Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present - Paperback

by Victoria V. Wolcott (Editor)

Challenges readers to use utopian thinking and practice to counter the conditions of the present and create an alternative future.

"Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture-with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging-Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository.

Author Biography

Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History and Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement; Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America; and Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit.