The book explores the fundamental and multifaceted dialectic between utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares within American culture. The utopian mindset in constructing and imagining different futures for society is reflected in a wide range of differential cultural texts and narratives such as novels, short stories, political discourses and treatises, journalism and scholarly and intellectual debates. Often these combine social criticism and satire, political rhetoric, religious belief systems, and biblical metaphors. Approaching the topic from various angles and throughout different historical periods, the essays in this volume collectively show how fascinating and rewarding the exploration of this utopian discourse of for an understanding of American culture.

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.

This title studies the creation of an 'Empire of Love' in the Pacific and the interconnections between culture and imperial power in the 19th and 20th centuries. It examines the European presence in such contested territories as New Caledonia, and Tahiti, and encounter and conflict in Panama and Indochina.

A magisterial chronicle of America s intellectual history by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian"

This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford—came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.