The Accidental Archipelago in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140: Narrative Polyphony and Archipelagic Utopianism in the Capitalocene
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of the “accidental archipelago” to describe the fragmented, partially submerged New York of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. The novel presents this urban form as an unintended consequence of capitalism’s ecological excesses and imagines how the resulting spatial and social conditions might make alternative modernities possible. Bringing together scholarship on the Capitalocene, critical island studies, speculative urbanism, and critical utopianism, the article develops three related arguments.
First, the accidental archipelago names a climate-altered urban form that unsettles conventional distinctions between city and island. Second, the novel’s multiple narrators give this spatial logic a formal counterpart. Distinct voices converge around the debtors’ strike, the political rupture that brings the plot to its culmination. Third, the article develops the concept of archipelagic utopianism, which locates political possibility in spatial relations, treats collective futures as contingent, and understands collective agency as emerging through connections across fragmented spaces. Read together, the city’s geography and the novel’s narrative form offer a way to imagine collective politics under the conditions of the Capitalocene.
Keywords — New York 2140, accidental archipelago, Capitalocene, narrative polyphony, archipelagic utopianism, climate fiction.
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