Chicanx Utopias

Author: Luis Alvarez
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324488
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.

America's Communal Utopias

Author: Donald E. Pitzer
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080789897X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Book Description
From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot.

The Faber Book of Utopias

Author: John Carey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571203178
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 531

Book Description
Utopias come in every conceivable cultural and sexual shade: communist, fascist, anarchist, green, techno-fantastic, all male, all female. John Carey's anthology encompasses many noble schemes, as well as chilling attempts at social control.

The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

Author: Laurence Davis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739110867
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
Description of the seductions - and snares - of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society. This title, an edited collection of original essays on "Le Guin's The Dispossessed", represents an exploration of the political ramifications of this work by a wide interdisciplinary swath of scholars from around the world.

The Story of Utopias

Author: Lewis Mumford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description

Utopia and the Ideal Society

Author: J. C. Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521275514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
This text provides a major study for all those working in the fields of 16th- and 17th-century political and social thought.

The Philosophy of Utopia

Author: Barbara Goodwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136337636
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
This collection addresses the important function of utopianism in social and political philosophy and includes debate on what its future role will be in a period dominated by dystopian nightmare scenarios.

Utopian Thought in the Western World

Author: Frank Edward MANUEL
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040562
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 907

Book Description
The authors have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time.

Utopia

Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409406997
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Book Description
In addition to considering the role of social theory in the imagination of alternative futures, this volume reflects on how social theory may assist us in understanding and appreciating utopia or utopianism as a special topic of interest, a special subject matter, a special analytical focus or a special normative dimension of sociological thinking. Bringing together the latest work from a leading team of social theorists, this volume will be of interest to sociologists, social and political theorists, anthropologists and philosophers.

The Politics of Utopia

Author: Barbara Goodwin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039110803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
This book provides both an introduction to utopianism and a general perspective on radical political thought. Vigorously disputing the widespread conviction that utopianism is a fantasy with no relevance to modern political life and thought, the authors argue that it is a concept whose special virtue lies in its capacity to transcend the limitations of present circumstances, to inspire alternative thinking and to open up new directions for political action. This book develops an approach which relates social causes to political theory and practice. The first part discusses utopianism as a form of political theory with unique characteristics and the ability to transcend the present. The second part considers utopianism as an expression of fundamental social impulses and as an ingredient of modern political movements. The third part offers a defence of utopianism as both theory and practice, and argues for its use to counteract the pragmatism and narrow empiricism which often passes for political «realism» in modern societies. This reissue of a popular and well-received landmark text contains a new preface.