REVIEW ARTICLE

Locating hope and futurity in the anticipatory illumination of queer performance

José Esteban Muñoz (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, New York.

Elisavet Pakis
Independent Scholar


In Cruising Utopia José Muñoz develops a critical methodology of hope to question a stultifying, deadening, capitalist present, and to open up the future. He draws on Ernst Bloch’s Marxist inspired analysis of hope, temporality and utopia, and looks at inspirational moments from the past in order to (re)imagine the future, and rekindle the political imagination. Cruising Utopia visits a number of queer art works from the past and present alongside each other and elicits their visions of potentiality, forward-dawning illumination, their affective force and futurity. Muñoz develops a hermeneutics of trace and residue to read the mattering of these works, their influence and world-making capacity.

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© borderlands ejournal 2011