The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed


Book Description

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years.




The Dispossessed


Book Description

A brilliant physicist attempts to salvage his planet of anarchy.




Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature


Book Description

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction. Published in 1974, it marked a revival of utopianism after decades of dystopian writing. According to this widely accepted view The Dispossessed represents a new kind of literary utopia, which Tom Moylan calls a 'critical utopia.' The present work challenges this reading of The Dispossessed and its place in the histories of utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction. It explores the difference between traditional literary utopia and novels and suggests that The Dispossessed is not a literary utopia but a novel about utopianism in politics. Le Guin's concerns have more to do with those of the novelists of the 19th century writing in the tradition of European Realism than they do with the science fiction or utopian literature. It also claims that her theory of the novel has an affinity with the ancient Greek tragedy. This implies that there is a conservatism in Le Guin's work as a creative writer, or as a novelist, which fits uneasily with her personal commitment to anarchism.




Changing Politics of Education


Book Description

The authors persuasively argue that the present cascade of reforms to public education is a consequence of a larger intention to shrink government. The startling result is that more of public education's assets and resources are moving to the private sector and to the prison industrial complex. Drawing on various forms of evidence-structural, economic, narrative, and youth-generated participatory research-the authors reveal new structures and circuits of dispossession and privilege that amount to a clear failure of present policy. Policymaking is at war with the interests of the vast majority of citizens, and especially with urban youth of color. In the final chapter the authors explore democratic principles and offer examples essential to mobilizing, in solidarity with educators, youth, communities, labor, and allied social movements, the kind of power necessary to contest the present direction of public education reform.




The Dispossessed


Book Description

The first comprehensive, in-depth book on the Trump administration’s assault on asylum protections Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning—that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb exploded in my life,” Arnovis said. The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family’s search for safety shows how the United States—in concert with other Western nations—has gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man’s quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity. Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders—it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.




The Possessed and the Dispossessed


Book Description

"Sharp concludes this study with an analysis of how indigenous spirit mediums and Protestant exorcists treat extreme cases of possession and madness, revealing contradictions inherent in cross-cultural psychiatric praxis. More generally, the book challenges current views about possession and marginal status, particularly in reference to gender and age, insightful discussions of the lives of migrant adults and children as they seek relief. Some personal and social ills make Sharp's investigation relevant to gender studies, medical anthropology religion and ritual, and the politics of culture as well as African and Madagascar studies."--Jacket




The Dispossessed Majority


Book Description

The intent of this book is to supply members of this discomfited and threatened group-here provisionally defined as the American Majority-with a systematic diagnosis of the diseases and debilities that have laid them low and some suggestions for their recovery. So many liberals having become minority racists and so many conservatives having become rootless cranks, so much religion having become social science and so much social science having become intellectual sleight-of-hand, the thoughtful Majority member has nowhere to turn but to himself. This, however, may be his salvation. In isolation the critical faculty cuts deeper. Only now is it possible to understand the tragic and humiliating fate of the American Majority because only now are a few Majority minds, deepened by decades of solitary contemplation and sharpened by the grim chronicle of events, finally tuning to the emergency wavelength of collective survival. No one who reads this all-encompassing study of the American predicament will ever again view his country and himself in the same light. The author brilliantly recounts the tragedy of a great people, the Americans of European descent, who founded and built The United States and whose decline is the chief cause of America's decline. Although replete with cogent criticism of the people and events which have brought America low, the book ends on a positive, optimistic note, which envisions a resurgent American Majority liberating its institutions from the control of intolerant intellectuals innately programmed to destroy what they could never create.




Dispossession


Book Description

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living? In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety.




Dispossession Without Development


Book Description

Winner of the 2019 Global and Transnational Sociology Best Book Award, American Sociological Association Winner of the 2019 Political Economy of World System (PEWS) Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association Received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against land dispossession. Dispossession Without Development demonstrates that beneath these conflicts lay a profound shift in regimes of dispossession. While the postcolonial Indian state dispossessed land mostly for public-sector industry and infrastructure, since the 1990s state governments have become land brokers for private real estate capital. Using the case of a village in Rajasthan that was dispossessed for a private Special Economic Zone, the book ethnographically illustrates the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism driving dispossession in contemporary India. Taking us into the lives of diverse villagers in "Rajpura," the book meticulously documents the destruction of agricultural livelihoods, the marginalization of rural labor, the spatial uneveness of infrastructure provision, and the dramatic consequences of real estate speculation for social inequality and village politics. Illuminating the structural underpinnings of land struggles in contemporary India, this book will resonate in any place where "land grabs" have fueled conflict in recent years.




The Day Before the Revolution


Book Description

“Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” – Cincinnati Enquirer The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "The Day Before the Revolution" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.