Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society

Bringing together a variety of scholarly voices, this book argues for the necessity of understanding the important role literature plays in crystallizing the ideologies of the oppressed, while exploring the necessarily racialized character of utopian thought in American culture and society. Utopia in everyday usage designates an idealized fantasy place, but within the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies, the term often describes the worldviews of non-dominant groups when they challenge the ruling order. In a time when white supremacy is reasserting itself in the US and around the world, there is a growing need to understand the vital relationship between race and utopia as a resource for resistance. Utopian literature opens up that relationship by envisioning and negotiating the prospect of a better future while acknowledging the brutal past. The collection fills a critical gap in both literary studies, which has largely ignored the issue of race and utopia, and utopian studies, which has said too little about race.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Introductories.- 1. Preface; Kenneth M. Roemer.- 2. Introduction; Patricia Ventura.- 3. Aethiopian Devils Are White: Constructions of Race in Early Modern Utopian Texts; Jane Campbell.- Part II. African American Literatures of Utopia from the Past to the Afrofuture.- 4. The Illusory Promises of Freedom: Frederick Douglass and the Utopia of Liberation; David Lemke.- 5. Intratextual Utopianism in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self and the Colored American Magazine; Amber Foster.- 6. Inevitable Hell? Eutopia and Race in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More; Tarshia Stanley.- 7. Black Power Utopia: Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, and the Revolutionary Afrofuturism of 1962-1974; Mark Tabone.- 8. Utopianism, Anti-utopianism, and Cultural Appropriation: Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga; Jeffrey Allen Tucker.- 9. Re-Programming the Present: The Dynamism of Black Futurity in Nalo Hopkinson Novels”; Cienna Davis.- 10. Race and Utopia in Mat Johnson’s Pym; Julie Fiorelli.- 11. Someone Else’s Hell: Utopia in N.K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood Duology; Susana Morris.- 12. Afrotopia and Afrofuturism: Seeking a Happy Place in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Rail.- road and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair; Isiah Lavender III.- Part III. Utopian Literatures of Race and Ethnicity.- 13. Nineteenth Century American Utopianism and the Attempted Reform of a Native American Tribe: From Fourierist Social Experiment to Mass Murder; Charles W. Nuckolls.- 14. Utopian Citizenship and Contemporary Arab-American Literature; Joseph Donica.- 15. The White Nationalist Utopia and the Reproduction of Victimized Whiteness; Edward K. Chan.- 16. "Strange Times to be a Jew"—Themes of Whiteness, Identity, and Sanctuary in the Imagined Jewish Utopias of Grand Island and Sitka; Justin Nordstrom.- 17. Looking Inward: Charles Yu and the Impossibility of Private Utopias; Betsy Huang.- 18. The Tale of the Tattoo: Latino/Americans, Race, and Utopia in Ink; Tace Hedrick and Karina Vado.

About the Author :
Patricia Ventura is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College, USA. Edward K. Chan is Associate Professor in the School of Culture, Media, and Society at Waseda University, Japan.