which at the moment may sound incongruous at best; however, such thinking often lays
the foundation for an ontology of the future. The creative response itself, one must
remark, never emanates out of idle intellection or without sensitivity to the currents of
things within a given social imaginary. It is thus the ability to understand the semiotic
significations of the present and the way they anticipate a future cast in transformative
tropes. The said signs are significantly different from their antecedents, though logically
emerging from the socio-political dynamism of the past. This accounts ultimately for the
writer’s creative projections that must anticipatorily capture the existential ethics of the
future. It also explains why Ashcroft links the novelty of the transnation to the concept of
Utopia: “I want to connect the transnation at this point to the concept ‘Utopia’, or more
specifically Utopianism as the agency of liberation in writing. The realm of the possible,
the realm of utopia is pre-eminently the realm of literature” (12). He further refers to
Ernst Bloch whose appreciation of literary thinking is in terms of the narratives it
produces for the purpose of having “a conception of a radically changeable world” (12).
In a similar vein, David Bleich in his book Utopia: The Psychology of a Cultural
Fantasy, sheds more light on the place of utopia in modern times as an exercise placeable
within the matrix of cultural investigations by which it is possible to conflate both
personal and societal issues in conscious response to the necessity of social change:
Such modes of understanding, aiming to unite personal and societal issues, beginning at the
end of the nineteenth century in psychoanalysis and pragmatism and continuing on into the
present, suggest how to revise our traditional “naming” procedure through a new principle of
understanding that accounts more regularly for the emotions involved in cultural life (1984:
12).But it is pertinent to intimate once more that the prosecution of utopia in literature can
also be linked to the deployment of dialogue. As a literary device popular with the project
of utopia, dialogue right from the Renaissance era, as Nina Chordas (2004: 27) contends,
has been deployed in matters of response to cultural exigencies. But more importantly,
with respect to utopia, the “affinity for dialogical settings, is a quintessential humanist
production”. Yet, there is an interesting angle to the abstraction of this literary
deployment which foregrounds the revelation that in its early stage of evolution,
dialogues in the context of the foregoing discussion was also “closely allied with nascent