Joe Davidson’s Saving Utopia takes as its subject the ‘strange disappearance’ (2) of literary utopias in comparison to earlier periods of utopia proliferation, while at the same time tracing the transformation and survival, however marginal, of utopian fictions. Why, Davidson asks, ’is it so difficult for writers to articulate visions of new and better worlds’ (2)? What can we learn from those who have succeeded in doing so, and how can the dream of utopia survive until it is ready at last for a ‘dignified death’ not in the face of hopelessness and despair but because we have remade the world such that it is no longer necessary to dream of a better one (188)?
Davidson tracks the vicissitudes of utopianism as literary genre from its early modern beginnings in Thomas More’s Utopia. While these earliest utopias imagined other worlds in other places—over the seas, hidden behind mountain ranges, or in other difficult-to-reach places— the eighteenth century saw, as Reinhart Koselleck has argued, a ‘temporalization’ of utopia (39). According to Davidson, this shift began with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 in 1771, in which it was not space but time which must be moved through in order to arrive at a better world. More recently, Davidson suggests, utopian fiction has struggled to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. It might still adapt, persist, and perhaps even recover in the form of what Davidson terms ‘the postdystopian utopia’, in which a better world is possible only by traversing the tempestuous oceans and perilous cliffs of social, economic, or climate catastrophe.
Davidson’s book consists of two parts. The first seeks to map and to account for the declining population of utopian texts. The second looks to black, feminist, and green utopianisms in order to find resources for navigating trauma, nostalgia, and apocalypse.
If utopianism is endangered, Davidson suggests, then the best way to account for this is by reference to the ‘collapse of modern time consciousness’. Where earlier periods looked to the future with hope and the expectation of better things to come, what we see looming on the horizon are only horrors (30). We are left with only the impoverished visions of Silicon Valley billionaires whose faith in the transformative power of technology is undermined by an incapacity to imagine any meaningful transformation of the social order (50).
How then, Davidson asks, might we ‘defuse and retool’ the challenges posed to utopian imaginings by the contemporary polycrisis, and how might we overcome the ‘bad feelings associated with the end of the future and dystopian times—trauma, nostalgia, and apocalypse’ (85)? The Black Lives Matter movement and the Black utopian tradition might suggest, Davidson intimates, some ways to hold together a traumatic past and its contemporary afterlives with an insistence on hope for a ‘liberatory future’ (87), even if that liberation can be imagined only minimally—as in Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimist hope for a cataclysmic end of the world which alone might suffice to interrupt the reproduction of white supremacy (88). Black utopianism, Davidson suggests, in both its fictional forms (such as Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, which centres around the question of how the fantastical underwater utopian community of Drexciya might confront the trauma of transatlantic slavery) and in its political demands (such as the recent resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery) suggests strategies by which postdystopian dystopias might incorporate a demand for confronting dystopian truths into their imagination of ‘reparatory’ utopian futures (113).
Feminist utopianism, in turn, suggests strategies for future survival. While the longing for a lost and better past is, for Davidson, for the most part the reactionary counterpart of our lost hopes for the future, recent works of feminist utopianism suggest a more productive way to look backwards: not melancholic fantasies of former glories but a return to historical false starts, to dreams of new worlds never brought to birth. Through what Elizabeth Freeman describes as ‘temporal drag’, ‘the unstable coming together of anachronism and novelty’, we might revive the future through the playful staging of encounters between the present and the past that never was, as exemplified by Isabel Herguera’s film El sueño de la sultana, which reimagines Rokeya Sakhwat Hossain’s 1905 short story ‘Sultana’s Dream’ as an anti-colonial corrective to the whiteness of contemporary feminist nostalgia.
Finally, Davidson suggests, green utopianism may point us towards the possibility of hope in the midst of climate crisis. Here the book is at its most theological, noting that utopian thought has, since its inception, been haunted by the idea of apocalypse—an idea recently resurrected in postdystopian utopian writers of climate fiction. Despite portents of doom, green utopias imagine the possibility of a new world emerging from the death of the old, as in Claire North’s Notes from the Burning Age, where, several centuries in the future and in the wake of climate collapse, a new religion focuses on placating the gods of the earth so they will never again set fire to the earth.
Saving Utopia concludes with a discussion of exhaustion as the characteristic experience of this historical moment, after the death of ‘modern time consciousness’. In exhausting times, where perhaps the best we can do is simply to endure, to carry on, the act of continuing to write, continuing to imagine better worlds in the midst of our exhausted world and the exhausted genre of utopia is the most countercultural thing we can do.
