Utopian Visions and the American Dream

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. This groundbreaking, timely book examines expressions of the utopian imagination with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

The great appeal of modern utopian and dystopian literature seems to be that it provides authors and readers with the liberty to engage in imaginative, playful reflection on the flow of time, and on where this flow might be taking us all. But appearances can be deceptive, we are told. Psycho- analysts rightly warn that authors' utopian imaginings most likely include projections of their own unique personal fears, hopes and other expectations upon the blank canvas of an unknown future. Social scientists and historians will tell us there is more to this determinism than individual projection. They rightly argue that people are always intricately interconnected, and that their personal outlook thus reflects the shared "social imaginary" of the culture, society and historical period in which they find themselves em- bedded. Therein lies the relevance of utopian writing for both the study of different cultures and historical epochs as well as their cultural and historical limitations. Together, psychological and social determinisms suggest that utopian literature is an interesting specimen for analysis, from which we may learn more about our specific psychological, cultural and historical conditioning but which fails to deliver us to a place beyond such conditioning. Indeed, such a perspective sheds doubt on our very capacity to fashion a future of our own design. I beg to differ. I argue that utopian writing contains an intrinsic element of creative insight which provides momentary glimpses of a future that is not anticipated but ours to create, and even more importantly (though perhaps also more rarely), a capacity for visionary experience that altogether escapes the limitations of psycho-social conditioning and the horizon of intellectual scrutiny. In order to illustrate this, I will be examining a special branch of utopianism which directly addresses the problem of conditioning and psycho-social determinism.

