for intellectuals who set
themselves the task of designing a future society, a perfect society—following
the pun on the name in Greek (no place, good place: imaginary yet positive).
Projecting a better world into the future renders present- day problems more
clearly. Because utopias tend to be the products of scholars and bookworms, it
is not surprising that from the time of the concept’s (or at least the term’s)
formal birth in the Renaissance, it has attracted quite a bit of academic atten-
tion. Much of this history is easily accessible, even second nature, to intellec-
tual historians, and it traces the genealogy of ideal, planned societies as envis-
aged from Plato to science fi ction. The appeal and the resonances are obvious
and rather powerful: religious roots in paradise, political roots in socialism,
economic roots in communes, and so on. Ever since Thomas More estab-
lished the literary genre of utopia in his 1516 work of that title, much of histo-
rians’ writing on the relevance of utopia has focused on disembodied intel-
lectual traditions, interrogating utopia as term, concept, and genre.1
Dystopia, utopia’s twentieth- century doppelgänger, also has diffi culty es-
caping its literary fetters. Much like utopia, dystopia has found fruitful ground
to blossom in the copious expanses of science fi ction, but it has also fl ourished
in political fi ction (and especially in anti- Soviet fi ction), as demonstrated by
the ease with which the term is applied to George Orwell’s 1984, Evgenii
Zamiatin’s We, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.2 Despite the name,
dystopia is not simply the opposite of utopia. A true opposite of utopia would
be a society that is either completely unplanned or is planned to be deliber-
ately terrifying and awful. Dystopia, typically invoked, is neither of these
things; rather, it is a utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only
for a particular segment of society. In a sense, despite their relatively recent
literary and cinematic invention, dystopias resemble the actual societies histo-
rians encounter in their research: planned, but not planned all that well or