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.
A Story Where Something Turns Out All Right: Remembering Utopia in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West
Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he has taught since 1994, and the director of the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous essays and five previous books: Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002); Life between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989–2001 (2009); Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014); Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (2014); and most recently, Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (2020); as well as the forthcoming Late Theory; Jameson, or, The Persistence of Reading.
Phillip E. Wegner; A Story Where Something Turns Out All Right: Remembering Utopia in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2025; 124 (1): 39–56. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557865
Download citation file:
Advertisement