The island as a fictional mock-up: colonialism and miscegenation in the Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract

This article seeks to read Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as a key of analysis of the intrinsic connections between European modernity and a set of practices produced by the colonial process. Thus, the main objective is to discuss how fictional discourse can serve us, contemporary readers, as a didactic tool to visualize, in territories created by the colonial process, the persistence of its mechanisms. Using fiction as a field of discussion and response to this process would mean to claim the topology of the utopic, making it a kind of fictional mock-up of societies constituted by colonialism, anticipating or reflecting the spatial alterations imposed by modernity.