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Feminist Utopias
Feminist utopias imagine alternative societies free from patriarchal domination, sometimes reconfiguring or abolishing gender itself. This overview traces the genre as a long, interconnected tradition, from early works such as Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies to Enlightenment-era calls for women’s education, and the surge of first-wave feminist utopias in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While these texts often envision women-only or technologically advanced societies, the essay stresses that utopia is contested: several canonical works rely on racist and ableist eugenics, rendering their futures exclusionary. Second-wave feminist speculative fiction expands the genre by interrogating gender as socially constructed and reframing utopia as an ongoing political project rather than a finished state, notably in the work of Octavia Butler. Contemporary feminist and Afrofuturist utopias further challenge Eurocentric futures, presenting more inclusive visions. The central argument is that feminist utopias function as political narratives which seek to reshape imagination, identity, and social possibility.
FOCUS: An Anthology of Contemporary Jamaican Writing
This article examines Focus: An Anthology of Contemporary Jamaican Writing (1943–1960) as a foundational cultural project in the emergence of Jamaican literary nationalism. Edited by Edna Manley, the anthology brought together poetry, fiction, drama, and visual art that responded to the social upheavals of the late 1930s and the growing anti-colonial consciousness leading to universal suffrage in 1944. Focus foregrounded the lives, labour, and cultural traditions of working-class Jamaicans, particularly through recurring figures such as the black working woman, while also revealing tensions between nationalist aims and lingering colonial aesthetics. The article traces how contributors negotiated class, language, diaspora, and artistic responsibility, highlighting both the anthology’s political ambitions and its exclusions—most notably of Louise Bennett and other vernacular voices. Despite its limitations, Focus is presented as a landmark publication that helped write Jamaica and the Caribbean into literary existence, shaping a canon that continues to influence regional education and cultural identity.
Harlem Renaissance
The essay takes on the cultural and political debates that shaped the Harlem Renaissance, framing it as the artistic expression of the New Negro Movement, emerging from the Great Migration, post-World War I racial tensions, and resistance to entrenched racist representations such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. The essay traces how Black writers navigated competing pressures: white patronage, expectations of racial uplift, and internal debates over whether art should function as propaganda or pursue aesthetic autonomy. Central to this tension are figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued for politically instrumental art, and Langston Hughes, who defended artistic freedom in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. Through discussions of writers including Zora Neale Hurston, the article emphasizes the movement’s ideological diversity, formal experimentation, and enduring significance as an assertion of Black self-definition through art.
Literary and Philosophical Societies
This comprehensive essay positions literary and philosophical societies—voluntary learned associations founded mainly from the late eighteenth century—as central to provincial infrastructures of “useful knowledge”, encompassing debate, lectures, libraries, experiments, and museums. Emerging in Manchester (1781) and Newcastle (1793), the model spread across Britain and beyond, creating influential networks independent of metropolitan bodies such as the Royal Society. Rooted in dissenting academic cultures and shaped by figures including Joseph Priestley, these societies functioned as intellectual hubs that also fostered mechanics’ institutes and adult education. Their shared governance structures reinforced social gatekeeping, while women’s participation remained limited until gradual mid-nineteenth-century reforms. Balancing exclusive member discussions with public lectures, the societies extended their influence through print culture, notably the Manchester Memoirs. Though formally excluding politics and religion, they often engaged contested issues indirectly. Recent scholarship recasts them as key institutional nodes of a provincial Enlightenment.
