AustLit

‘Philosophy's great projects mantle hope for revolution and possibilities for cultural survival and transformation The spirit of philosophical inquiry is to ex-pose societal wrongs and model hope for the future—as found in Marx's account of human alienation, Hegel's exploration of the master-slave relationship, or Levinas's writing of ethics and human relatedness It was Ernest Bloch however, who was concerned with "hope" and the political and social potential for utopian society. In his concept of concrete utopia, he argues that "active hope" and "active belief" are materialized through "conscious human work on it" and that "realism without such hope and without the dominating mode of being of the good possibility is not real-ism There is nothing real without a place for revolution and a better future" Yet such discursive constructions of "hope" can be slippery when applied to political worldviews, and as Australia has experienced, creating frameworks for "hope of a better future" has left the most vulnerable subject; "hopelessly" marginalized and oppressed Early colonial society, for example, was hoped for—it was created through language of writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson who affirmed a national identity from a dominant white perspective As a result, a hopeful society was created (for these subjects) but one that did not consider the "hopes" of Indigenous subjects. On the contrary, the modern Australian author Alexis Wright challenges mainstream philosophical paradigms of hope and recreates the "future" from an antiutopian Indigenous view In her recent novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), she critiques humanities' projects, reconciliation, and "closing the gap" for having little utopian potential because these discourses operate on a nexus of "hope" that serves hegemonic national interests of assimilation, appropriation, solidarity, and interventsionist politics.  (Introduction)