The Postdystopian Utopia

Having dwelled on the precarious position of utopia in the con temporary cultural moment, let us imagine another scenario.The bestseller list for the year 2036 is a triumph for utopia.Jostling with crime thrillers, celebrity memoirs, and cookbooks are several utopian texts, with titles such as Once More in Nowhere and New Peninsula.In pride of place, at the very top of the list, is M. N. Hunter's Dreamlands of Another Planet, an Afrofuturist vision of liberation set on Saturn.It has touched a chord across the world.So-called Dreamlands Clubs have been formed by the book's enthusiastic readers, who engage in an exchange of fantasy over the minutiae of daily life on the new planet.In fact, a major publisher has already commissioned Cookshops of the Future, a recipe book offering a taste of the delights of Hunter's vision of Saturn.The Dreamlands phenomenon comes hot on the heels of a surprise television hit of 2033: a crowdfunded adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, commissioned to honor the fifteenth anniversary of her death.Since the success of this series, producers have been scrambling to secure the film rights to the classics of the utopian genre, with adaptations of William Morris's News from Nowhere, W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Comet," and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time all in the works.The utopian revival in the realm of popular culture rebounds against the increasingly radical demands of social movements across the world, with the raft of speculative dreams of alternative worlds