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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - Renewing Democracy

  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
    Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024, pp 254-270

  • Summary

    The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?