Democracy, totalitarianism, and progress in The Handmaid’s Tale: A nostalgic tale of hope?

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the television series The Handmaid’s Tale—created by Bruce Miller and based on the novel by Margaret Atwood—to show its critical power in the narratives of progress to warn on the fragility of our democracies and—as Giorgio Agamben argues—their contiguity with totalitarianisms. However, I also examine the way the third season seems to tone down the aforementioned criticisms through the development of what Fredric Jameson calls nostalgia for the present. Likewise, following Mariela Solana, I explore the political meanings of hope and nostalgia as affects whose meanings cannot be established a priori. Finally, I argue that in the series there is a strange, perverse coexistence of two ways of understanding nostalgia that explode the dichotomy between desires which, according to Sara Ahmed, redirect us towards social forms in which hopes and desires for radical change have already been placed.