The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism

From its very inception, utopian spatialization has not been kind to Indigenous people. Anticipating a program of colonial violence in centuries to come, Thomas More’s original utopian society is only founded after the conquest of a foreign land Thus the foundation of ‘Utopia’ is a hypocritical one, as the peaceable lives of its citizens are only secured as a result of violence towards other lives. The injustices of 16th-century capitalism, outlined in the first book, are only resolved in the second by a further injustice. The imperial logic at work here is but a simulation of one of capitalism’s principal effects, this being the conquest and colonization of space. Indeed, as Christopher Kendrick argues, the second book of ‘Utopia’ articulates the very invention of space in this historical period. Amidst changing economic regimes, as Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism, space was a way of conceptualizing the experience of displacement. The topography of Book Two was the imaginary accompaniment to the reality of unemployment described in Book One, as dispossession and homelessness turn an immersion in place into a new idea of space.

That violence may well be inherent to the program of utopian spatialization was fore grounded centuries later by dystopian and critical utopian writers, whose imaginary topographies were often tarnished by totalitarian regimes or hegemonic cultures. Yet these were largely representations of those living inside utopian, dystopian or revolutionary situations, and were not concerned with those whose difference disqualified them from the political consensus. It is instead science fiction, with its aliens and humanoids, that analogizes imperial and colonial history. One of the founding texts of the genre, H. G. Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, displays a capacity for working through the historical conditions of its imagination.