Books in the Ralahine Utopian Studies series

Race and utopia have been fundamental features of US American culture since the origins of the country. However, racial ideology has often contradicted the ideals of social and political equality in the United States. This book surveys reimaginings of race in major late twentieth-century US American utopian novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. Dorothy Bryant, Marge Piercy, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson all present radical new configurations of race in a more ideal society, yet continually encounter an ideological blockage as the horizon beyond which we cannot rethink race. Nevertheless, these novels create productive strains of thinking to grapple with the question of race in US American culture. Drawing on feminist theory and critiques of democracy, the author argues that our utopian dreams cannot be furthered unless we come to terms with the phenomenology of race and the impasse of the individual in liberal humanist democracy.

What would a good world for women look like? How would we get there from where we are and how would we have to change ourselves in the process? This book examines a critical moment in recent American and western European history when the utopian dimension of political movements was particularly generative and feminism was at their core. The imaginative literature that emerged out of American, French, and German feminisms of the 1970s engaged the dialectic between the actual and the possible in radically new and creative ways. Ranging from conventional utopian and science fictions to avant-garde and experimental texts, they countered the idea of utopia as a pre-set goal with the idea of the utopian as a process of dreaming forwards. This book explores the transformative potential of feminist visions of change, even as it sees their ideological blind spots. It does more than simply look back to the 1970s. Instead, it looks ahead, anticipating some of the shifts and changes of feminist thought in the following decades: its transnational scope, its critique of identity politics and the gendered politics of sexuality, and its embrace of affect as an analytical category. The author argues that the radical utopianism of second wave feminisms has not lost its urgency. The transformations they envisioned are still our challenge, as the vital work of social change remains undone.

This is a reissue of an influential text that was first published in 1987, to which the author has added an introduction reflecting on the work twenty years after publication. The grounding assumption of the book is that an element of utopianism is a necessity in any political thinking, and that a self-conscious utopianism can generate a richer level of theory and practice. The text then follows the chequered career of utopianism in the Marxist tradition, arguing that Marxism has been unable to do without a utopian dimension but for various reasons has often resisted acknowledging this fact. It examines the origins of the Marxist critique of utopianism, and the various ways, either covertly or overtly, in which the utopian was reinserted into the tradition. It looks at the utopian socialist predecessors of Marxism, the ambiguous critique of the utopian developed by Marx and Engels, the complex debate over utopianism in the Second International, the authoritarian socialism that emerged in the Soviet bloc, and the consciously utopian thought of Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Bahro, and André Gorz. Throughout, the book seeks to combine rigorous scholarship with a commitment to a utopian frame of mind.

Gazing in Useless Wonder focuses on utopias as self-referential texts that literally have to constitute themselves as imaginary or intentional entities before they can work as vehicles for socio-political ideas. Foregrounding the construction of utopian fictions defines both the perspective and the differentiation of the analytically significant elements, so that the traditionally dominant topics such as the nature and origins of the ideologies behind the construction of the ideal model are taken into account only insofar as they contribute to the aesthetic effect of the utopian construct as a whole. The organising principle of the early modern utopia involves two different modes of presentation: the narrative frame and the ekphrastic description of the ideal state, each possessing an aesthetic function realised according to different principles, with the ideal image constructed in accordance with the dominant aesthetic norms of the period pertaining to the visual arts, such as harmony, symmetry, alleged perfection, and timelessness. Despite variations, especially in the thematic-ideological domain, the dominant genre pattern that emerged as a result of the simplification of the complex semantics of Thomas More's Utopia in the early modern period is taken here as forming a single synchrony in the history of utopian fiction-making.

Re-examines the rise of utopian thought at the fin de siecle, situating it in social and political contradictions of the time and exploring the ways in which it articulated a deepening sense that the capitalist system might not be insuperable after all. This book constitutes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the utopian imaginary.

In reaction to the spread of globalization, recent years have seen considerable growth in the number of intentional communities established across the world. In this collection of articles and lectures, many of them previously unpublished in English, the author analyzes various aspects of the philosophy of the kibbutz and draws parallels with other societies and philosophical trends, in the hope that a close look at the ways of thought of the kibbutz - arguably the best-established communalist society - may help other communalists crystallize their own social philosophies. Utopian thought and communal experience are brought to life through the extensive use of the voices of some of the most influential thinkers and kibbutz members of the past hundred years, including Martin Buber and David Ben Gurion.

Concentrating on the difficulties writers from both perspectives experience with the topic, this title interrogates the meta-theoretical problematic for ongoing intellectual work on architecture and utopia. It is suitable for scholars, and general readers with a concern for the interrelationships between the built environment and social dreaming.

This volume is an experiment: an enquiry into the possibilities and potentialities of a prospective anthropology of utopia. With different ethnographic contributions studying «empirical utopias» across the world (from ecotopias to religious havens, transnational policies, retirement homes and community agriculture), it looks beyond the commonsense understanding of utopia as a desire, an expectation, a form of imagination stemming from Western political thought. In the process, the volume explores the dynamic dialectic between human imagination and concrete action.

Returning to print for the first time since the 1980s, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is the origin point for decades of literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Darko Suvin's paradigm-setting definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvin's centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined. In addition to the 1979 text of the book, this edition contains three additional essays from Suvin that update, expand and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface that situate the book in the context of the decades of SF studies that have followed in its wake.

This book is a series of essays, written over the last twenty years, which rethink the nature and prospects of utopianism in a world that has grown increasingly sceptical as to the possibility of systemic socio-political transformation in a positive direction.

Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life as a novelist, playwright and critic, British Sartre, as "The Times" put it. This volume brings together a complete collection of Williams' critical essays on science fiction and futurology, utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film, and politics.

Upon its original publication in 1970, Robert C. Elliott's The Shape of Utopia influenced both some of the major scholars of an emerging utopian and science fiction studies, including Darko Suvin, Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson, and authors of new utopian fiction ranging from Ursula K. Le Guin to Kim Stanley Robinson. The book establishes a deep genetic link between utopia and satire, and offers scintillating readings of classic works by Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Aldous Huxley and others. It charts the rise of an insidious fear of utopia that comes to characterize the first half of the twentieth century and investigates some of the aesthetic problems raised by the efforts to portray a utopian society, before concluding with brilliant speculations on the emerging practice of anti-anti-utopia - the reinvention of utopia for contemporary times. This Ralahine Classics edition also includes a new introduction by Phillip E. Wegner which situates the book in its context and argues for its continued significance today; a 1971 review of the book by the late author of utopian science fiction, Joanna Russ; and an opening tribute by one of Elliott's former students, Kim Stanley Robinson.

Demand the Impossible was written from inside the oppositional political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Ralahine Classics edition of this groundbreaking work reissues the original text along with a new essay on Aldous Huxley's Island and a set of reflections on the book by leading utopian and science fiction scholars.

Shockwaves of Possibility explores the deep utopianism of one of the most significant modern cultural practices: science fiction. The author contends that utopianism is not simply a motif in SF, but rather is fundamental to its narrative dynamics. Drawing upon a rich array of theory and criticism in SF and utopian studies, the book opens with a global periodizing history that shows the inseparability of SF from developments in other cultural fields. It goes on to examine literature, film, television, comics, and animation in order to demonstrate SF's unique effectiveness for grappling with the upheavals brought about by globalization. Shockwaves of Possibility proves SF's vitality in the brave new world of the twenty-first century, as it illuminates the contours of the present and educates our desire for a radically other future.

Defined by a Hollow