After utopia : modernity socialism & the postcolony

After Utopia is an attempt to think new political practices and subjectivities in the twenty-first century. It recognizes that our present demands a reinvention of the great dream of a world beyond capitalism and a world without borders that marxism once dreamt of. It argues that if the world today has to save itself from impending all-round disaster, brought on by the ravages of capital and Empire, it must once again confront questions of class and property relations. It must also reclaim the earth from capital. But After Utopia is written with the deep awareness of the post-utopian world that we inhabit, where there are no fixed and ready-made answers to those questions that marxism once posed. They can and do arise in entirely unanticipated ways and demand fresh responses.

The author therefore argues that this requires a fundamental restructuring of our vision â€" away from state-dependent strategies of transformation, by recognizing the power of shared molecular economies that constitute the practices of everyday life in large parts of the world. Such a restructuring alone can enable us to find the resources for a new and ecologically sound way of thinking about an egalitarian future.

About Author:

Aditya Nigam works with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He is interested insocial and political theory and is associated with the Programme in Social and Political Theory at the CSDS. He has worked on questions of nationalism, identity, secularism, radical politics and Marxism and is particularly interested in the contemporary experience of capitalism and globalization in the postcolonial context and the ways in which political subjectivities are constituted in the present

Nigam is author of The Insurrection of Little Selves Crisis of Secular-nationalism in India (2006) and Power and Contestation India Since 1989 (with Nivedita Menon). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, in 1998 and Visiting Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, in 2006. He was also Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, in March-April 2009.