The Racial Horizon of Utopia

This book surveys reimaginings of race by US American utopian novelists including Dorothy Bryant, Marge Piercy, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. It 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.

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.

Autorentext

Edward K. Chan is Associate Professor of American Studies at Aichi University in Nagoya, Japan. His research and teaching interests include twentieth-century US American literary, film and popular culture, with a special emphasis on race and transnational perspectives on US American culture.

Zusammenfassung
«[...] Chan's monograph is an important and necessary foray into the extremely complex problem of the future of race, one that effectively explores one strand of literary engagement with this problem.»
(Taylor Evans, Science Fiction Studies 44/2017)

Inhalt

Contents: Race and the Subject of Utopia - Utopia, America and Race - Race, Democracy and Corporeality - Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 1970s Utopian Subject - Mourning the Individual Self: Octavia Butler and the Haptic Utopia in the 1980s - Simulating Multicultural Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy in the 1990s - Conclusion: The Racial Horizon of Utopia - Epilogue: After 2000 and Multiculturalism as Nightmare.