De nieuwe utopisten en de keerzijde (leestips)

Robinson’s attempt to keep the flame of Utopia alive in a despairing era has made him a lonely figure. But suddenly, in the last few years, a new literary genre has emerged that hopes to revive ecological utopianism. Rallying under the banner “solarpunk,” a ragtag band of freelance futurists and science fiction writers have argued that we have an obligation to imagine positive futures where plausible technologies give us practical green solutions.

Uit 'The New Utopians', een lang artikel van Jeet Heer in The New Republic. In zekere zin gaat het over het oeuvre van schrijver Kim Stanley Robinson (niet bij te houden die man.) Maar de laatste alinea's zijn een handige introductie van solarpunk.

Aan de andere kant van het spectrum, een ander favoriet onderwerp van dit blog: Detroit. Ben Paynter schrijft voor het toch al interessante Los Angeles Review of Books een lange recensie over Beautiful Terrible Ruins : Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline van Dora Apel:

As the title of her work indicates, Apel’s thesis is that “the anxiety of decline feeds an enormous appetite for ruin imagery.” Not stopping there, though, she qualifies: “But it matters whether we understand ruination as historically inevitable, the fault of its own victims, or as the result of industrial disinvestment and capitalist globalization.” The industry of “ruin imagery” has to be better understood, the possibility of an underlying “anxiety of decline” has to be explored, and the role of “capitalist globalization” has to be disambiguated.