Overview

In eleven essays of scholarly inquiry encompassing a variety of disciplinary perspectives including literature, visual culture, and media studies, Microutopias and Everyday Hope illuminates the potential for alternative futures that resides in utopian thinking on smaller scales. Reflecting on analyses of source material that ranges from entertainment media to concrete sites, contributors draw our attention to the important aesthetic details of everyday life that are increasingly drowned out in a landscape dominated by continuous polycrisis. Caught in late capitalism’s relentless and dystopian march, they argue, any kind of future is necessarily predicated on utopian thinking in the present and must look beyond the spectacle of horror to draw on the hope that can be found in the smaller wins day to day. Ultimately, this collection serves as an appeal to the crucial role the humanities can play in withstanding and moving past the contemporary societal fragmentation plaguing the globe.

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9781666980516

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Reviews

Uncovering the utopian impulse in diverse cultural works, this elegant book attends to the many subtle, transient, dispersed moments of social hope, desire, and change. Developing the concept of microutopias through an analysis of films, literature, music and more, this book not only reveals the presence and importance of microutopianism within social life, but demonstrates what microutopianism offers as an analytical method. An original and vibrant contribution to utopian studies. * Davina Cooper, Research Professor in Law and Political Theory, King's College London, UK *

Uncovering the utopian impulse in diverse cultural works, this elegant book attends to the many subtle, transient, dispersed moments of social hope, desire, and change. Developing the concept of microutopias through an analysis of films, literature, music and more, this book not only reveals the presence and importance of microutopianism within social life, but demonstrates what microutopianism offers as an analytical method. An original and vibrant contribution to utopian studies. * Davina Cooper, Research Professor in Law and Political Theory, King's College London, UK * This engaging and engaged collection moves from a concern with utopia as critically bound up with the practices, rhythms and spaces of everyday life, offering possible glimpses of a transformed way of living from within the constraints of a shared reality. Reading widely across and between medias and cultures, its authors invite us to understand afresh the many traces of a better world that surround us in the cultural practices and products of the present. This way of reading can itself, they suggest, be a vehicle of hope. * Michael G. Kelly, Professor of French, University of Limerick, UK *

Author Information

Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Lene Johannessen is Professor of American Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway.

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