To Map, to Warn, to Hope | Boston Review 06/12/2017, 08*36

LITERATURE & CULTURE

To Map, to Warn, to Hope

Introducing Global Dystopias
JUNOT DÍAZ

This is the editor's note to our latest print issue, Global Dystopias.

William Gibson has famously declared, “The future is already here—it’s just not very
evenly distributed.” Gibson’s words have been much on my mind of late. How could
they not be? The president is a white nationalist sympathizer who casually threatens
countries with genocide and who can’t wait to build a great wall across the neck of the
continent to keep out all the “bad hombres.” After a hurricane nearly took out Houston,
the country’s most visible scientist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, stated that the effects of
climate change may have grown so severe that he doubts the nation will be able to
withstand the consequences.

For me, literature, and those formations that sustain

it, have ever been a eutopic enclave against a

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To Map, to Warn, to Hope | Boston Review 06/12/2017, 08*36

darkening dystopian world.

Then, as if on cue, Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony almost completely bankrupt by neoliberal
malfeasance, was struck by Hurricane Maria with such apocalyptic force that it more or
less knocked the island into pre-modernity. Earlier today a former student informed me
that more skin bleaching is consumed in India than Coca-Cola, and on the edge of my
computer a new site is announcing that the Chinese government has made it nearly
impossible for its 730 million Internet users to express opinions online anonymously.
Plus this little cheery gem from the Federal Reserve: the top 1 percent of the U.S.
population controls 38.6 percent of the nation’s wealth, an inequality chasm that makes
the Middle Ages look egalitarian. Whether we’re talking about our cannibal economics
or the rising tide of xenophobia or the perennial threat of nuclear annihilation, it seems
that the future has already arrived.

And that future is dystopian.

We began our Global Dystopias project with the clarifying recognition that it is
precisely in dark times that the dystopian—as genre, as a narrative strategy—is most
useful. If, as Fredric Jameson has argued, utopia functions as “a critical and diagnostic
instrument,” then dystopia, utopia’s “negative cousin,” is similarly equipped, only more
so. In assembling this special issue, we were drawn not so much to pursuing the classic
“bad places” of times past (“a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) but the corpus
that Tom Moylan has identified as critical dystopias. As per Lyman Tower Sargent, a
nonexistent society that readers view “as worse than contemporary society but that
normally incudes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopian be
overcome.” Most significantly, critical dystopias, in Moylan’s formulation, point to
causes rather than merely describe symptoms. Their highest function is to “map, warn
and hope.”

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly

distributed.

That has ever been our call over these strange troubling months—to map, to warn, to
hope.

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To Map, to Warn, to Hope | Boston Review 06/12/2017, 08*36

I wish to thank the many brilliant writers who joined us on this project. While not every
one of our submissions sits easily under the rubric of critical dystopia, I would submit
the project as a whole partakes in some of the genre’s higher functions. For me,
literature, and those formations that sustain it, have ever been a eutopic enclave against
a darkening dystopian world. If the assembled narratives here argue anything in all
their diversity, it is that despite statements to the contrary, it does not appear that we
will ever reach peak dystopia. No end to dystopia but also, fortunately, no end, no
closure in dystopia, no boot stamping on a human face—forever. The human capacity
for oppression might be limitless, but equally limitless are our dreams for better places,
for justice.

If you like what you read, consider supporting Boston Review by purchasing a copy of
Global Dystopias.

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