ABSTRACT
Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (published in English as Old New Land) depicts the opening stages of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. The text was originally published in German in 1902, although set 20 years in the future. Altneuland represents land use, agricultural labour and Zionist collectivism, in other words the material means by which settler-colonisation can be achieved. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin assert that ‘postcolonial ecocriticism [has the] capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world’ (2010, 14). I offer a postcolonial1 ecocritical reading of Altneuland that demonstrates the way Herzl’s narrative trajectory moves away from an underdeveloped environment and society towards a prosperous one. Herzl’s promotion of settler-colonialism is encapsulated in his use of utopia and Bildungsroman. This essay looks at two utopian projects, one literary and one geopolitical, and how the constraints and possibilities of each of these utopias conflict. In particular, Herzl’s use of the generic characteristics of utopian fiction projects a vision of settler-colonialism that is different to the contemporaneous reality. This essay argues that these literary strategies enable Herzl to create a text that can be regarded as an alternative to the real-world ‘utopian’ project of Israel/Palestine.
