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Utopias of the New Right in J. G. Ballard's Fiction

Nicola Valley Institute of Technology

The colonization of social space by capitalism has engendered a New World Disorder, which has translated into a fear of Otherness. One response to this fear has been the withdrawal of the economic elites into gated communities that might evolve into fortified outposts of neo-imperialism predicated on the social, political, cultural, and economic exclusion of the Other. It is within this geopolitical terrain that J. G. Ballard's imaginative geography in Super-Cannes (2000)—Eden-Olympia—emerges as a commentary on such "Utopias of the New Right." Driven by a geopolitical imaginary based on neoliberalism and neofascism, Eden-Olympia is a Utopia existing in a predacious relation to local Arab residents. Specifically, this article demonstrates that Utopias of the New Right threaten to extirpate public space, the global commons, and democratic civil society. Generally, this article argues that neofascist and neo-imperial geopolitical imaginaries threaten our ability to imagine alternative geopolitical imaginaries.

Key Words: imaginative geography • Utopia • gated community • neo-imperialism • and J.G. Ballard

Space and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, 4-24 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331208327745


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