Volume 55, Issue 1

With utopia’s heyday of the second half of the 19th century long gone with only a momentary flare up as feminist utopia in the 1970s, utopian literature seems to remain in limbo. Indeed, many critics have agreed upon a diminished belief in a potentially better world if not upon the disappearance of utopian literature and the impossibility of utopian thought altogether. Yet utopia is very much alive: it has reappeared in the disguise of novels, initially set as dystopias, predominantly in the contemporary feminist dystopias of the past twenty to thirty years. These ‘transgressive utopian dystopias’ resist neat categorizations of utopia/dystopia; rather, they present utopian strategies as integral part of the dystopian narrative. While the described dystopian societies are riven by manifold dualisms, the suggested utopian impulses aim at their transgression. These utopian strategies can be single glimpses of hope, as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) illustrates, or contain the very downfall or subversion of dystopia and the actual process of building utopia, as in Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast tetralogy (1974-1999).

Utopias in the traditional sense are hard to find in contemporary literature. Still we do find utopian moments in many of the representations of a flawed world. In Chang-rae Lee’s three novels Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft utopian aspects mainly manifest themselves in the private realm; there mutual understanding is possible because the generation of new intended meanings is possible. An expansion of such discursive regeneration as a Christian model of mutual support, however, remains difficult in the wider society because minorities (in his case mainly Korean Americans) remain excluded from the public realm of a policing syntax that imposes petrified old patterns of binary competition upon them. Nevertheless, there are incidents of modest progress, i.e., there is a pragmatist vision of survival and even optimism in Lee’s work that focuses, particularly in his last novel, on the family as the American nucleus of development and agency, combining both traditional ‘family values’ and Asian notions of filiality. Thus ultimately Lee’s vision of a good future remains a quintessentially American one.

This essay examines Las Vegas nonfiction by paying particular attention to the utopian function of the city in American aesthetics and to the dystopian energies of those literary texts positioned in the tradition of the New Journalism. It argues that Southern Nevada, though frequently considered as a postmodern cityscape of simulacra, has in fact always been reflected and shaped by a strong realist tradition. Some of the most important authors of literary nonfiction have written about Las Vegas: among them Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and David Foster Wallace. In addition numerous works have appeared in recent years exploring the city from a host of architectural, urbanist, and historical perspectives. Visiting writers were interested chiefly in the city’s wealth of opportunities for meticulous observation and representation of the body (the essay explores the figure of the showgirl as a case in point). As the essay outlines this interest has not abated in the early 21st century. But the general nature of Vegas writing has changed from prose informed by the mercurial language of the New Journalism to works interested in larger, more complex and academic representations of this new American metropolis.

Focusing on the zombie-film 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle) may at first sight seem an odd choice in the context of utopian writing, but links to utopia can in fact be drawn on various levels. Zombies, like utopia itself, can function as a means to comment on or criticize present society; the creation of zombies in 28 Days Later is linked to an utopian ideal, the elimination of rage; and the film can be read as a quest for a utopian space in a pastoral setting. Thus, the film is discussed as a self-referential mixture of genres that combines dystopia with apocalypse, utopia with the pastoral, and that ironically undercuts all its generic statements.

Post-apartheid South Africa, having recently come into its own in terms of the Utopian national vision that has driven and informed its history, is in danger of assuming this to be the end of its history, with only a better delivery of that static vision being in question. This paper considers the utopian as a vital element in oppositional and revolutionary strategies. It then looks at the important role the future, deployed in a utopian mode, took on in anti-apartheid texts during the darkest period of the liberation struggle, and asks if we can identify a similar impulse in texts that take as their subject some of the less satisfactory aspects of the post-apartheid condition. Focusing on Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, one of the texts regularly presented as representative of new South African nation, the paper examines post apartheid fiction’s particular avoidance of a nationalised sense of the political. It then places this against the question of the national in relation to the utopian, and argues that the nation is useful to us as an idea if it is always beyond us, always calling the present into question.