A Story Where Something Turns Out All Right

Remembering Utopia in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

Bibliographic Data

ID4440500
AuthorsPhillip E Wegner (0009-0001-1462-8435, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume124
Issue1
Pages39-56
Publication date2025-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00382876-11557865
OpenAlexW4406747559
LanguageEN
References cited9

In the current interregnum, there has, not surprisingly, been a great deal of interest in the literary dystopia. However, far less attention has been directed to the dystopia's precursor, the practice Tom Moylan identifies as the critical utopia. The author argues that we see a brilliant realization of the form in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017). Exit West exemplifies Fredric Jameson's generic discontinuity, moving as it does from a realist mode through a science fictional dystopia and the fantastic, arriving finally at the critical utopia. The last transition occurs through the narration of an unexpected event-one in which nothing is happening. The world that emerges is one where new possibilities appear in what Alain Badiou identifies as the conditions of science, art, politics, and "minimal communism," or love. Such a world-"not a heaven but not a hell"-is one wherein not knowing what is to come allows an authentic future again to become possible. This is in stark contrast to the ideologies of capitalist realism, which teach us that there are no alternatives, that the current interregnum is permanent, and that there is no future that is not a repetition of the past

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Utopia · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy · Psychology

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