Abstract
This chapter argues that literary texts that imagine anti- or post-capitalist spaces are important for preparing readers to enter them and to make them possible. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God explore the sociopolitical significance of the anti-capitalist futures they manifest. Hamid imagines a possible “desirable future,” subverts capitalist myths of inevitability, and implicitly relegates the current apocalyptic narrative trend to a failure of imagination, while Erdrich’s novel takes the shape of a meta-text bent on imagining an alternative future to the future the novel posits. Hamid and Erdrich register the savagery of late capitalism and at the same time extend radical hope in their characters’ forging of interdependence in the place of individualism and their respective worlds’ rewarding of communitarian rather than capitalist values.
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Notes
- 1.
A note of gratitude to Claudia Rankine whose immediate response to my brief description of this article was to ask me if I was familiar with Saraceno’s work—which turns out to embody a visual artistic expression of precisely my reading of these two novels.
- 2.
Emily Hall, “Tomás Saraceno: Tonya Bodaker Gallery,” Artforum, 2012, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201208/tomas-saraceno-38835
- 3.
Hall, “Tomás Saraceno.”
- 4.
Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 421.
- 5.
As Anand Giridharadas articulates in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World: “a successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken” because “[w]hen the fruits have fallen on the United States in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them.” Giridharadas argues that this extreme and worsening disparity explains “the spreading recognition on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken and has to change.” Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Vintage, 2019), 4, 5.
- 6.
Deep thanks to David Polanski, whose chapter also appears in this section, for bringing Wynter’s work to my attention and for his thoughtful edits and suggestions.
- 7.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human after Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3(2003): 271, 262.
- 8.
Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 262.
- 9.
Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 268.
- 10.
Daniel Heath Justice, “‘Our stories give us a lot of guidance’: Daniel Heath Justice on why Indigenous literature matter” by Zoe Tennant, CBC Radio, April 09, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/why-stories-matter-now-more-than-ever-1.5526331/our-stories-give-us-a-lot-of-guidance-daniel-heath-justice-on-why-indigenous-literatures-matter-1.5527999
- 11.
Ruth Franklin, “A Timely Novel of Anti-Progress by Louise Erdrich,” The New Times, November 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/books/review/louis-erdrich-future-home-of-the-living-god.html
- 12.
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), 217. All further citations to this novel will be parenthetical.
- 13.
An “unusually cool day for August” in Minnesota is “only ninety degrees.” Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 55.
- 14.
Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God, 3. All further citations of the novel will be parenthetical.
- 15.
Erdrich tends to use multiple narrators in her novels, so that the same story is told from many, variably reliable, viewpoints and subject locations. Notably, her two novels that appear to respond to specific political catalysts—The Round House which was published just as the Violence Against Women Act was due to either expire or be extended to include more protections for Native American women and Future Home of the Living God, about which Erdrich says although she feels “shock” at the speed with which it was rushed into print, “[she] only ha[s] to look at photographs of white men in dark suits deciding crucial issues of women’s health to know the timing is right”—both employ single, arguably limited narrators. The Round House is narrated by a child, while Future Home’s twenty-six year-old narrator spends much of the novel detained. Franklin, “A Timely Novel.”
- 16.
The novel reveals very little about the authoritarian regime in charge and Cedar does not hypothesize about the government’s character or intentions, but moments of interaction with characters who are relatively “in the know” (such as the ultrasound doctor) lend themselves to this interpretation.
- 17.
Michael Schaub calls Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, a “rare stumble from a great writer,” for example, charging that the novel is “too often unclear” to the point of being “inexplicable” Michael Schaub, “Future Home of the Living God is a Rare Stumble from a Great Writer,” NPR, November 14, 2017, https://www.wfae.org/npr-arts-life/2017-11-14/future-home-of-the-living-god-is-a-rare-stumble-from-a-great-writer
- 18.
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” The Harvard Law Review Association 106, no. 8(1993): 1721.
- 19.
Wynter , “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 262. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva echoes this in Racism Without Racists in which he instructs that “race relations acquired … a new character since the 1960s” and that an “increasingly covert nature of racial discourse and racial practices” works to sustain racial inequity after this point. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th edition (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017), 23.
- 20.
Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1778.
- 21.
As a redeemed white female character who initially annoys characters and readers alike, Sera recalls Polly Elizabeth in Erdrich’s 2009 novel, Four Souls.
- 22.
