Utopias in Unlikely Places: Literary Utopias, Race, and World-Building in the Present

In recent years, a few overlapping questions have percolated in the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies: what is the value of utopia in dark, dystopian times; and what is the usefulness of utopia (as a place, literary genre, and theoretical framework) for racial imaginaries? I argue that, to reckon with these questions, the literary utopia needs to be interrogated, for colonialist epistemologies are woven into the very texture of the genre. Instead of merely including non-white and non-Western authors within the existing framework of utopia, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a new framework for the literary utopia as a way of disentangling the genre from colonialist epistemologies and hierarchies of humanness. I define utopia as a no-good-place, drawing from David Bell’s framework, and read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity for the way the way its worlds of freedom and liberation amid capture reshape frameworks and potentialities of the literary utopia. Chapter 1 builds onto the introduction’s conversations of Black feminist utopias and Black women’s writing by focusing on Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Chapter 2 attends most closely to the spatial conventions of the literary utopia as a way of reimagining utopia’s ‘topos’ in a way that does not reproduce colonial logics of place and hierarchies of humanness. I turn to Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita—an Asian American writer—for its portrayal of a cross-ethnic and cross-racial utopia that offers an alternative to dominant spatial logics. Chapter 3 reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz—a Dominican American writer—for its portrayal of utopianism for those living in the wake of slavery. This utopianism is not based in a dream of a better future, but, rather, it moves sideways in the present. All three of these texts offer utopias or utopianisms that don’t look or feel like they should. These imagined utopias—centering racialized characters who have been dispossessed of the future and are living in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—are non-linear, move sideways, aren’t always hopeful, and can be heard and felt more than seen. But all of them imagine and build radically different worlds in the present.