This special half-issue is inspired by a passage by Indian writer, educator, and utopian experimenter Rabindranath Tagore in his The Religion of Man (1931), which Tagore first delivered in 1930 as the Hibbert Lectures at the University of Oxford:The set of four articles in this issue is particularly focused on transcultural utopian imagination with nodal point in South Asia, with the transnational space of Bengal (spanning the present-day sovereign nations of India and Bangladesh) as a further major focus, irradiating out to the past and future, and to many utopian places, both rural and urban, extending, notably, to the United Kingdom, South Africa, Indonesia, and the United States.Recent scholarship has made substantive analysis of modern South Asian utopian and dystopian imagination, alerting us, notably, to the importance of analyzing women’s utopian writing and practice from South Asia (Bagchi 2016, 2020), to the insights afforded by including bhasha or vernacular Indian literature and film in our canon of utopia and dystopia (Bagchi 2019, 2020; Banerjee 2019; Chatterjee 2019; Chaudhuri 2019; Mohan 2012), to the importance of religion in utopianism (Bagchi 2016), and to the recurring imagination of the rural and the urban as sites of social dreaming and nightmare (Mohan 2012; Banerjee 2019). This collection expands the current scholarly debates on these subjects.The present collection continues the line of argument begun by Bagchi (2016) in the context of South Asian and transcultural utopian imagination: religion plays a far more important role than is usually recognized in utopian writing and practice. The articles in this collection further explore the fruitful paradox expressed in the phrase “prospective memories of the future” as a means of crystallizing the social dreaming upon which utopia depends. How can memory be prospective, or anticipatory? How does one view such a paradoxical vision of temporality? A prospect is both a mental picture and an anticipated event. From what place, imagined how, does the social dreaming occur? How is the memory of the past deployed in utopian imagination? What processes of transcultural innovation occur in such imaginings?Bagchi examines transcultural utopian imagination of social futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Rabindranath Tagore and his friend M. K. Gandhi at the center. The article looks at Tagore’s and Gandhi’s stays at and fellowship with Woodbrooke, a Quaker residential educational institution in England. Woodbrooke was also dear to Tagore and Gandhi’s British friend, the Christian anticolonial and social activist C. F. Andrews, a key influence on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire, a visit that the article also examines. The article argues that Tagore’s and Gandhi’s visits to England (specifically the Midlands and/ or the north of that country) in 1930 and 1931 illuminate Indo-British entanglements in utopianism, manifesting ideals of social futures in which values were shared with Christian, mainly Quaker utopians. One of the early British influences on Indian utopians was John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose thought valorizing social fellowship and religion and speaking against wage capitalism influenced Gandhi; Ruskin also influenced the settlement movement contributing to the foundation of the Quaker institution at Woodbrooke.Zooming in on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire in northern England, the article argues that British and Indian utopians cooperated with and mutually influenced each other under difficult political conditions. The article excavates, with regard to Gandhi’s Lancashire visit, the work of the Quaker social dreamer Corder Catchpool (1883–1952) and his utopian experiments in Spring Vale Garden Village, where Gandhi stayed in 1931. The Indian and British utopian figures active in the 1930s examined here envisaged the future in ways that were often animated by aspects of the past, usually a renovated and reimagined past, in which religion is important.Sangeeta Datta explores Tagore’s vision of the future, in relation to Datta’s own creative practice, especially as theatre and film director, a practice that engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia and his future-making that continuously reinvent the past. Written at a time of pandemic crises exposing humankind’s vulnerability, Datta’s piece examines Tagore’s utopian vision that, when revalued and renewed, remains enormously fruitful for furthering social justice and creativity today.Datta examines the afterlives of Tagore’s utopia through three case studies. First, she examines the Dartington project where Tagore’s friend and associate Leonard Elmhirst was inspired to create an English utopian experiment on the model of Tagore’s utopian community in Santiniketan and Sriniketan. Second, she analyzes Tagore’s musical Tasher Desh (Land of Cards) in its original context and Datta’s recent stage production presented by the arts company Baithak UK in London in 2019. Finally, Datta examines the feature film Life Goes On, which she directed, analyzing it as a familial dystopia and a Tagorean vision revisited through lenses of family, race and gender.Samadrita Kuiti examines Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905), a short work originally written in English, offering a dream vision of a futuristic utopian society, with elements of science fiction, and Padmarag (1924), a short novel originally written in Bengali, which can be seen as complementary parts of a feminist utopian vision. These works show a desire for an egalitarian, decolonized nation, cutting through barriers of religion, gender, race, and class. Kuiti’s article shows how both fictions offer a vision of interreligious sisterhood, particularly by proposing Hindu-Muslim communal unity, against a backdrop of growing tensions between the Hindu and Muslim communities in fin-de-siècle British India. The article also shows how the Indigo Rebellion of 1859 in colonial Bengal is represented in Padmarag to create critiques of predatory colonial masculinity. Hossain’s utopian narratives play a major role in decolonizing utopian studies, the article argues overall.Banerjee examines the utopianism of the film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), directed by Satyajit Ray. The article interrogates the various ways in which Ray’s film signals the utopian, through an examination of the trope of wish-fulfillment, through an analysis of the way utopianism is articulated through irrealist aesthetics, particularly its figuration of ghosts, and through its violation of the narrative structure of the real. With the film in its utopianism making acute critiques of issues around class, caste, abusive power, and war, Banerjee sees some intransigent social contradictions playing out in the film, signaling the limits of textual utopianism. The three faces of utopianism that Sargent so foundationally explicated—literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory (Sargent 2010, 5–9)—play out in the analysis offered in the articles in this special issue, showing how utopian literature and practice fruitfully dialogued, and offering major insights into cultural and social crossings and hybridities in utopianism from cultures extending beyond Europe, extending the lines of enquiry that Dutton and Sargent (2013) so boldly articulated.