Cedar’s mail carrier at her home (which gets seized by the government when she is captured) Hiro, continues to deliver Cedar’s mail to her, secretly, after she is detained; Cedar writes, “Hiro has casually risked his life for me because I am on his mail route” (211).
- 23.
Michel Laguerre, Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1999), 161.
- 24.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1974), 229, 86.
- 25.
Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial(1918): 337.
- 26.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 2.
- 27.
L.S. and E.H, “Open Borders: The Case for Immigration,” The Economist, April 16, 2018, https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/04/16/the-case-for-immigration
- 28.
Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 6–7.
- 29.
Randall Lane, “Reimaging Capitalism: How the Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need to Change,” Forbes, March 31, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2019/3/4/reimagining-capitalism-how-the-greatest-system-ever-conceivedand-its-billionairesneed-to-change/?sh=61304b7e64c8
- 30.
Cressida Leyshon, “This Week in Fiction: Mohsin Hamid on the Migrants in All of Us,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mohsin-hamid-2016-11-14
- 31.
John. F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 98, 102, 114.
- 32.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 10.
- 33.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 6.
- 34.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 6.
- 35.
All characters except the two protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, remain unnamed in Exit West.
- 36.
L.S. and E.H., “Open Borders.”
- 37.
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 6.
- 38.
Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 6.
- 39.
Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 5.
- 40.
Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 5.
- 41.
Sophie Nield, “There is Another World: Space, Theatre, and Global Anti-capitalism,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 1(2006): 61.
- 42.
Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 421.
- 43.
Daniel Heath Justice, “‘Our stories give us a lot of guidance’: Daniel Heath Justice on why Indigenous literatures matter,” Zoe Tennant, CBC Radio, April 09, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/why-stories-matter-now-more-than-ever-1.5526331/our-stories-give-us-a-lot-of-guidance-daniel-heath-justice-on-why-indigenous-literatures-matter-1.5527999
- 44.
Michel Laguerre, Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1999), 16.
- 45.
Cornel West, “Prisoners of Hope,” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, ed. Paul Rogat Loeb (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 346.
- 46.
Cornel West, “Prisoners of Hope,” 346.
- 47.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 125.
Works Cited
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 5th edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017.
Brooks, Van Wyck. “On Creating a Usable Past.” The Dial(1918): 337–341.
Chomsky, Noam. Hopes and Prospects. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010.
DeCerteau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2005.
Giridharadas, Anand. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Vintage, 2019.
Franklin, Ruth. “A Timely Novel of Anti-Progress by Louise Erdrich.” The New York Times, November 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/books/review/louis-erdrich-future-home-of-the-living-god.html
Hall, Emily. “Tomás Saraceno: Tonya Bodaker Gallery.” Artforum. 2012. https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201208/tomas-saraceno-38835
Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” The Harvard Law Review Association106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91.
Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017.
Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Laguerre, Michel. Minoritized Space: An Inquiry into the Spatial Order of Things. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1999.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1974.
Leyshon, Cressida. “This Week in Fiction: Mohsin Hamid on the Migrants in All of Us.” The New Yorker, November 7, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mohsin-hamid-2016-11-14
L.S. and E.H. “Open Borders: The Case for Immigration.” The Economist, April 16, 2018. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/04/16/the-case-for-immigration
Nield, Sophie. “There is Another World: Space, Theatre, and Global Anti-capitalism.” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 1 (2006): 51–61.
Schaub, Michael. “Future Home of the Living God is a Rare Stumble from a Great Writer.” NPR, November 14, 2017. https://www.wfae.org/npr-arts-life/2017-11-14/future-home-of-the-living-god-is-a-rare-stumble-from-a-great-writer
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. London: Penguin Books, 2010.
Justice, Daniel Heath. “‘Our stories give us a lot of guidance’: Daniel Heath Justice on why Indigenous literatures matter.” By Zoe Tennant. CBC Radio, April 09, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/why-stories-matter-now-more-than-ever-1.5526331/our-stories-give-us-a-lot-of-guidance-daniel-heath-justice-on-why-indigenous-literatures-matter-1.5527999
West, Cornel. “Prisoners of Hope.” The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul RogatLoeb, 293–297. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human after Man, its Overrepresentation-An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3. (2003): 257–337.
Zizek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London and New York: Verso, 2008.
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Maucione, J. (2021). Anti-capitalism and the Near Future: In Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God. In: Beck, C. (eds) Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_12
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