Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War Two, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. Dohra Ahmad adds to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the twentieth
century, Ahmad shows, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed
literary texts--novels, poems, contemplative essays--in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Landscapes of Hope goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W.E B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.
Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War Two, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. Dohra Ahmad adds to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the twentieth
century, Ahmad shows, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed
literary texts--novels, poems, contemplative essays--in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Landscapes of Hope goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W.E B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.
Introduction: Real Networks and Imaginary Vistas
One: Developing Nations
I: Evolution: Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean
Howells
II: Eugenics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Two: A Periodical Nation
I: Culture: A. K. Coomaraswamy
II: Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore
III: Personification: Sarojini Naidu
IV: Transnationalism: J. T. Sunderland
Three: Worlds of Color
I: Resurrection: Pauline Hopkins
II: Romance: W. E. B. Du Bois
III: Rationalism: Richard Wright
Epilogue: Multicultural Utopia?
Dohra Ahmad teaches postcolonial literature at St. John's University. She is the editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (W. W. Norton, 2007); her essays have appeared in English Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
"In this striking new configuration, Ahmad combines theoretical
inquiry into utopian writing with historical attention to exiled
Indians in America. The result transforms our view of writing in
the U.S. from Bellamy and Howells to Du Bois and Richard
Wright."-Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
"In Landscapes of Hope Dohra Ahmad transforms our whole
conceptualization of anti-colonial writing. She shows how, in
developing transnational forms of resistance, diasporic and exiled
activists simultaneously crossed the boundaries of writing itself.
Their utopic visions of their people released from the burden of
colonial rule informed their fiction, their periodicals and their
speeches alike. Ahmad brilliantly reconceptualizes the very scope
of
anti-colonial writing and asks us to rethink the ways in which we
have imagined it in the past. Landscapes of Hope marks a major
contribution to postcolonial studies and opens the door to its
future."-Robert J. C.
Young, New York University
"With its nuanced exploration of the parallels and encounters
between Indian nationalists in the US and African American
internationalists, Landscapes of Hope is an important contribution
to the history of Afro-Asian radicalism. Anti-colonialism, Ahmad
reminds us, emerges in the "realm of the conditional": it finds its
angle of critique and its redemptive vision in utopianism. Her
remarkably thorough portrait of Lajpat Rai's New York-based
journal
Young India also reminds us that anti-colonialism is contrapuntal
and cross-diasporic: never a single nationalist discourse emerging
in isolation, but instead an interweaving of struggles that take
shape crucially
in view of one another."-Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University
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