Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse

Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse
Author: J. Verheul
Publisher: Virago Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN:

The book explores the fundamental and multifaceted dialectic between utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares within American culture. The utopian mindset in constructing and imagining different futures for society is reflected in a wide range of differential cultural texts and narratives such as novels, short stories, political discourses and treatises, journalism and scholarly and intellectual debates. Often these combine social criticism and satire, political rhetoric, religious belief systems, and biblical metaphors. Approaching the topic from various angles and throughout different historical periods, the essays in this volume collectively show how fascinating and rewarding the exploration of this utopian discourse of for an understanding of American culture.

Utopia/Dystopia

Utopia/Dystopia
Author: Michael D. Gordin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2010-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400834953

The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.

US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions

US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions
Author: Saskia Fürst
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3643909314

This collection takes stock of current discourses in American studies on the political valence of American utopias, be they as religious diasporas or as socialist experiments, fantastic or realist, successful or failed. The included essays take into account the spatiality of utopias (especially in their visionary scope), analyze currents in literary utopias, and look at dystopian visions in literature. This volume strives to keep alive the long tradition of writers, artists, and scholars who warned against imminent disasters and envisioned ways to counter such ruinous bearings. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 17) [Subject: Sociology, Literary Studies]

Understanding Bharati Mukherjee

Understanding Bharati Mukherjee
Author: Ruth Maxey
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2019-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1643360019

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford—came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.

Beyond the Revolution

Beyond the Revolution
Author: William H. Goetzmann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2009-02-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0465004954

A magisterial chronicle of America s intellectual history by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian"

Seaway to the Future

Seaway to the Future
Author: Alexander Missal
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2009-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299229432

Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project, Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions. Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association “Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum

The Net Delusion

The Net Delusion
Author: Evgeny Morozov
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2011
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781586488758

Publisher's description: “The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran. Yet for all the talk about the liberalizing force of the internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian regimes are effectively using the internet to suppress free speech and democracy. What's more, the latest research shows that greater access to information pacifies a population as much as it incites it to revolution. If we in the West are to promote liberal ideals, we'll have to do more than fund Facebook. In this book, blogger and social commentator Evgeny Morozov tackles these issues with relentless energy and analytical savvy. Marshalling a compelling set of case studies, he shows why we must stop thinking of the internet and social media as instant cures for repression, and how, in some cases, they can even threaten democracy.

American Mobilities

American Mobilities
Author: Julia Leyda
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-02-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839434556

American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility - social, economic, geographic - in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of "domestic," referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the "American" century. Juxtaposing canonical fiction with popular, and low-budget independent films with Classical Hollywood, Leyda brings the analytic tools of American cultural and literary studies to bear on an eclectic array of primary texts as she builds a case for the significance of mobility in the study of the United States.

The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures

The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures
Author: Kristina Baudemann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000529894

This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis’s "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.

Going Dutch

Going Dutch
Author: Joyce Diane Goodfriend
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004163689

This volume investigates the place of Dutch history and Dutch-derived culture in America over the last four centuries. It considers how the Dutch have fared in America, and it explores how American conceptions of Dutchness have developed, from Henry Hudson's historic voyage to Manhattan in 1609 through the rise of Dutch design at the turn of the twenty-first century. Essays probe a rich array of topics: Dutch themes in American arts and letters; the place of Dutch paintings in American collections; shifting American interests in Dutch art, literature, and architecture; the experience of Dutch immigrants in America; and the Dutch Reformed Church in America. "Going Dutch" presents a much needed overview of the Dutch-American experience from its beginnings to the present. Contributors include: Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Willem Frijhoff, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Hans Krabbendam, Joseph Manca, Nancy T. Minty, Mark A. Peterson, Christopher Pierce, Judith Richardson, Louisa Wood Ruby, Benjamin Schmidt, Robert Schoone-Jongen, Annette Stott, Tity de Vries, and Dennis P. Weller.