This chapter provides an overview of the importance of utopian theorizing in the twenty-first century. It resituates utopianism, through Blochean theory, as larger than a literary genre and more diverse than representations of perfect societies. Rather, it celebrates an ideal of the utopianism of the everyday, of the here-and-now as much as of the future. It argues for a utopianism that is necessarily decolonial as it seeks to undo the damage of racial capitalism and provide imaginative resources for living differently. It concludes with an overview of the chapters collected in this book, showing that they explore both reactionary or nostalgically inflected visions of America’s settler-colonial utopian foundations, as well as centering new strains of utopian thought emerging from the margins of hegemonic American culture.

This chapter reads César Aira’s work as an intervention in Argentine literature at the end of the twentieth century, which – since its irruption in 1981 – called for new reading protocols based on a fundamental operation: the transformation of the concept of fiction into invention. The radicalness of this invention – which embodied an unprecedented way of writing in Argentine literature – constitutes a point of inflection in storytelling.This phenomenon is described from diverse and converging points of view: the development of a singular economy; writing as the art of continuum and as a form of contemporary art; the imagination of worlds of the present by means of a general theory of documentation. The hypotheses put forward draw on a transversal reading which, while considering the whole of his books (more than a hundred), focuses on key texts which are representative of the diverse profiles of his works: the parable of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Argentina, between Ema, the captive and Shantytown; the aporias of vision and the machines of thought from An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter to Marble; the fables of the writer in the contemporary world, between Varamo and Parménides.

“Animalia Americana” foregrounds an examination and critical analysis of the historical, literary, and theoretical correlations between Blackness and animality to assess how these correlations, specifically the ways in which animals are found “running free” within a Black literature, might guide us toward more ethical practices. This chapter reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha as illuminating the dominant strains of how pest animals have appeared in twentieth-century African American letters: Not only as markers of the gratuitous violence which both marks and mars Black life in modernity, but as figures through which Black writers articulate the ways of thinking about feeling, and sociality, that surviving such violence have produced. From the ways in which K-9 police dogs were unleashed upon Black people during the Civil Rights Movement as a violent form of sociopolitical suppression to the significance of animals in Black communal and familial units emblematized through the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club and DMX’s love for his American pitbull terrier, this chapter complicates the relationship between Blackness, animality, and humanity.

This chapter analyzes the colonial period, taking 1536, the date of the founding of the city of Buenos Aires, as a starting point. It aims to discuss texts linked to the conquest of the River Plate – namely, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Comentarios (1555), Ulrich Schmidl’s Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (1567), and Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Argentina (1612), among other letters, chronicles, and documents – using water, a key aspect of the spatiality constructed in these works, as a guiding axis for the analysis. This is not aesthetized water, waiting for a contemplative gaze, but water marked by overflow, excessive, water that stagnates, sickens, and stings, overcoming boundaries and impeding the actions of the body attempting to own those lands. In the colonial period, particularly in the texts discussed, a water matrix takes shape which will become the seed of fiction in Argentine literature. The presence of water not as a background or the setting for major events, but as a founding incident of narration, as the main driver of action; a presence which renders spatiality and the bodies traversing it (and enduring it) the keys to the narrative of the River Plate.

This chapter examines litigation related to the appointment of federal judges, including administrative law judges (ALJs). Key issues raised in this litigation include recess appointments, the confirmation process, and whether and how the Appointments Clause applies to non-Article III judges including ALJs. In recent years, most of the litigation over federal judicial selection has concerned the appointment of ALJs.

Beatriz Sarlo’s Escena de la vida postmoderna represents a turning point in literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies in Argentina. Originally published in 1994, it was a major, influential intervention on cultural and media questions that had not been central in literary studies, written by a well-known literary scholar. It represents a shift from “the book” to “the city” as a site of analysis and interpretation of cultural forms. Part urban critic, part flâneur, Sarlo is intrigued by the changing public spaces of Buenos Aires amid a new phase of late capitalism, marked by new forms of consumerism, visual culture, and entertainment. She dissects the meanings and dynamics of cultural expressions that transcend and challenge the power of the written word, and unearths a new Buenos Aires, increasingly dominated by screens, public gatherings in private spaces, youth subcultures, and art forms that echo new developments. The book stands as both a call to fellow literary scholars to foreground nonliterary forms of cultural production and engagement in their work, and as a representation of an important point of reference to “demediatize” the study of communication and meaning-making in order to comprehend the significance of public and popular urban sites.

This chapter will address contrasting ways in which Argentine literature has reflected on, and borrowed from, scientific theories and practices. Many nineteenth-century writers (such as José Mármol, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Lucio V. Mansilla) drew on (pseudo-)scientific discourses to lend legitimacy to their arguments, while others developed a critical approach to the legacies of positivism in Argentina. Dystopian visions of the imbrication of science, technology, and the politics of authoritarianism dominate the twentieth century, in texts that explore the experience of mass society or dictatorship. However, this chapter will also highlight cases of much greater ambivalence, such as that of Roberto Arlt, in whose work the pursuit of science and technology becomes both an instrument of violence and a fount of beauty and liberation. Furthermore, it will construct an important genealogy of authors – from Eduardo Holmberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century through to the contemporary writer Marcelo Cohen – who have conducted innovative metafictional explorations into the relationship between literature and science, and who have understood the porous boundary between them to be a source of great creativity.

