Transmodernity, capital, and queer Utopian critique: Days without end

This paper considers the limitations of the different accounts of the Transmodern offered by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and Enrique Dussel, advancing in their place ways of grasping global capitalism in terms of combined and uneven development and the persistence of accumulation through dispossession. In the conditions these forces have forged, where might we at least discern utopian impulses? Less, perhaps, in the libertarian forms of sex-and-drug hedonism that once featured significantly in countercultural movements, and which have by now been thoroughly commodified, and more through the kind of cultural production that addresses gender and sexual definition as integral to the violence conjured into being by modernity. Sebastian Barry’s novel, Days Without End, is one such instance, combining a postcolonial consciousness of the dynamics of accumulation through dispossession in Ireland and the US with an allegorical critique of militaristic and frontier masculinity in the form of Thomas McNulty and John Cole’s relationship.