Unsettling Utopia: The Politics of Hope in North American Dystopian Fiction
| dc.contributor.advisor | Aranda, José | |
| dc.creator | Henry, Brittany | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-05-17T15:26:14Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-05-01T05:01:08Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2018-05 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2018-04-20 | |
| dc.date.submitted | May 2018 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2019-05-17T15:26:15Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | As dystopian writers in recent decades have increasingly embedded narratives of resistance and alternative social orders into their dark visions of the future, scholars in the fields of utopian and science fiction studies have celebrated the genre’s attempts to articulate dystopian critique in a way that rejuvenates utopian imagination as a viable form of radical politics. However, Unsettling Utopia argues that this critical investment in refiguring utopia as a site of political hope fails to account for utopia’s historic entanglement with histories of colonization and the project of settler colonialism in the Americas. Through close readings of North American dystopian texts, I reveal the limitations of Eurocentric dystopian critique and utopian hope and examine the emancipatory potential of decolonial speculative narratives as the critical and imaginative starting point of projects for social change. Unsettling Utopia’s literary history of speculative fiction begins with the premise that the epistemological and ontological violence of the colonial encounter are foundational to the concept of Western utopianism as well as to the development and maintenance of a North American settler colonial utopian imaginary. Therefore, I read Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia and the 1767 anonymous feminist utopia The Female American as precursors to contemporary literary texts such as survivalist blogger James Wesley Rawles’s 2012 Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Analyzing these texts together reveals that the settler colonial imaginary continues to underwrite the utopian longing of dystopian critique across the political spectrum. I then turn to Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s 2009 Lunar Braceros, and Sabrina Vourvoulias’s 2012 Ink to emphasize the vital role of dystopian literature by writers of color in both exposing the ongoing logic of utopianism as a master narrative for colonization and articulating meaningful alternatives to the violent racialized and gendered logic of settler colonialism and global coloniality. I conclude by reading migrant testimonios about undocumented border crossings as a form of concrete dystopian literature that both underscores the ongoing reality of dystopia as lived experience and performs a transformative model of embodied subjectivity as a mode of ethics premised on practices of decolonial love. | |
| dc.embargo.terms | 2020-05-01 | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Henry, Brittany. "Unsettling Utopia: The Politics of Hope in North American Dystopian Fiction." (2018) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105777">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105777</a>. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1911/105777 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.rights | Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder. | |
| dc.subject | Dystopia | |
| dc.subject | utopia | |
| dc.subject | speculative fiction | |
| dc.subject | American literature | |
| dc.subject | multiethnic literature | |
| dc.subject | settler colonialism | |
| dc.subject | decoloniality | |
| dc.title | Unsettling Utopia: The Politics of Hope in North American Dystopian Fiction | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | Text | |
| thesis.degree.department | English | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Humanities | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Rice University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |
Files
Original bundle
1 - 1 of 1