ABSTRACT
While Europe looked for utopias located in the shimmering distance the distinctive feature of postcolonial utopias was the dominance of utopianism over utopia, because while utopias provided particular models of perfection on which the imagination might contrast the social conditions of the present at leisure, postcolonial hope for the future is both more urgent and more socially integral. Certainly individual utopias occur from time to time in the literature, and the utopian impulse is prominent in the settler colonies, where several utopian communities were established, but the predominant dynamic is the belief in the possibility of social change. Even in pre-independence literature where the utopia of the independent nation is conceived, the dominant ethos is freedom and selfrealization. For this development art and literature become crucial: future thinking in postcolonial societies reveals itself most clearly in the ways in which art, literature, music and other cultural productions project a sense of the possible, particularly the possibility of a transformed postcolonial society. Indeed, it is not the representation of utopia that matters but the declaration of possibility. It is by narrative, by the stories we tell, that we have a world, and the stories we live by determine the future. By utopian thinking, utopian forms, utopian narrative, we may have a conception of a radically changeable world.
