Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope

Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope explores the aesthetic and historical conditions that inform the recent convergence of the seemingly incommensurable domains of the postcolonial Third World and the genre of SF, particularly as expressed in the recent phenomenon of visionary SF narratives originating from postcolonial national cultures. Offering a materialist theorization of this surge of Third-World science fiction supported by careful and penetrating close readings, the book considers its formal emergence as representing a definitive shift in postcolonial literary and cultural production that finds its material provenance in the political, economic, and spatial dilemmas of globalization and its ideological vitality in the enduring project of utopian thought for the post-contemporary present.

ERIC SMITH is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA. He has published widely on Postcolonial and Modern/Postmodern British Literatures.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Desire Called Postcolonial Science Fiction
"Fictions Where a Man Could Live': Worldlessness Against the Void in Salman Rushdie's Grimus
'The Only Way Out is Through': Spaces of Narrative and the Narrative of Space in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber
There's No Splace Like Home: Domesticity, Difference, and the 'Long Space' of Short Fiction in Vandana Singh's The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
Claiming the Futures That Are, or, The Cunning of History in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome and Manjula Padmanabhan's Gandhi-Toxin
Mob Zombies, Alien Nations, and Cities of the Undead: Monstrous Subjects and the Postmillennial Nomos in I am Legend and District 9
Third World Punks, or, Watch Out for the Worlds Behind You
Conclusion: Reimagining the Material
Selected Bibliography
Index