Table of Contents

Introduction: Real Networks and Imaginary Vistas
One: Developing Nations
I: Evolution: Edward Bellamy, William Morris, William Dean Howells
II: Eugenics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Two: A Periodical Nation
I: Culture: A. K. Coomaraswamy
II: Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore
III: Personification: Sarojini Naidu
IV: Transnationalism: J. T. Sunderland
Three: Worlds of Color
I: Resurrection: Pauline Hopkins
II: Romance: W. E. B. Du Bois
III: Rationalism: Richard Wright
Epilogue: Multicultural Utopia?

About the Author

Dohra Ahmad teaches postcolonial literature at St. John's University. She is the editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (W. W. Norton, 2007); her essays have appeared in English Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Reviews

"In this striking new configuration, Ahmad combines theoretical inquiry into utopian writing with historical attention to exiled Indians in America. The result transforms our view of writing in the U.S. from Bellamy and Howells to Du Bois and Richard Wright."-Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
"In Landscapes of Hope Dohra Ahmad transforms our whole conceptualization of anti-colonial writing. She shows how, in developing transnational forms of resistance, diasporic and exiled activists simultaneously crossed the boundaries of writing itself. Their utopic visions of their people released from the burden of colonial rule informed their fiction, their periodicals and their speeches alike. Ahmad brilliantly reconceptualizes the very scope of
anti-colonial writing and asks us to rethink the ways in which we have imagined it in the past. Landscapes of Hope marks a major contribution to postcolonial studies and opens the door to its future."-Robert J. C.
Young, New York University
"With its nuanced exploration of the parallels and encounters between Indian nationalists in the US and African American internationalists, Landscapes of Hope is an important contribution to the history of Afro-Asian radicalism. Anti-colonialism, Ahmad reminds us, emerges in the "realm of the conditional": it finds its angle of critique and its redemptive vision in utopianism. Her remarkably thorough portrait of Lajpat Rai's New York-based journal
Young India also reminds us that anti-colonialism is contrapuntal and cross-diasporic: never a single nationalist discourse emerging in isolation, but instead an interweaving of struggles that take shape crucially
in view of one another."-Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University