ABSTRACT
Postcolonial writing is suffused with future thinking, with a utopian hope for the future, a belief in the reality of liberation, in the possibility of justice and equality, in the transformative power of writing, and at times in the potential global impact to be made by postcolonial societies. The language of postcolonialism drove the cultural turn in globalization studies in the 1990s, and it did so for three reasons. The utopian function of postcolonial literatures is therefore located in its practice as well as its vision the practice of confronting and transforming coercive power to produce an imagined future. The Utopian Studies society was formed in 1988, around the same time The Empire Writes Back was published. It has developed an international and a European branch, a journal, a membership almost as large as ACLALS, but with a few exceptions postcolonial studies has had no contact with the field.
