Deconstructing Utopia: Nature, Colonialism and Satire in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012)

While there is a conspicuous link between utopian conjectures and natural space, the accelerated environmental degradation in the Anthropocene has significantly blunted the utopian appeal of ‘untainted’ nature. A similar crisis afflicts notions of utopia as ‘undiscovered’ space following Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘temporalization’ of utopian speculation. These developments complicate or make impossible literary representations of utopia as unknown or unaltered nature. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘space’ and ‘place’ as well as on Eva Horn’s reflections on an ‘aesthetics of the Anthropocene’, the paper examines how narratives of nature as utopia are critiqued and satirised in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012). The island landscape of the South Pacific remains outside the protagonist’s narrative control, resisting attempts to abstract it by staging a ‘revenge of place.’ Representations of nature as non-descript, homogeneous and empty (or ‘space’) are confronted with the uncanny and dangerous aspects of a specific ‘place.’