Hardy 12

Creating contemporary utopian narratives appears as a particularly difficult yet vitally necessary endeavor. That is, hopeful proposals are direly needed to inspire the means of transcending a seemingly hopeless present. Yet, to return to Levitas’ notion of an enduringly critically self-reflexive, dialogical, and provisional utopianism, the ways in which previous utopias have naturalized dystopian realities for marginalized groups must be addressed. For instance, the socialist utopias of Bellamy and Morris naturalized, to varying degrees, hetero-patriarchy and racism, in their respective failures to articulate critiques of those forms of oppression. Today, the focus on the threats associated with climate change and global economic stagnation, as well as both ongoing and potential outbreaks of violence, has the potential to obscure the particularities of social inequalities and their respective intersections with ecological crisis. The experiences of Indigenous and other landbased peoples are especially vulnerable in this regard. In fact, one might argue that the critical utopias referenced above by Delany, Le Guin, Piercy, and Russ contribute, in varying degrees, to the naturalization of settler colonialism. As such, the growing body of Indigenous critical theory and allied critiques of settler colonialism ought to be of specific concern. Lorenzo Veracini defines settler colonialism thusly: [W]hereas settler colonialism constitutes a circumstances where the colonising effort is exercised from within the bounds of a settler colonising political entity, colonialism is driven by an expanding metropole that remains permanently distinct from it . . . as settlers, by definition, stay, in specific contradistinction, colonial sojourners—administrators, missionaries, military personnel, entrepreneurs, and adventurers—return.13 This throws open the question of how the utopian traditions of settler societies—including but not limited to the United States and Canada—themselves ought to be understood as part of the project of naturalizing settler colonialism. That is, the utopianism of settler societies must be accountable to anti-colonial critiques. To fail to do so is to undermine the relevance of utopia as a contributor to the project of making a better world or, at the least, it constrains the social dreaming of a better way of being to an exclusive category.