The Racial Horizon of Utopia

This book surveys reimaginings of race by US American utopian novelists including Dorothy Bryant, Marge Piercy, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. It argues that our utopian dreams cannot be furthered unless we come to terms with the phenomenology of race and the impasse of the individual in liberal humanist democracy.

Edward K. Chan is Associate Professor of American Studies at Aichi University in Nagoya, Japan. His research and teaching interests include twentieth-century US American literary, film and popular culture, with a special emphasis on race and transnational perspectives on US American culture.

«[...] Chan’s monograph is an important and necessary foray into the extremely complex problem of the future of race, one that effectively explores one strand of literary engagement with this problem.» (Taylor Evans, Science Fiction Studies 44/2017)

Contents: Race and the Subject of Utopia – Utopia, America and Race – Race, Democracy and Corporeality – Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 1970s Utopian Subject – Mourning the Individual Self: Octavia Butler and the Haptic Utopia in the 1980s – Simulating Multicultural Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Trilogy in the 1990s – Conclusion: The Racial Horizon of Utopia – Epilogue: After 2000 and Multiculturalism as Nightmare.