ABSTRACT
In the wake of continued mass migration and movement towards the metropolitan centre, critique of the utopian impulses driving urban settlement presents a powerful counterpoint to the contemporary cities celebrated status as an icon of post modernity. As the colonist justifies imperial seizure of territory in ideal terms of adventure and freedom so the city-utopia is often the focus for similar yearnings. The connection between colonial cities and the utopian ideal city presents opportunities to explore how postcolonial novelists engage with an urban space of idealized desire; to investigate whether the relationship between colonial nation and post colony is replicated on the urban scale. The significance of the utopian city as a motif extends, however, beyond the real-world city, to strike at the heart of the postcolonial imaginary. If Morrison provides the clearest utopian city, then it is Rushdie's fiction that most indubitably delineates the urban space that is from its beginnings explicitly dystopic.
