Utopian Generations
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A01=Nicholas Brown
Absurdity
Adjective
Aesthetic Theory
African literature
Alain Badiou
Allegory
Ambiguity
Amos Tutuola
Anti-capitalism
Arrow of God
Author_Nicholas Brown
Bossa nova
Bourgeoisie
Category=DSB
Cheikh Hamidou Kane
Chinua Achebe
Class consciousness
Colonialism
Criticism
Critique
Decolonization
Dedan Kimathi
Dystopia
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Eumaeus
Ezra Pound
Fredric Jameson
Ideology
Immanuel Wallerstein
Imperialism
Irony
Jacques Derrida
Jean-Paul Sartre
Laughter
Literary modernism
Literature
Manifesto
Martin Heidegger
Marxism
Modernism
Modernity
Multitude
Narration
Narrative
Novel
Parade's End
Parody
Peon
Pepetela
Petite bourgeoisie
Philosophy
Poetry
Politics
Postcolonial literature
Postmodernism
Prejudice
Pretext
Proletarianization
Rhetoric
Romanticism
Satire
Subjectivity
Symptom
The Other Hand
The Various
Theodor W. Adorno
Theory
Thought
University of Minnesota Press
Wole Soyinka
Writer
Writing
Wyndham Lewis
Product details
- ISBN 9780691122120
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2005
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the same. African literature has commonly been seen as representationally naive vis-a-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as reactionary vis-a-vis postcolonial literature. What brings these two bodies of work together, argues Nicholas Brown, is their disposition toward Utopia or "the horizon of a radical reconfiguration of social relations." Grounded in a profound rethinking of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, this fluently written book takes as its point of departure the partial displacement during the twentieth century of capitalism's "internal limit" (classically conceived as the conflict between labor and capital) onto a geographic division of labor and wealth. Dispensing with whole genres of commonplace contemporary pieties, Brown examines works from both sides of this division to create a dialectical mapping of different modes of Utopian aesthetic practice.
The theory of world literature developed in the introduction grounds the subtle and powerful readings at the heart of the book--focusing on works by James Joyce, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ford Madox Ford, Chinua Achebe, Wyndham Lewis, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Pepetela. A final chapter, arguing that this literary dialectic has reached a point of exhaustion, suggests that a radically reconceived notion of musical practice may be required to discern the Utopian desire immanent in the products of contemporary culture.
Nicholas Brown is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