After three decades of vanguards there was a colloquial turn in Latin American poetry. Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas, César Fernández Moreno’s Argentino hasta la muerte, Carlos Martínez Riva’s La insurrección solitaria and Neruda’s Odas elementales – all published in 1954 – show the abandonment of the oneiric in favor of a less fancy language and new links with popular culture. Juan Gelman’s Gotán (1962) is included in this trend. A decade later, exile marks an unexpected turn: Gelman will not only speak of defeat and death but will also impel exile and death on his lines: it is about not only the political in the poem but the politics of the poem. Therein resurfaces a key American issue: the need to construct a tradition. Gelman’s Hechos y relaciones (1980) and Citas y comentarios (1982) are contemporary with the first publications by Néstor Perlongher (Austria-Hungría, 1980; Alambres, 1987). With his Neobarroso, Perlongher proposes a relationship with the popular born of the curtailment in a domestic lexicon, an extolment of the kitsch and pop. Unlike Gelman, who finds in Europe the breadth of poetry, Perlongher discovers in Brazil the reciprocation of two systems, of Hispanic America and the Portuguese-speaking world.

Published during the debates around the role of the author in response to the Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Latin American literary Boom, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966) emerges not only as a culmination of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction but also as a volume in dialogue with the literary, social, and political concerns of the time. Constant throughout this collection is the representation of characters who are displaced from familiar surroundings either physically, psychologically, or even fantastically. Characters are forced to share an uncomfortable space in “Autopista del Sur,” a story situated on the highway south of Paris that presents an allegory of human relations. Through the textual transposition of Che Guevara’s diaristic rendition of his trajectory through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, “Reunión” also records the historical meeting of revolutionaries. Meanings produced through displacements develop also in the closing story of the volume, “El otro cielo,” in which Paris and Buenos Aires are seamlessly intertwined in the character’s experience. Displacement functions as an organizing thread through Todos los fuegos el fuego; transfers and reverberations in the stories generate disquieting tensions that reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and the human condition.

The three types of issues discussed in Chapter 5 involve a combination of interesting and routine issues. Probably the most interesting are those related to eligibility that dealt with formal qualifications: legal training, law license, practice time, residence, age, and gender. Several challenges to licensing requirements arose because the requirement was stated as “learned in the law,” which in turn raised questions as to whether that meant holding a law degree. The more interesting issues concerned age, particularly after the passage of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA); importantly, the ADEA cases arose in states that appointed rather than elected judges, and the issue was whether judicial positions fell under the “policy position” exclusion. Age-related cases were brought on other grounds (e.g., equal protection) as well, but those cases failed. Term length cases generally concerned how long a judge appointed to fill a vacancy was to serve. Vacancy cases concerned the existence of a vacancy and how vacancies were to be filled.

How does the contemporary novel imagine utopian possibility in the wake of the global dominance of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century?  This chapter suggests that we can discern two forms in which the novel responds to this perceived waning of American power. The first of these is an elegiac strand in the contemporary American novel, which mourns the failure of the American ideal and laments the exhaustion of its historical possibility. The second sees in the same failure of US hegemony not the winding down of a world view, but the emergence of new forms of cultural hybridity, new subject positions that come to thought only now, in the wake of the “American century.” This chapter suggests that, in order to understand the persistence of utopian thinking into the contemporary moment, one has to attend to both of these strands in the novel after American hegemony. The old word is dying, we might say, in an echo of Gramsci’s famous line, and the new cannot be born. It is in this interregnum that we find not only morbid symptoms, but the emergence of new forms of utopian possibility.

The primary focus in Chapter 7 is election administration, which includes ballot contents (e.g., what name a candidate could use on the ballot and additional information that should or could appear on the ballot such as incumbency status of a candidate), ballot form or format (retention or contested), scheduling issues, validity of the election, and a range of other issues. The chapter concludes with a relatively brief discussion of election contests, including type of election being contested (partisan or nonpartisan, primary or general), and the issue raised in the contest; two of the cases involved name issues raised after the election, one a name change and the other the use of the candidate’s birth name rather than her married name.

This chapter considers contemporary environmentalism through the lens of ecotopia, a modification of the utopian form that includes the ecological as a core consideration. The idea that the nonhuman world should have meaningful political status is a radical transformation of the usual terms of utopia, rendering certain utopian tropes (like the technology-fueled extinction of vermin or pests) impossible while activating other new possibilities both for the transformation of the social and for individual self-actualization. In particular, ecotopias are distinct from most utopias in their abiding suspicion of technology; in an era of escalating climate disaster, this suspicion of technology becomes increasingly urgent even as it becomes complicated by the perceived need for some miraculous techno-fix to ameliorate the worst impacts of climate change even in ecotopia. A short coda discusses real-world ecotopian projects, attempts to make such visions real as a model to others for what might yet be.

This chapter traces the waning of utopian literature in the 1970s following the end of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism. It argues that the downturn in the rate of profit related to production, and the resulting turn to economic growth predicated on financial speculation, resulted in a crisis for the utopian imagination and its ability to conceive of utopian alternatives to the present. As a result, the critical utopianism of the long 1960s gave way to a new wave of dystopian writings. Although these dystopias echoed the turn to weak utopianism and cognitive mapping in critical theory by convincingly illustrating the negative effects of neoliberalism on economic growth, income inequality, and the social safety net, they often struggled to imagine anything outside of these worsening conditions. The chapter culminates in a consideration of new utopian writing following the 2008 financial crash that foregrounds the socialization of debt.