The fascination with “empire” and its revisionist historical issues has shifted the lens of colonial studies toward utopian writings vis-à-vis neo-imperialism and anticolonial rhetoric. Landscapes of Hope reinvigorates our interest in the history of colonial struggle by networking disparate “glocal” utopias imagined across nations. Projecting the utopian principle as writing “one's way out of a present injustice” (13), Ahmad explores “the intellectual allure of the utopian text: as a self-contained laboratory for how new worlds are conceived and conveyed” (12). This study applies a critical utopianism to its examination of inequality, slavery, and national liberation across modern historical troughs of oppression and social injustice.
Positing ideological evolution as central to colonialism and neocolonial relations, “Developing Nation,” the first chapter, reiterates that this ideology also aided the revitalization of utopian fiction in the twentieth century and charts the legacy of developmentalist utopias as grounded in the fictions of Bellamy, Howells, and Gilman. Primarily useful as cautionary examples of simplified faith in the natural evolution of social order and equality, such “classic” utopias purportedly contrast with the more fluid/amorphous dystopic visions of the later twentieth century.
Recording an unprecedented mapping of India's struggle for freedom in Young India, a periodical published in America in the early 1900s, “A Periodical Nation” explores the tribulations of popular Indian figures like Lala Lajpat Rai, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Coomaraswamy, who performed the “doubly utopian … work of imagining a future India from the position of exile” (69). This second chapter examines complex interconnections between Indian nationalism and faith in a utopian “global” India by tracing this periodical's enterprise in revealing the commonality of social injustice in the US and India as well as debunking the myth of a fragmented India.
“Worlds of Color,” the third chapter, celebrates the utopian writings of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois as contrapuntal critiques of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist philosophy. Of One Blood and Dark Princess posit the struggles of African American culture on a transcultural and transnational scale to embrace both “what is at stake in unearthing the past” (143) and “what was hoped for, gauging the past through its own sense of futurity” (146). In quest of a “global south,” these works posit alternatives to modern capitalist America in the Ethiopianism of Africa and the Orientalism of India, thereby encouraging the re-creation of an ethnic identity within a “global” one.
Interestingly, developmentalism opens and closes the study, for, as the rationalism of The Color Curtain points out, we are and will remain in its vice-like grip. Unsurprisingly, capitalism and multicultural globalism often coerce us by proscribing our cultural identities. The epilogue offers no countersolution other than to “construct better worlds … by eschewing fundamentalisms of all kinds, whether religious or economic” (200). In light of the sporadic neocolonial invasions of Third World countries, such a simplified solution is questionable. If utopia delimits horizons, we reopen them with the same geopolitical/cultural tools that sustain our existence. The circle is vicious, and Ahmad's insightful exploration of this postcolonial conundrum acknowledges as much.
