000			02617nam a22002297a 4500
005			20260807161345.0
008			260807b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9781531512651
028			_a: Raghav Books Pvt. Ltd. _b: 2/25 First Floor, Arun House, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi _c: 3114 _d: 3/8/2026
082			_a810.9 OH
100			_aOh, Rebecca.
245			_aReading Better States _b: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South. _c/ Rebecca Oh.
260			_a, New York _b: Fordham University Press _c, 2026.
300			_av, 221p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b2164
520			_aReading Better States traces the persistence of desires for the postcolonial state in an era of environmental harms and climate catastrophe. As pollution, toxicity, drought, and flood increasingly threaten peoples and environments across the global South, postcolonial writers and ordinary citizens alike have not ceded their futures to the damaged presents they inhabit. Rather, Reading Better States shows how they turn to the state as a resource, imagining postcolonial states as powerful actors and calling upon them to intervene in processes like global capitalism and environmental racism, or to provide environmental protections and basic material necessities. These utopic possibilities are concrete rather than grand, limited and situated rather than totalizing. But they are no less utopic for being quotidian. Reading Better States challenges the anti-statism prevalent in postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, where states are predominantly defined through violence. Seeing postcolonial states beyond their bad surfaces requires a utopian method of reading, a way of seeing the state that reads its negativity against the grain for alternative possibilities. In Reading Better States the state is Janus-faced. It is a bad actor, but it is also a site of collective hopes and concrete utopian visions. Using a wide-ranging archive of novels, films, court decisions, legislation, poetry, and testimony, Reading Better States reveals the importance of environmental concrete utopias in the present and reconsiders the postcolonial state for its interventionist possibilities as well as its violence. It does this through a utopian method that, like concrete utopias themselves, attends to negativity while stretching beyond it, seeking out visions of surplus which exceed, even if they cannot escape, the damage and disappointment of the present earth.
650			_aLiterature
650			_aAmerican Literature
650			_aHistory
700			_aRebecca Oh.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c70647 _d70647