I begin with this poem to suggest a movement that has developed almost unnoticed in post-colonial writing, a persistent hope for the future that refuses to be snuffed out however much it is couched in irony, however impossible it seems. Fogarty’s hope, expressed as much in terms of recovery and critique of the present as in terms of possibility, concerns his people conceived as a group connected to the earth, survivors of devastation, a people in country, a people at home. But what is the manner of its dwelling in the nation? It is that last word round which the ambivalence, complexity, and contradiction of post-colonial utopianism revolves. For in whatever way we frame it, this genre takes a form that ignores, or repudiates, the concept of nation inherited from the colonial state. The word ‘nation’ itself is absent as post-colonial writers conceive a hope that takes various shapes: geographical, historical, cultural, racial-shapes that may constitute an emerging genre of post-colonial utopianism.