Anti-capitalism and the Near Future: In Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God

This chapter argues that literary texts that imagine anti- or post-capitalist spaces are important for preparing readers to enter them and to make them possible. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Louise Erdrich’s The Future Home of the Living God explore the sociopolitical significance of the anti-capitalist futures they manifest. Hamid imagines a possible “desirable future,” subverts capitalist myths of inevitability, and implicitly relegates the current apocalyptic narrative trend to a failure of imagination, while Erdrich’s novel takes the shape of a meta-text bent on imagining an alternative future to the future the novel posits. Hamid and Erdrich register the savagery of late capitalism and at the same time extend radical hope in their characters’ forging of interdependence in the place of individualism and their respective worlds’ rewarding of communitarian rather than capitalist values.