Histopias

The present monograph looks closely at and identifies a new subgenre, histopias. A (late) postmodernist phenomenon, histopias are fictional retellings of the history of the world. They often use utopian/dystopian scenarios, which are necessary as “world-historical effect”: the end and/or rebirth of the world offer the possibility of narrating the fate of all mankind. Whether novelists or playwrights, histopian authors use a structural pattern that mirrors the way in which the world tells itself: both continuous and discontinuous, in turn linear, cyclical, or radial.

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic study of Chinese reflections on “progress,” its multifaceted expressions, contesting interpretations, highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism it encountered.

This is the first English translation of one of the key works of 20th-century Venezuelan fiction. Published in 1949, Ana Isabel: A Respectable Girl by Antonia Palacios is a classic coming-of-age story set in Caracas in the 1920s, exploring issues of race, class, and gender and exposing the colonial and patriarchal legacy of the country in the era before urban development and the dependence on an oil economy. A modern Latin American classic and the Venezuelan counterpart of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street(1984), Ana Isabel: A Respectable Girl broke with the symbolic realist genre in vogue in Latin American narrative works and inaugurated a new form of expression with poetic overtones.

“Once one understands the nature and magnitude of defuturing as the negation of world futures, how one has to account for the history and making of the material world – including design - dramatically changes. Defuturing as our condition forces the generation of a new philosophy of design.” With these thoughts this book presents a radically new understanding of the history, context and futures of designing. First published in 1999, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy is a prescient and powerful account of what it means to comprehend that we live in world that is taking away futures for ourselves and non-human others. Arguing that designing is doubly implicated in this process, first in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but second, re-thought through the lens of defuturing, as a mode of acting in the world that can help contest the negation of the world, Defuturing transforms our comprehension of designing and of how futures can be constituted. Working not through abstract theorizing but through the analysis of concrete examples, the book uses historical material on design to expose the archaeology of defuturing. Shattering the illusion that the future simply “is”, Defuturing confronts designing with the challenge of remaking while offering the elements of a new practical reasoning of design acting.

The contemporary popular cultural space has leveraged the queer in the same format of representation as its presentation in the 1990s. Although the queer is portrayed in a less perverse light than a decade ago, popular cultural representations of the queer in the visual culture genres are still on the level of the banal. While popular culture has become more encouraging towards the queer, the broader cultural opinion about the queer has been progressively more skeptical, compromised by the idea that the queer is encroaching on spaces reserved exclusively for heteronormative recreation. The essays in this volume look closely at how the queer is portrayed across media and throughout the world.

"Introduces the idea of defuturing, which is first employed here as a deconstructive method to expose foundational flaws in those worlds so familiar to us. It places the significance of understanding design before all concerned people while also confronting design students and professionals with a practical retooling exercise" (Amazon)