"An American Utopia"

2016 Jameson, Fredric (b. 1934). “An American Utopia.” In An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 1-96 with a brief “Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams” (vii-viii) by the editor and comments by Jodi Dean (b. 1962); Saroj Giri; Agon Hamza; Kojin Karatani (b. 1941); Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952); Frank Ruda; Alberto Toscano (b. 1977); Kathi Weeks; and Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949). PSt US

The author discusses his utopia based on a universal army, similar in some ways to Bellamy’s Industrial Army, as the best way to deal with the current economic situation. The utopia was originally given as a keynote address at the 2013 meeting of the Society of Utopian Studies in Charleston, SC, and the utopia in the address was much more detailed than in the published version. The comments are Robinson, “Mutt and Jeff Push the Button” (97-104), which is fiction (see 2016 Robinson); Jodi Dean, “Dual Power Redux” (105-32); Saroj Giri, “The Happy Accident of a Utopia” (133-45); Agon Hamza, “From the Other Scene to the Other State: Jameson’s Dialectic of Dual Power” (147-68); Kojin Karatani, “A Japanese Utopia” (169-82); Frank Ruda, “ Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism” (183-210); Alberto Toscano, “After October, Before February: Figures of Dual Power” (211-41); Kathi Weeks, “Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and the Political Imagination (243-65); and Slavoj Žižek, “The Seeds of Imagination” (267-308); followed by “An America Utopia: Epilogue” by Jameson (309-17). The author is the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies (French) and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. He was the recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2008, and in 2012 the Modern Language Association awarded him its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.