Utopia in the Present ― Cultural Politics and Change

The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs. The collection adapts the idea of utopia to the intercultural present using it as a metanarrative projected towards the future and rooted in local experiences and actions. The book presents an interdisciplinary and anti-canonical perspective, and methodological frames from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Imagining social and cultural change outside hegemonic articulations of power is a practice of freedom opposed to the protective drive that raises borders and walls around potential islands to claim the right of keeping them isolated and self-sufficient.

Claudia Gualtieri is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Milan. She published on African and Canadian cultures and literatures, travel narratives, old and new slaveries, colonial and postcolonial writing, and cultural theory. She is working on questions of identity, migration and borders, cultural objects and immaterial culture, Afro-Europeans and African-Italians, migrant theatre, everyday cultural and subcultural productions.