Dystopian Spaces Research Articles

What if love can save us… A study of romantic love in the dystopian fiction Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

This article was developed through a bibliographic study based on the concept of romantic love among clones in the dystopian society portrayed in “Never Let Me Go” (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. The discussion on society and clones’ position is based on the theories of utopia (Trousson, 1990), dystopia (Vieira, 2010), and heterotopia (Foucault, 2009). The clones were regarded as a group of entities who were seen as less human or even non-human entities created to be consumed as organ repositories and discarded by the so-called real humans. The work debates how the construction of romantic love (Johnson, 1987) is depicted in this fiction, especially among the clones. The narrative exposes how the bodies are depersonalized, controlled, and subordinated by coercive strategies in that dystopian space. Romantic love arises as a way of surviving and as an attempt of nonconformity to face that society, that is, romantic love means a reaction and resistance against that social system.

The Role of Postcards in Disseminating the Nuevo Ideal Nacional of Marcos Pérez Jiménez

The dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez engaged a variety of cultural texts to push the sense of spectacle and tangible progress that was central to the Nuevo Ideal Nacional – a positivist infused set of ideas that placed a premium on economic development and social well-being. This article considers the role postcards played in constructing an idealized visual lexicon for perezjimenismo . Postcards of the period projected an image of modernity to Venezuelans and foreign visitors alike. They indicated what the government deemed important – public works, flagship architectural projects, and infrastructure. The lexicon of modernity established by postcards and other photographic texts came to be widely disseminated and understood – although such images clearly occluded other ‘realities’ within Caracas. Though the focus of the article is on period postcards, the article considers the way in which contemporary photographers have inverted traditional postcard tropes to produce images that present the modern Caracas as a dystopian space.

The Loss of the Real in Kazuo Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Go,Klara and the SunandNocturnes

AbstractThis paper addresses the issue of the loss of the real in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro as a contemporary author whose thought line is still in progress. His approach to this issue is anti-capitalist as he questions the so-called scientific advancement led by cash-oriented capitalists and industrialists. His writing seeks to strip the veil of the murderous nature of this kind of science. He blames it for killing the real and creating a world of simulations. He animadverts upon dystopian spaces where he holds postmodern scientific knowledge responsible for the digression of the natural course of life and lays bare the secrets behind the replacement of the real with the simulated by drawing attention to such debatable topics as human cloning, cosmetic surgeries and artificial intelligence. In terms of methodology of analysis, this paper is primarily based on a close examination of the author’s literary texts: two novels(Never Let Me GoandKlara and the Sun)and three short stories from Nocturnes (“Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Crooner”). Postmodernist concepts have been of great relevance to the analysis of these texts, for his fiction could not be approached in isolation from the realities of the postmodern era where it’s produced. Equally, bearing in mind the author’s socio-ethnic and historical background, the society where he lives and the politico-cultural transformations of the world aTher the Second World War plays an important role in the analysis of his texts.

Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012)

Although Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) does not qualify as a classic dystopia detailing a possible and undesirable future state of society, the novel shares some traits of the genre, including a protagonist struggling with a system against which she rebels. The dystopian space par excellence seems to be that delimited by the walls of the Panopticon, here an institution for young delinquents, which finds a counterpoint in the shape of an island utopia, a destination that becomes a symbol of harmony and freedom. However, panoptic space, contrary to what is asserted in the text, does not shelter the omnipresent and omniscient surveillance of which the Panopticon and Big Brother have become emblems. In contrast to the supposedly grid-like space of the Panopticon, readers find a literal space which is rich in nooks and crannies and a literary space which reveals an intertextual depth that draws, among other things, on a number of Gothic motifs. Although the text explicitly reappropriates the Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an invention itself riven by the tension between utopia and dystopia, and echoes Michel Foucault’s strategic reading in Discipline and Punish (1975), the virulent critique it levels at the welfare state echoes some of the central issues to be found in George Orwell's attack on totalitarian states, particularly those related to memory and language. The adoption of a first-person narrator allows Fagan to speak out against surveillance that consists in control only and to oppose dehumanizing institutional discourse.

