Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present

Victoria W. Wolcott

Apr 2024 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

"Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture—with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging—Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.

About the author

Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History and Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement; Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America; and Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit.