Reading Better States

Name: Reading Better States
Price: 254 AUD
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ISBN: 9781531512644

Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South

Rebecca Oh

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Hardback

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English

Fordham University Press
23 January 2026

Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Colonialism & imperialism; Politics & government; Human geography

Reading 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.

By: Rebecca Oh
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781531512644
ISBN 10: 153151264X
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 23 January 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Rebecca Oh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Reviews for Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South

""Reading Better States makes a compelling and important intervention into debates about the state and theorization of ‘political forms’ within literary and critical theory. The book is a fresh, original, and extremely welcome contribution to large-scale debates about the ‘aesthetics of politics’ that transcends narrower conversations within literary studies to impact other humanistic fields."" - Elizabeth Anker, Cornell University