Despite its forays into neighbouring disciplines, Saving Utopia for the most part remains within the theoretical bounds set out by utopian studies. Davidson suggests that Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction—that it must contain ‘a novum, or a novel phenomenon that is “totalizing” in the sense that it entails a change in the whole universe of the tale’ might also be applied to utopias. Yet Suvin’s definition not only—as John Rieder has argued—covers over the historical complexity and mutability of actually existing science fiction in service of aligning the genre with the ‘cultural prestige associated with the academic-classical genre system’ but also relies on deeply Christian logics of supersession and redemption on which utopian fictions are themselves so often built. If literary utopias must, as Davidson argues, be built on a total transformation of the universe, then so too is the genre itself, Davidson implies, positioned as a novum with respect to what came before. Where utopian studies often inclines towards a narrative which begins with Plato’s Republic and then takes a great leap forward to Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia, Davidson insists more strongly on the genre’s newness, taking More as his starting point. The utopia as defined by novum must be distinguished from ‘other modes of imagining a good place—the limitless abundance of the Land of Cockaigne, the eternal bliss of heaven, or the harmony of the primordial Golden Age’ (14).
Yet one thing of which utopian fictions repeatedly assure us is that no border around the promised land can ever be completely sealed. Whatever perils mark the crossing between no-place and its neighbours—whether spatial or temporal—there is no mountain so high, no sea so tempestuous, no angels bearing swords so terrifying that intrepid souls cannot make their way across them. If we were to grant the possibility of migration—even of commerce—between utopian fiction and Christian theology, we might find, I would suggest, that other distinctions also begin to lose their clarity. This is especially true, I think, of the distinction between utopia and dystopia, which Davidson temporalizes such that utopia can be redeemed if only we position it as ‘overcoming’ the dystopias which come before it, including the dystopia in which we live: this present moment (2).
Here Davidson’s discussion parallels the recent return in Christian theology of both universalism and annihilationism—the hope that all may, in the end, be saved or, at least, allowed to die peacefully rather than being maintained in eternal conscious torment: the affirmation that hell, if it exists at all, must be empty. Christian theology holds, for the most part, the nonexistence of evil and the possibility of utopia without dystopia yet finds itself insisting, nonetheless, on the necessity of hell. There are a few different ways that we could read this. First, it could be read as an insistence that justice must be done and wrongs righted: not only the wrongs of others but also our own. As the priest protagonist of Paul Schrader’s film First Presbyterian asks, contemplating the human devastation of ecologies and climate, ‘Will God forgive us’? In a media landscape full of artefacts of the desire to see those responsible for the current crisis pay for their misdeeds, where in the postdystopian dystopia might we locate the desire for justice?
Second, it is an inescapable fact that unambiguously utopian literature shares with depictions of heaven a narrative problem: perfection is boring. Aquinas’ insistence that the pleasures of watching the damned suffer for all eternity in hell is one of the joys of heaven may be gruesome, but it is difficult not to have some sympathy. Modern Western storytelling derives from Christianity not only its basic form—creation, fall, struggle, redemption—but also the difficulty of imagining perfection. Give us hellmouths and lakes of fire; give us climate collapse and marauding gangs of trans women hunting men for oestrogen; give us anything at all except everything we ever wanted, a fate so dull that The Good Place’s protagonists rightly opt instead for oblivion.
Finally, as might be more readily apparent if we trace utopia’s origins all the way back through the genocidal missions of Christendom to the slaveholders’ utopia of Plato’s Republic, utopia for some is dystopia for others. As James Cone has it following the Nation of Islam, ‘White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell’. The wildest dreams of Silicon Valley billionaires are—as many of us are currently experiencing—a dystopian hellscape for the rest of us. As Naomi Alderman’s dystopian-utopia The Future cleverly suggests, so too might our dreams of a better world resemble billionaires’ worst nightmares.
The ‘dystopian times’ in which we live are themselves the product of earlier times in which utopian fictions flourished, just as the modern world is the product of medieval dreams of heaven which so frequently brought hell to earth. We owe the logic of supersession—of the struggle to overcome the bad times of the present with better times to come—not only to liberal visions of progress or Marxist dreams of revolution but to the Christian logic of salvation history: the hope of God’s kingdom brought to earth, the promise of liberation from captivity in Egypt into a land of milk and honey, to a new Jerusalem built upon the rubble of the old, upon the bones of its previous inhabitants. Supersessionism entails ‘a reconciliation’ which, as Hegel has it, ‘can only be achieved through a knowledge of the affirmative side of history, in which the negative is reduced to a subordinate position and transcended altogether’. If we forget the imbrication of heaven with hell—of utopia with dystopia—we will be doomed to repeat it.
