landscapes of hope anti-colonial utopianism in america mar 2009

[...]... scholars interested in breaking the hermetic seal that can so often encase national literatures This book contains an in- depth study of a single transnational, anti-colonial periodical among several, but it also carries the hope that others may pick up the many strands I have inevitably dropped I intend Landscapes of Hope in part as an opening gesture toward what I hope will be many more investigations of. .. still set in far-off “undiscovered” lands As proof of the dominance of developmentalist thinking during this period, we will find it within utopian novels often held to be utterly different My focus is on what these “classic” utopias have in common, and what they do not share with the documents of the more inchoate, dynamic utopianism that will provide the focus for the remainder of Landscapes of Hope Where... have called for in our own century During this time of intimidating potential, the architects of decolonization carried out the exhilarating work of imagining independent states Du Bois and Lajpat Rai, along with Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and others, did this by marshaling the goals and methods of utopian fiction How else could one navigate the vast realms of possibility that... of an ideal independent India Pauline Hopkins, in her messianic novel Of One Blood, carries her American-born hero to Ethiopia’s Hidden City of Telassar, where he fulfills his unknown destiny by bringing the cloistered utopia into the modern world W E B Du Bois in Dark Princess audaciously merges India, Africa, and the American South to produce a global Black Belt on the verge of true emancipation Landscapes. .. Landscapes of Hope traces the shape and character of the anti-colonial utopias that these radical thinkers dared to imagine Together they inhabited the realm of the conditional Lajpat Rai’s Young India, Hopkins’s Of One Blood, and Du Bois’s Dark Princess all usher readers into a space that does not yet exist For these writers, utopian thinking proved an indispensable exercise toward overcoming present-day injustices... we want to be It is my own hope that Landscapes of Hope will attest to the power of the imagination in helping us to reach that place 1 Developing Nations The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future —Karl Marx, Capital We must begin by identifying the legacies of the utopian tradition in which the prewar anti-colonial writers participated... Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S Culture, and their important precursor Cultures of United States Imperialism, I will take a quite distinct emphasis: not on America s emerging role as an imperial power, but rather on the anti-colonial resistance that paradoxically sprang up within that growing power Just as Said’s exposure of the workings of colonial discourse in Orientalism prompted a rush of work... patriotism If at points in Landscapes of Hope America appears as a beacon for freedom, elsewhere it is a neo-colonial threat Young India appeals to the introduction: real networks and imaginary vistas 11 self-image of a growing world power by presenting India and the United States as analogous rebels against English rule, thus anticipating the specious notion that the latter falls under the rubric of postcolonial.15... Throughout Landscapes of Hope we will see that anti-colonial utopian writers stand in different places in relation to the complex legacy of the developmentalist utopia Each group and individual, too, buys into different dominant myths Where Pauline Hopkins responds to the white supremacy of canonical utopian fiction by celebrating an Africanist essence, and Du Bois by valorizing racial hybridity as basis of. .. hybridity as basis of global emancipation, Young India expediently attempts to classify Indians as white Lacking the dubious luxury of defining themselves as Aryan and thus on the winning side of an implicitly eugenic ideology, Hopkins and Du Bois offer clearer 12 landscapes of hope rejections of developmentalism They also offer stronger endorsements of affirmative Orientalism, the non-Western romance . w0 h1" alt="" Landscapes of Hope This page intentionally left blank Landscapes of Hope Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America dohra ahmad 2009 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes. permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Ahmad, Dohra. Landscapes of hope : anti-colonial utopianism in America / Dohra Ahmad. p. cm. Includes. Negri have called for in our own century. During this time of intimidating potential, the architects of decoloniza- tion carried out the exhilarating work of imagining independent states. Du