Calls for societies to become more sustainable are becoming increasingly urgent. Tired of waiting for 'the market' or 'the state' to solve problems for them, many civic actors are claiming an active role in carving out pathways towards sustainable transformation in practice: finding sustainable ways to meet their daily needs, work, make decisions, and define value together. 10 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation and background of study: In the midst of a great transformation Karl Polanyi's 1944 classic, The Great Transformation (see Polanyi, 2001), was a seminal reflection on social ruptures and transformations in the 19 th and 20 th centuries Writing in the midst of the second World War, Polanyi saw the rise of fascism in Europe as an outgrowth of a crisis in democracy. At its root, the crisis of democracy he observed was one of market fundamentalism -that is a society in which more and more aspects of nature and human life were treated as commodities, or standardized objects to be bought and sold on the market (Polanyi, 2001). For Polanyi, market society is based on a utopian vision and is enacted as a gradual process of dis-embedding social and natural relations and commodifying them into decontextualized, unmoored objects. This vision aims to replace human decision making with market rationality and organization. Polanyi warned that the results of realizing such a vision would be devastating, and that a Great Transformation of such a society's social order would come about, inevitably, whether by "design or by disaster" (Colby, 2021, p. 38). The American writer Mark Twain is credited with saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes". Although the circumstances of today's world are different in many ways, they also could be said to rhyme with the social 1 See: https://www.idea.int/gsod/global-report#chapter-2-democracy-health-check:-anoverview-of-global-trends,

This study is devoted to the possibility of a carnivalesque theory of Greek Old Comedy and its implication for our interpretation of it. The carnivalesque model is an anthropological theory originated from the Russian thinker, M. Bakthin, in his research on F. Rabelais' Gargantua (Ca. 1534). This model praises the utopian vision in a carnival, which is located here and now, with a complete overturn of the established order, a full liberation of individual from the constraints externally imposed from outwith and an ecstatic celebration of food, flesh and feces, in short, a Lebensphilosophie that worked against classical aesthetics of form and self-control. A similar situation can be found in the classical Old Comedy of Aristophanes, where in each play a utopian idea that reversed the existent and repressive social order was put forward, defended, carried out and ended with a convivial feast or wedding celebration, komos in short. Therefore it seems likely that a carnivalesque reading of Aristophanes would shed light on our understanding of Aristophanes on some aspects. The present study is consisted of three parts. The first chapter is about the possibility of a carnivalesque theory of Greek Comedy. In this chapter the necessary background of Old Comedy is given, with an emphasis on its civic context. The Old Comedy was an institutionalized discourse, with a claim for the public voice in a very competitive discursive space; it was a genre sponsored by and addressed to a the Athenian authorities, a projection of Athens' self-image to itself and to the outside world at large; it could never be an art purely for the sake of art. In addition, an exploration of the ritual, i.e., Dionysian, context is attempted. The god himself in the Dionysia was a god of transgression and category-breaking: the sweet wine, abundant food, egalitarianism and liberation, a temporal suspension of the established order, in a festival sacred to him, were carnivalesque in atmosphere. Moreover, the carnivalesque space this god created was an occasion for ”ritual reversal”, and so we see comedy play out the reversal of norms and represent its vision of utopia in different forms, such as sex strike to stop war or the set-up of a Utopia called Cloud-cu-cu-Land. The most important rhetorical device deployed by Aristophanes in this act of reversal was parody, but parody was a device that must presuppose both the act of parody and the object for parody at the same time. Comedy in this sense must contain within itself the preservation of established order as well as its negation, a continuation and disruption at the same time. This raises a question abut this allegedly utopian vision: if comedy was a discourse sponsored by and addressed to the Athenian people, then comedy could not merely be a device of social safety-valve for the release of social aggression; it is, in fact, an act of deeper legitimization for the established order. From this we step formally into the carnivalesque theory of Greek Old Comedy. As we delve further into the implication of the double vectors of Old Comedy in its functions, the more it is understood carnival and comedy were both used as a superlative exercise of power which allowed itself to be regularly contested ritually in order to be more in control. The second chapter is a test case of this theory, with Aristophanes' Themophoriazusae as example. In this chapter I try to point out the construction of gender as a matter of discourse and therefore the close connection between gender and genre must be affirmed. Themophoriazusae is consisted of a series of parody of the traditional wisdom of gender as it was represented by the misogynist Euripides. With his comic inversion of Euripides' tragedies we will find the boundary of genres blurred, with the consequence that disturbs the boundary of gender. Therefore, we find transvestism, impersonation and other acts of gender-crossing go together with the mixture of genres. I also give an analysis of the structure and themes of Thesmophoriazusae in this chapter, too. In the last chapter I give a Chinese translation of this play.

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.