Postcyberpunk dystopian cityscape and emotion artificial intelligence: A spatio-cognitive analysis of posthuman representation in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Within visual culture, postcyberpunk films are best approached as places of Otherness whereby human identity and agency are downplayed and posthumans are magnified in highly technopolic societies marked with scientific determinism. Postcyberpunk treats the posthuman enclave as a heterotopic site, oscillating between utopian and dystopian spaces, potentially and optimistically, creating a space for humanity to be reassessed and renegotiated. Against this backdrop, the current research endeavor proposes a Spatio-Cognitive Model of Posthuman Representation focusing attention on heterotopic ‘spaces’ and ‘bodies’ in hyperconnected environments. While the model owes a substantial debt to Foucault’s writings on heterotopia and the utopian body, in tilting the focus of enquiry, this paper is informed by the tenets of polyrhythmia, hypermimesis, spatial repertoires, semiotic assemblages and cognitive embodiment as insightful interventions. Blade Runner 2049 is taken as a fertile case study grounded in paradoxes and ambiguities around the contradiction between humans and replicants, artificial intelligence and super-large enterprises. The hybridity pertinent to the postcyberpunk film genre and the inner and outer topographies of posthuman representation proved to be insightful investigative vantage points of multimodal inquiry for the socio-political and technocratic implications they underlie. With technology seamlessly integrated into social spaces and posthuman bodies, Blade Runner 2049 is arguably structured as an emotional journey composed of multiple heterotopias (spatial layers, ruptures and bifurcations expressed through socio-political capitalist projections). The article adamantly argues for new philosophical perspectives and praxis in redefinition of the social relationship between human and posthuman.

Novel Spaces

Novel Spaces

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Spaces of resistance and transformation: Caribbean islands between dystopia and creolotopia in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys’s best-known novel Wide Sargasso Sea, writing back to Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre, is set in the exuberant natural world of the post-emancipation Caribbean. Despite its harsh depiction of cruelty, self-deception, and hypocrisy in the human world, the novel conveys a sympathetic impression of Caribbean society. The novel’s utopian/dystopian tension is centered on its imagining of the Caribbean as a paradoxical site of coexisting dystopia and creolotopia. This article focuses on spaces lived in by individual characters, aiming to show that Wide Sargasso Sea’s Caribbean islands can be read as both dystopian spaces of resistance and creolotopian spaces of transformation. Counter to colonial utopian imaginary, the tropical islands in the novel are presented as an evil, ugly, and diseased world for both white colonizers and the colonized, yet they are simultaneously portrayed as a special Caribbean creolotopia formed through archipelagic thinking and the process of creolization, as embodied in the lived experiences of the black woman Christophine. By resisting the binarism of victim/victimizer and envisioning utopia and creolotopia in the same space, the novel subverts the binary thinking that dominates Western epistemology.

Posthuman Emotion Artificial Intelligence in Postcyberpunk Cityscape: A Multimodal Reading of Blade Runner 2049

Within visual culture, postcyberpunk films are best approached as ‘places of Otherness’ whereby human identity and agency are downplayed and posthumans are magnified in highly technopolic societies marked with scientific determinism. Postcyberpunk treats the posthuman as an enclave oscillating between utopian and dystopian spaces, potentially, and optimistically, creating a space for humanity to be reassessed and renegotiated. The hybridity pertinent to the film genre and the inner and outer topographies of posthuman representation are insightful investigative vantage points of multimodal inquiry for the socio-political and technocratic implications they underlie. Against this backdrop, Blade Runner 2049 is one fertile example grounded in paradoxes and ambiguities around the contradiction between humans and replicants, artificial intelligence and super-large enterprises. With technology seamlessly integrated into social spaces and posthuman bodies, Blade Runner 2049 is arguably structured as an emotional journey composed of multiple spatial layers, ruptures and bifurcations expressed through socio-political capitalist projections. The article adamantly argues for new philosophical perspectives and praxis in redefinition of the social relationship between humans and posthumans.

Transformative dystopia in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

This paper explores a hitherto unexplored issue in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and namely the meaningfulness of the fact that two of the main characters in the novel, the Englishman Alfred Archibald Jones (Archie) and the Indian Bengali – Samad Iqbal, go through an extreme dystopian experience leading to their discovery of multiculturalism during World War II in the spaces of a defunct British tank and of a little Bulgarian village near the Greek and Turkish border. The paper examines some of the cultural incongruities in the novel, which renders the “Bulgarian” experience there locked in a dystopian space generated by the Bulgarian village as well as delineates the transformative significance of this experience in Archie’s and Samad’s awakening to multiculturalism.

