Landscapes of hope : anti-colonial utopianism in America /

Using the canonical utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean Howells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman as her starting point, Ahmad does a beautiful job of demonstrating how later writers transformed the conventions of the genre to produce a borderless utopianism that promotes the anticolonial movement. Her thorough examinations of the New York-based journal Young India and of such writers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Richard Wright are exciting individually. Together, they provide a whole new way of viewing the connections between postcolonial and ethnic American writing. One sees how African Americans and Indian nationalists employed the utopian tradition, sometimes collaboratively, to "oppose the perceived constraints of modernity" and as a "spiritual antidote for the moribund West." Thus, Ahmad's terrain encompasses literary studies, American studies, and postcolonial studies--and this territory, as she presents it, is well worth exploring. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. D. C. Greenwood Albright College