This article explores the historic role of dystopian and feminist utopian fiction in upholding or supplanting capitalist, patriarchal dominance hierarchies. Here, I will examine the following: the persistence and popularity of dystopias; the political and cultural trends that have influenced them; the reasons why feminist writers have typically excluded men from their utopian visions; the sexual objectification of women in dystopias; and the utopian/dystopian parallax. I will discuss the need for feminist writers to envision inclusive alternate futures that propose realistic, cooperative societies that counter prevailing dystopian models. This can be achieved by dismantling and reconstructing our present reality through the act of changing the stories that we tell ourselves.

Three dreams run through American history: the elitist dream, the American dream, and the democratic dream. For most people, the American dream means marginal economic improvement; democracy, in all but the formal or legalistic sense, is essentially dropped from the promise of American life. The conservative elitist dream makes no pretense of concern for social democracy, and the liberal American dream offers at best a less oppressive social order than that envisioned in the conservative dream. For true democracy, an earlier dream of America the radical democratic dream envisioned by Thomas Jefferson-must be rediscovered and adapted to contemporary American life. Culturally, the American dream reinforces capitalism and liberal democracy; together, all three push classical democratic values aside. Although it is overwhelmed by the American dream, another dream of America, the democratic dream, recurs throughout American history.

Chapter 1 Historical Thoughts of Equality and Inequality Chapter 2 1776 and Beyond: Elitist Versus Enlightened Thought Chapter 3 Patrician Influence and Social/Educational Thought Chapter 4 What Is Equality? Chapter 5 Education and Mobility and the American Dream Chapter 6 The Golden Years Are Over Chapter 7 World Inequality Chapter 8 Wishful Thinking: Recommendations and Solutions

This provocative book analyzes the pre-Prohibition history of American grape growing and winemaking in the context of imperialist expansion. It does not break new ground; other books—particularly Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, From the Beginnings to Prohibition (Berkeley, 1989) and Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (New York, 2000)— cover much the same territory. Instead, it shifts focus away from the story of wine per se to an account of wine as one example in a larger, more complex story of national identity. Unfortunately, Hannickel subverts her project by treating interpretations of that identity as unquestioned facts, and by inventing facts to fit her interpretations. Her argument becomes increasingly predictable; it is as much about her own political views as about wine.Those views see American history as a record of imperialist conquest disguised by rhetoric upholding various myths of nature’s beneficence in a new world Eden. Hannickel contends that the ways in which people talked about grapes and wine contributed to the attractiveness of this rhetoric. Whether in New York, the Ohio Valley, or California, the language used to describe grape growing “was generative of nineteenth-century American national identity and ideal visions of urban and rural life” (17). It was, however, always a masquerade. Such language failed to depict reality; in fact, it deliberately hid reality from view. To Hannickel, what really happened was simply violent conquest and exploitation, and she is most interested in the reasons why Americans did not see what was happening all around them.The problem with this view is not just that other interpretations of American history are equally plausible but also that Hannickel distorts the story of American wine in order to make it fit her political viewpoint. Viticulture in nineteenth-century America was largely a series of failures; only California wine near the close of the period could even approach the style and quality of European wine. Most other American wines were unpleasant to drink. The literature of American wine is replete with questions about why a land filled with so much natural bounty yielded such bad wines (the answer concerns vine diseases against which fragile European grape varieties never developed an immunity). Hannickel ignores this issue, instead arguing that wine and grapes became symbols of American efforts to justify an empire of bourgeois consumerism.Three of the myths of American identity that Hannickel sees as implicated in the wine industry are the Dionysian myth of nature as alternately bountiful and wild, the imported myth of terroir (the interaction of environment with plant genetics), and the Jeffersonian myth of an agrarian republic. Not surprisingly, she thinks that all three of them served to conceal the realities of empire building. Whether or not she is correct (the story appears to be much more complicated), the specifics of her argument do not work. Although certain American writers, including early winemakers, described the country in Edenic terms, no one envisioned it as a locus for a new Dionysus. Similarly, early grape growers paid attention to locale, but they did not focus on terroir, as that word had not yet acquired its contemporary meaning in French, let alone English. Moreover, Thomas Jefferson certainly tried to grow grapes for wine, which he praised as a gift of nature, but he, like many others, failed. For that very reason, he ended up with a collection of European, not American, wines at Monticello.In Empire of Vines, Hannickel advances an intriguing, though flawed, thesis that is as much about American politics as American wine or wine culture. She wants to give the wine grape in nineteenth-century America a cultural significance that far exceeds its actual social or economic significance. Wishing for something, however, does not make it so, and a great deal of this book is just that—wishful thinking.

Social order tendency analysis is studied based on intensive probe to present criminal information research jobs. The phenomenon of “routine fluctuation” and “warning fluctuation” in the field of social public order is extensively studied. An urban crime distribution vector generation algorithm, which based on exponential attenuation, is generated by combining the historic statistic data and with the present one. a Composite Statistic Profiling-Vector Hypothesis-test Algorithm, consist of a system anomaly testing expression and a corresponding referenced anomaly testing expression, is presented to exam the present statistics value set, thus social system anomaly index is obtain. Prototype system and experiment results show its precision and credibility. Introduction As the developments and changes of politics, economics and culture in a certain human society, social order tendency fluctuates correspondingly. To be objectively, change is eternal; however the changes of social order surely affect the social stability and social life. Therefore, how to distinguish the warning changes from routine changes is becoming event important for us. Generally, crime tendency can be abstracted from the comprehensive processing toward many relevant factors, which involve social status, population fluctuation, political reformation, crime quantity, crime type, crime structure, etc. In historical researches, time series analysis algorithm, regression analysis, SVM, Bayes analysis and Markov chain algorithm are used to calculate or forecast the trend of social crime. Though many researches on criminal trend have been achieved, we still find that rare algorithm can effectively process the social order trend for decision makers to formulate the comprehensive method to decrease the criminal rate. In this paper we mainly deal with a novel algorithm which analyze social order trend from criminal statistical data. Attenuation Based Profile Vector In terms of individual, each occurrence of a crime is certainly a (p, 1-p) binary event, which is a common probability event in reality. In addition, generally if a certain event possesses a characteristic that its occurrence is “rare”, a Poisson stream may be used to approximate it. Thus, we can verify that general crime events observe Poisson distribution and urban criminal event observes same distribution, then we may use some values derived from distribution property to depict the urban public order status. Composite distribution. Considering the great diversity of crime types, we have to aggregate some crime types in order to obtain a better statistics distribution. Since that the sum of a series Poisson distribution also observes a Poisson distribution, we attempt to use Poisson distribution means to represent the urban crime occurrence property. Nevertheless, as a profile value which can indicate the implicit rule of urban crime, it must represent the fluctuation rule of present status as well as the affection of historic statistic data.Hence, for each component of profile vector, we process it as follows. 2nd International Conference on Electrical, Computer Engineering and Electronics (ICECEE 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 1115 At the first time, we collect the mean value of a certain crime. We note it as w and draw a directed segment to represent it. After a specified time span which is defined in advance, we whirl the previous segment counterclockwise with angle a, the project of it on its original direction is: ) cos( ' ∂ ⋅ = w w . When second measure comes, rotates the historic vector and projects it, combine with the present statistics data to generate new profile vector. ∑ = −

Literacy is an important driving force when it comes to attaining a critical eye for the real world, as well as for analyzing problems in the past and making predictions for the future. Since literacy is evolving in a new paradigm for human lifestyles and abilities, in no small part thanks to the rapid development of AI(Artificial Intelligence) and robot technology, this study begins with a review of the change in the meaning of literacy. Next, we consider the meaning of ‘visual literacy’, in an era when AI reads and analyzes information such as images and texts, as well as visual recognition, voice recognition, and decision-making through algorithms, and creates art in a new way. The ultimate purpose of this study is to argue for the need to change the meaning of ‘visual literacy’ as a driving force for visual communication based on imagination in terms of technological utilization, critical thinking, and ethical social problem solving. Therefore, the content of this study emphasizes both a utopian and dystopian aesthetic vision, as well as critical thinking, in terms of potential and expandability of AI, rethinking the meaning of ‘visual literacy’ at the ethical level with human autonomous judgment and a sense of responsibility. The results of this study demonstrate the need for us to apply ‘visual literacy’ in a way that combines imagination and critical thinking, as well as our need to develop a new way of visual cognition necessary for the acquisition and use of digital technology in terms of the role of liberal arts education in universities. Through this study, I argue that the application of ‘visual literacy’ to foster democratic citizenship qualities can help us expand new possibilities for the role of liberal arts education in the era of AI by giving us the authority to understand and utilize digital media based on imagination for image and text information processing technology and visual communication.

How can we account for order while also recognizing agency and individuality? We propose dignity as a moral motivation for social personhood that represents a parsimonious theoretical – and ideally empirical – pivot for relating the agentic individual with social evaluations underlying the study of social order. A desire for dignity compels individuals to assert themselves socially while also contributing to the maintenance of social order. Because the bases of dignity are socially determined, an individual-level desire for dignity effectively serves to uphold social order. We draw on scholarship by Lamont, Goffman, Habermas, and others to identify a number of components, paradoxes and measurement issues relevant to the study of dignity as the locus of moralized individual selfhood. In closing, we cast the resurgent field of the sociology of morality as an ideal venue for advancing scholarship on human dignity. INTRODUCTION The study of morality is undergoing something of a resurgence in sociology (Abend 2014; Hitlin and Vaisey 2013), reinvigorating phenomena that were core to the founding of the discipline (Hodgkiss 2013; Powell 2010), instilling a focus on values, normative culture, and fundamental evaluative frameworks for understanding interaction and the social order. Morality ranges from the most personal inner experience up to the most macro-oriented forces that hold a cultural group or society together. It comprises intuitions, emotions, and thoughts that people share in defining proper, laudatory, and taboo thoughts, behaviors, and relationships (Haidt 2008). An actor's moral sense implicates the “socially defined systems of rules and roles” that give meaning to situations and actions (Kurtines 1984). A modern sociological approach to morality, rather than attempting to establish or explain some single basis for morality across human societies, is anchored more firmly in groups, social position, and culture (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). Within and across societal groups, subjective interpretations of ‘right’ and ‘good’ are experienced as externally binding, a priori axiomatic social forces (Joas 2000). Subjective moral experience derives from structural and cultural forces and maintains social order. Just as important variation exists regarding what is moral, so too does variation regarding what constitutes dignity in given situations, groups and societies (Hitlin and Piliavin 2004; Schwartz 2011). Similar to the idea of ‘thin’ versus ‘thick’ morality (Abend 2011), we believe dignity can be understood within particular situations as well as on a larger scale dealing with institutions, life courses, and ultimate ends.

This paper seeks to explain why Japan has attained a higher level of social order than comparably developed western national societies. To do so, it distinguishes the attainment of local order in social groups from the global order in national societies. Recent models of spontaneous, self-organizing order are insufficient to account for global order. In contrast to the more popular normative explanation of order in Japan, which holds that a consensus on fundamental values derived from Confucian roots is an essential cause, this paper proposes a solidaristic theory built on rational choice premises. This new theory views global order as a by-product of dependence and visibility mechanisms within key social groups such as families, schools and firms. A wide range of comparative evidence reveals that the solidaristic theory provides a superior explanation of the high level of social order in Japan than the normative one.

The essay demonstrates how Hollywood meets history. It will examine the ways in which the mainstream movie fuses filmic and non-filmic discourses in order to stage the American Revolution on screen. On the one hand, the film appropriates legendary figures and folk tales about some colonial militia leaders who fought against the British troops during the war of independence. The Patriot assembles a historical patchwork hero whose on-screen appearance renders a culturally meaningful narrative about America's past for contemporary viewers. On the other hand, the film visualizes history through star performance and references to earlier historical movies. The. essay will argue that the very patchworking of characters and the cinematic 'quilting' of life stories form essential strategies for mainstreaming history in Hollywood movies.