Landscapes of Hope - 9780195332766

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts - novels, poems, contemplative essays - as a way to conceptualize the new societies they sought. After exploring conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Dohra Ahmad shows the surprising ways in which writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.
Landscapes of Hope offers a cogent new examination of anti-imperialist discourse during this under-studied but critical period. With a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States, Ahmad combines perspectives from American Studies, utopian studies, and post-colonial theory to describe an unrecognized strand in the American utopian tradition. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Ahmad analyzes the little known, often collaborative contributions of both African and Indian Americans and reveals the productive relationship between anti-colonial writing and the utopian tradition. Her subtle and original argument provides a new framework for understanding Left literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century.