Bloomsbury Academic Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires activists, artists, and citizens alike. In this book Tom Moylan - one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies explores the utopian process in its individual and collective trajectory from dream to realization. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou and science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and China Miéville, Becoming Utopian, develops its argument for sociopolitical action through studies that range from liberation theology, ecological activism, and radical pedagogy to the radical movements of 1968. Throughout, Moylan speaks to the urgent need to confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises of our time. Review Becoming Utopian is a synthesis of engagements and concerns and a completion of hermeneutic and political wagers, a vital addition to socially conscious and politically engaged scholarship, and a contribution that may prove as lasting as Moylan's two major works that preceded it. It is mature, engaged, and urgent at once, just as it is both profoundly self-reflexive and passionately attuned to the difference inherent in utopian rupture. It is an always already classical work, for it is a work of authentic humanist sensibility that is poised to inspire and nurture scholarship for years to come --Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos, University of Cyprus About the Author Tom Moylan is Glucksman Professor Emeritus at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Founder of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies and an internationally recognised scholar and teacher, his previous books inclide Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Uropian Imagination (1986).