Historical displacement lets fiction examine utopia’s aftermath cleanly

Evidence

In this chapter, I will discuss the status of utopianism in two postmodernist works of fiction, both of them set in the post-utopian early 1870s. I have chosen these two seemingly unrelated novels because they are both set just at the moment of the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau, with, in both cases, that historical moment a simultaneous representation and displacement of the sixties, used at once to account for and also to parallel our current situation: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks. … I do so because at this point in this study I want to engage the question of the utopian and the postutopian in postmodernity directly. The historical displacement in these novels to the post-utopian situation of the 1870s, based on rather than representing directly the post-utopian 1970s, allows a clarity of focus on the question of postmodern post-utopian hope itself, rather than on the specificities of the 1960s. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 894

Categorization

• SEED: A craft essay could examine the 1870s-setting novels that use an earlier defeat-of-utopia moment as a displaced allegory for a recent one — the Freedmen’s Bureau-to-1970s mapping as historiographic method.
• XREF: connects to: Women’s liberation consciousness made the utopia-maternal link explicit in fiction — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 905; Displacement applies even to one’s own imagined community and culture — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 1083

Broader Connections

• Displacement applies even to one’s own imagined community and culture #expands (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1083