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Entangled futures : utopianism, white supremacy, and radical futurityJovita Pristovšek, 2026, original scientific article
Abstract: This article examines utopianism as a historically contingent and politically ambivalent discourse shaped by its entanglement with race, Indigeneity, empire, and white supremacy. Challenging neutral or universalist accounts of utopia, it argues that modern utopian thought emerged not outside colonial modernity but through and alongside its architectures of territorial conquest, epistemic hierarchization, racial differentiation, coerced labour, and imperial governance. In its canonical form, utopia functioned as a technology of colonial futurity: it rendered land available for appropriation and extraction, positioned Europe as the agent of historical progress, and naturalized racialized forms of dispossession in the name of an ideal social order. Yet the article does not conclude that futurity itself must be abandoned. In stead, it provincializes classical utopia and asks what remains of world imagination after utopia’s colonial genealogy has been exposed. To address this, the article develops the concept of ‘entangled futures’: a con flictual field in which colonial, decolonial, Black radical, Indigenous, and anti-humanist temporalities are historically forced into relation without becoming equivalent or fully translatable. Through readings in utopian studies, settler-colonial critique, Black radical thought, critiques of Western humanism, and Indigenous futurisms, it argues that radical futurity cannot be reduced to a single emancipatory horizon. What survives the critique of utopia is not its rehabilitation as a universal ideal, but a fractured and incommensurable field of world-making.
Keywords: utopia, colonial futurity, settler colonialism, entangled futures, radical futurity
Published in RUP: 21.08.2026; Views: 236; Downloads: 6
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