This article examines the relationship between utopian production and reception via a reading of the work of the great utopian author and theorist William Morris. This relationship has invariably been defined by an inequality: utopian producers have claimed unlimited freedom in their attempts to imagine new worlds, while utopian recipients have been asked to adopt such visions as their own without question. Morris’s work suggests two possible responses to this inequality. One response, associated with theorist Miguel Abensour, is to liberate (...) reception, with Morris’s utopianism containing an invitation to readers to reformulate the vision proffered. However, this response, despite its dominance in contemporary utopian theory, not only misreads Morris but also undermines the political efficacy of utopianism. Consequently, I suggest that Morris responds to the problem of utopian inequality by constraining production, proposing a historical control on utopianising; new utopias are directed by an archive of visions articulated in past struggles. (shrink)

In recent years, images of climate catastrophe have become commonplace. However, Black visions of the confluence of the Anthropocene and the apocalypse have been largely ignored. As we argue in this article, Black social thought offers crucial resources for drawing out the implicit exclusions of dominant representations of climate breakdown and developing an alternative account of the planet’s future. By reading a range of critical race theorists, from Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi (...) Coates, we propose a rethinking of the climate apocalypse. The African American theoretical and cultural tradition elaborates an image of the end of the world that emphasises the non-revelatory nature of climate catastrophe, warns against associating collapse with rebirth, and articulates a mode of maroon survivalism in which the apocalypse is an event to be endured and escaped rather than fatalistically expected or infinitely delayed. (shrink)

The relationship between humanity and the soil is an increasingly important topic in social theory. However, conceptualisations of the soil developed by anticolonial thinkers at the high point of the movement for self-determination between the 1940s and the 1970s have remained largely ignored. This is a shame, not least because theorists like Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Suzanne Césaire and Amílcar Cabral were concerned with the soil. Building on recent work on human-soil relations and decolonial ecology, we argue that these four (...) thinkers conceptualised the connection between soil, empire, and anticolonial revolt. Williams and Rodney ground understanding of soil degradation in global relations of economic power, while Césaire and Cabral reconceptualise postcolonial nationhood in terms of the mutability and diversity of the soil. The article concludes by suggesting that these two anticolonial counterpoints, global connectivity and more-than-human identification, anticipate and deepen contemporary attempts to decolonise ecological thinking. (shrink)

William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many individual...

The weathered stone, collapsed lintels and hollow roofs of the ruin have long evoked a sense of pathos, standing as monuments to the disastrous contours of history and the possibility of alternative futures. In this article, I ask: What is the meaning of the ruin in the postcolonial context of the Caribbean? There are few physical ruins in the Caribbean, resulting in a feeling of lack: the architectural landscape fails to speak to the catastrophes of slavery and colonialism. Dub, a (...) subgenre of Jamaican reggae, responds to this sense of deprivation. The dub producers of the 1970s decomposed reggae songs, creating ruinous constructions where crucial elements of the original version are missing. Fragmented dub compositions act as icons of the traumatic history of the Caribbean and a utopian pique to the imagination, forcing the listener to fill in the gaps and imagine the world remade. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing discontent with feminism’s understanding of its own history and, more specifically, the place of the feminist 1970s. Feminist scholars – most prominently, Elizabeth Freeman, Victoria Hesford, Kate Eichhorn and Kathi Weeks – have sought to move beyond the feelings of progress and nostalgia that the feminist 1970s often inspires. There is a need to mediate between the urge to leave the past behind and the desire to return to it, with feminists adopting positions (...) that ricochet between progress and nostalgia. In this article, I argue that the feminist literary utopia offers a particularly productive means by which to represent this ambivalent, paradoxical temporal understanding. The classic feminist utopias of the 1970s have become the object of critical contention in more recent speculative texts, which destabilise both progress and nostalgia in their evocation of second-wave separatism. To elaborate this claim, I turn to Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, which critically assesses the feminist 1970s via an account of a separatist feminist enclave in a near-future Britain. The community of women is a homage to the feminist 1970s, displaying both the potentialities of the movements of this time as well as their sometimes violent limitations. The dreams of the 1970s emerge in the text as an unsettling presence in the world, a force that can neither be left behind nor fully embraced. (shrink)