Paradise in Hell: Mapping Out Ustopian Cartographies in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

The paper examines Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from the fertile lens of cartographical studies of space. Initially, it explores the relationship between cartography and Atwood’s literary oeuvre. Then, it draws upon Foucault’s theory of heterotopia to consider its relevance to Atwood’s Ustopia. It seeks to fill in the gap in the critical studies written on Atwood’s ustopian trilogy. The paper explores how Atwood has diegetically constructed ustopian cartographies in which dystopian spaces are permeated with heterotopic locations of utopian resistance. It attempts to elucidate that the diachronic analysis must be complemented by a synchronic analysis of space. It develops the hypothesis that the ustopian cartographies of the spaces occupied by the characters in Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy have resolved the tension between utopia and dystopia. By theorizing the cartographies of her ustopia, Atwood establishes herself as a literary cartographer.

An ecoGothic reading of Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’

ABSTRACT This article offers an ecoGothic reading of Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) and ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’ (1832). It fleshes out human-nature encounters in the selected short stories to revisit the common response to nature in Hawthorne scholarship as a passive element reflecting characters’ state of mind. We argue that the wilderness in both short stories is presented as a malevolent and dystopian space which is actively resistant and hostile to human intrusion. We explore the ways that nature reacts to intruders in both stories drawing on the main concepts of ecoGothic criticism. The article indicates that descriptions of the wilderness in these stories are framed in Gothic terms; nature appears as disturbed and disturbing, haunted and haunting. The gloomy wilderness of the stories generates fear in the intruders not only by its uncharted space and bewildering structure but also through the possibility of the menacing presence of the Indians. Nature in the selected stories overpowers humans, punishes them severely and reclaims its space at the end.

“Who’s Going to Mobilise Darkness and Silence?”: The Construction of Dystopian Spaces in Contemporary British Drama

Abstract This article examines the recent explosion of British dystopian plays, analysing their changing characteristics from the 1990 s to the 2010 s. After an initial brief look at precursors, it then focuses on examples of new writing which tackle the idea of dystopia in the absurdist manner typical of the 2000 s. In a third step, the focus is on the dystopian drama of the 2010 s and its more conventionally structured plots, which at the same time increasingly include ironic and parodistic elements. It becomes clear how this comparatively new genre is able to shake off the constraints of traditional dystopian writing and develop recognisable characteristics of its own. Throughout, emphasis is put on the “reality” of the plays’ fictional worlds, on the usage of the stage space, and on how the audience’s relationship with the stage is constructed as a double bind of distance and closeness.

The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film

The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film

The Dystopian Beyond: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Stretching behind the literal or metaphorical frontier, the beyond—regardless of its ontological status—constitutes, this article argues, a necessary complementary component of any dystopian reality that determines whether the dystopia in question is of the Orwellian or Hollywood type. Proposing to treat dystopia as a nonsemiosphere (i.e., a potentially semiotic space that eliminates independent acts of meaning assignation and uncontrolled socializing), the article discusses various methods of construing and deconstructing the beyond of the Orwellian type as exemplified in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hence, the main focus is not on the core dystopian space of semiosis but, rather, on its periphery, boundary, and domains expected to be beyond dystopian control. What is taken into consideration are the political, social, temporal, psychological, textual, and generic “beyonds.”

Corporatopia e caostopia: os espaços distópicos na trilogia MaddAddam, de Margaret Atwood

Sob a perspectiva dos estudos da distopia (BARTON, 2016; CAVALCANTI, 2003; CLAEYS, 217; MOYLAN 2003), apresentamos uma análise dos espaços distópicos na trilogia MaddAddam (2003, 2009, 2013), da escritora canadense Margaret Atwood. Através da análise, é proposto que a o conjunto de obras apresenta uma distopia corporativista, extrapolando certos aspectos negativos do sistema econômico capitalista, por fazer figurar uma sociedade controlada pelas corporações e cujos os espaços de moradia, seja das elites ou das classes menos favorecidas, são ambos distópicos, embora cada espaço apresente características distintas. Concluímos que o tipo de controle e violência contra as pessoas nessa sociedade ficcional, embora que se expresse de maneiras diferentes, em última instância, atendem aos interesses de uma pequena elite corporativa na trilogia que visa o lucro acima de qualquer padrão moral ou ético. Assim, a obra possui um potencial crítico bastante acentuado no diálogo com a nossa sociedade histórica.

