Utopian Generations

[Dave Monroe]

Brown, Nicholas.  Utopian Generations:
   The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century
   Literature.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005.

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 naïve
vis-à-vis modernism, and canonical modernism as
reactionary vis-à-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.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8067.html

Ch. 1, "Introduction"

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8067.html

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8067.pdf


	
		
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