SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter examines the depiction by populism in the domain of 'popular culture' of what purports to be its non-capitalist/non-socialist alternative: in short, the socio-economic and political structure of its 'imaginary' as this involves a symptomatic opposition between the utopic and dystopic. Using the pseudonym of Ivan Kremnev, the Russian neo-populist theoretician A. V. Chayanov wrote the utopian fiction The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia. Accordingly, the utopic vision of Chayanov entails traversing time but not space; the protagonists in his narrative are projected forward into a future within the same demarcated space. Much of the populist discourse which structures the agrarian myth is present in the films of Frank Capra, who directed not only Lost Horizon but also Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and t's a Wonderful Life (1946).