Research

My PhD research focused on the relationship between utopia and the future. In my work, I am concerned with questioning the way in which the temporality of utopia is standardly understood.

Utopia has been a lively area of research for many years, especially within the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies. However, scholars of utopia have often associated visions of new and better societies with the future, such that the realisation of a fulfilled world is to be achieved via a progressive movement through time. In one sense, this is unsurprising. The rise of the modern time regime in the eighteenth century positioned the future as the realm of the new and the better. This triggered a temporalisation of the utopian form. Utopias published in the early modern period were set elsewhere in the world but, beginning with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 (1771), utopias start to be set in the future.

Despite this strong association between utopia and the future, it is unclear whether it is still viable today. The future is not what it used to be. In the light of the social catastrophes of modernity and awareness of the failure of past attempts to enact a utopian break, the idea that the future will bring liberation appears naïve. All of this poses a challenge to utopia. If visions of new worlds have traditionally found their home in the future, then how does utopia ground itself in temporal terms in the current crisis of the future? How do utopians respond to the supporting condition of the modern time regime being pulled out from under their feet?

The aim of my work is to examine how the shifting status of the future has reconfigured utopian attempts to imagine alternative societies. Its originality consists, first, in destabilising the traditional association between utopia and the future by highlighting that there is nothing necessary about the imagination of new worlds in the time to come and, second, in demonstrating that the end of the future has not resulted in the end of utopia but rather its reconstitution in a new form. There is a specifically post-futural mode of utopianism that both acknowledges and subverts the crisis of the future.

In my published writings, I have developed the notion of the post-futural utopia. This might be by exploring the distinctive temporality of Black utopian visions, examining the looping conception of time proposed by dub reggae artists in the 1970s, or the retrotopian impulse of contemporary feminist science fiction. More generally, I have also examined the distinctive form of social theory produced by utopian fiction, as well as discussing the utopianism of thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ernst Bloch, and William Morris. These concerns are also reflected by my writings for popular audiences, including a long essay on the continuing relevance of the utopian ideas of the interwar period for politics today.

The purpose of my new study is to explore and elucidate the value of apocalyptic narratives for developing social theoretical understanding of the climate crisis. Whether it is movements like Extinction Rebellion or popular nonfiction books such as David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), the sense that climate change will bring mass devastation and corrode social structures suffuses the cultural consciousness. However, the positive value of climate apocalyptic narratives, despite their prevalence, have been largely overlooked by environmental theorists, both in sociology and beyond.

This is a shame, not least because the apocalypse has long offered a means by which marginalised groups have conceptualised the world. From the millenarian peasant movements of early modern Europe to the rise of Rastafarianism in the postcolonial Caribbean, visions of the end of the world critique the injustice of actually existing society and posit an emancipated society in the future. My aim is to consider whether climate apocalyptic narratives function in a similar manner. To what extent do images of a future Earth ravaged by climate change augment critical theory? Does the figure of climate apocalypse reveal what is wrong with the social world by imagining its collapse? Can the end of this world inform thinking about the beginning of another, more liberated one?

To begin to address these questions, I have produced an article with Filipe Carreira da Silva focused on the role of the climate apocalypse in the African American theoretical and cultural tradition, as well as a piece on the idea of collapse in the contemporary environmental movement, a critique of existential risk studies, and a reconstruction of the feeling of eco-anxiety..