Interweaving Dystopian and Utopian Spaces, Constructing Social Realism on Screen: Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal

This article investigates the role of utopian and dystopian spaces in the construction of social realism in Bakita Byaktigato/The Rest is Personal (Pradipta Bhattacharya, 2013). The inherent contradiction between the implausible fictional construct of utopian and dystopian spaces and the existing socio-political reality is finely foregrounded through multiple loci of narrative actions. The film, based in Kolkata, revolves around Pramit, an aspiring documentary film-maker, and his quest for love. There are two spaces in the depiction of Kolkata: the city that contains the contemporary socio-political reality which is neither utopic or dystopic, and its dystopic underbelly that embodies the absence of hope for redemption or respite for its inhabitants. Pramit meets a fraudulent astrologer who occupies the dystopian space of ‘darkened shadows’ but knows about the utopian space that remains beyond his reach. The dystopian space is riddled with poverty, deprivation, unfulfilled desire, and hopelessness, along with fear and volatility. The final locus is a village called Mohini, a utopian space representing absolute harmony and undiluted bliss. Only the chosen ones have the privilege to enter the village. Everyone is happy in this space and prone to falling in love that lasts a lifetime. This is commemorative of arshinagar (‘the mirror city’), a coveted space in baul practices and a metaphor for a utopian space that stands in stark contrast with the reality. By interweaving these spaces in his cinematic experimentation, Bhattacharya addresses issues such as folk-cultural practices and community, economic crises and class, caste hierarchy, and social relationships, while attempting to create an alternative cinematic language to counter the filmmaking practices in Bengal that rendered itself vestigial.

Lost, redefined, or preserved? Expressions of solidarity in Paul Auster’s 'In the Country of Last Things'

In his novel set entirely in a dystopian environment, In the Country of Last Things, Paul Auster portrays a disturbing vision of urban space where pervasive processes of disintegration and destabilisation profoundly determine the relations inside it. In this study the semiotic space of this unnamed city will be examined on the basis of the opposition between dominant dystopian space and impermanent sanctuaries located within the urban realm. The defining division of space has its reflection in the practical realisation of the concept of solidarity. The city is inhabited by society for whom moral codes and higher values can be considered relics of the past. Consequently, genuine solidarity has been replaced by what Sally Scholz calls ‘parasitical solidarity’. Temporary refuges, on the other hand, serve as the last anchorages of humanity trying to resist detrimental impacts from outside and to preserve natural gestures of solidarity.

Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands

This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. My exploration of these projects is situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh, a space increasingly imagined as a ground zero of climate change. The projects discussed frame the borderlands as a site that reflects forward onto a multiplicity of (other) dystopian spaces to come. Their often puzzling architecture reveals a grim imagining of the future: one in which atomized resilient families remain rooted in place, facing climate chaos alone, assisted by development technology. In this way, these projects seek to mitigate against global anxiety about climate displacement by emplacing people—preventing them from migrating across borders increasingly imagined as the front lines of climate security. Yet at the same time, these projects speak a visual language that suggests they are as much about representing success at managing climate crisis to an audience elsewhere as they are to successfully stemming climate migration in a particular place. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the specific visions of time and space embedded in securitized framings of the future. In doing so, however, it also points toward counterimaginations and possibilities for life in the midst of ecological change. I thus conclude by contrasting climate heterodystopias with other projects that Bangladeshi peasants living in the borderlands are carrying out: projects that offer different ways of imagining the environment and life in the borderlands of Bangladesh.

Transumanos e pós-humanos em “Deuses de pedra”: a valorização do corpo padronizado na distopia de Jeanette Winterson

Em Deuses de Pedra (2012), escrito por Jeanette Winterson, há um espaço narrativo distópico do passado em que habitantes do planeta Orbus, praticamente destruído por intervenções humanas, vivem para as alterações genéticas e melhoramento estético dos seus corpos bonitos e jovens. Ao mesmo tempo, há um avanço tecnológico no desenvolvimento de robôs, sendo o mais representativo o robô sapiens, extremamente inteligente e belo e com características físicas humanas. Na narrativa há corpos distintos materialmente, no entanto, similares visualmente a partir de um ideal de padrão de beleza que incentiva a alteração dos corpos como um espaço de adaptação social. Nesse trabalho será analisado a relação entre corpo e tecnologia e qual a implicância dessas discussões para os estudos de transumanismo e pós-humanismo a partir dos corpos alterados das personagens e as consequências dessas alterações a partir da criação de um corpo ideal que promove uma ideia errônea de saúde perfeita através da interferência tecnológica.