Postcategorical Utopia

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(Magdalena J. Zaborowska, Professor of American Studies and Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan)

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(D. Quentin Miller, Professor of English, Suffolk University, Boston)

This book examines the dialectic of ideology and utopia in three novels by James Baldwin. Taking Fredric Jameson's seminal theory of the political unconscious as its point of departure, Dr Pekka Kilpelaeinen conceptualizes Baldwin's writing in terms of the impulse of postcategorical utopia, where the ideological categorizations based on race and sexuality, in particular, are challenged by the utopian impulse to imagine alternative futures. The readings of three of Baldwin's novels probe into the questions of ideological and utopian spatialities, transgressive interracial and same-sex relationships, and critiques of both Western modernity and its black counterculture. Baldwin's denouncement of the oppressive effects of identity categories penetrates his entire oeuvre, from his early, critically acclaimed work to his later, often ignored novels. Seen through the lens of postcategorical utopia, the urgency of Baldwin's vision gains a new sense of immediacy and relevance.