This comparative analysis examines two instances of dystopian/utopian narratives and media – the film and script Submission: Part I (2004) by the Dutch-Somalian but naturalized American author Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the novel Submission (2015) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. These two works challenge the project of Europe as a bastion of liberal ideals and its various markers, including laïcité, universalism and human rights, through narratives informed by cultural pessimism and religious and racial dystopia. Fantasies of race, ethnicity and empire pervade the fictional Islamistan in Submission I as well as Houellebecq’s narrative exploring the conversion of French society to Islam. Whereas Submission: Part I has been hailed for addressing Muslim abuse and Houellebecq’s novel has been cited often as a trigger of Islamophobia, I argue that both works merit new interpretations when read in relation to historical fears of ethnic and religious Muslim Others in postcolonial presents: Submission: Part I as contributing to the Islamic problem it supposedly addressed, with Houellebecq offering a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of the Muslim ‘Other’ that acknowledges the significance of Arab/Muslim France to the French Republic.

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In Marcel Beyer’s celebrated Flughunde (1995), the discovery of an underground archive of sound in the aftermath of the Cold War—preserved despite strategies apparently calling for its mechanical destruction—reassigns agency and voice to instrumentalized victims of National Socialism. By highlighting the close connection between an alleged security custodian of the archive, the actual National Socialist sound cartographer Hermann Karnau, and Moreau, a character bearing a strong resemblance to the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Beyer’s novel draws attention to a utopian experiment with life that was carried out in the wake of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific and posits additional historical undertones manifested in Karnau’s National Socialist experiments with sound. Karnau’s attempt to master vocal timbre in particular foregrounds technologies that make it possible to manipulate voice and memory in the post-Fascist and post-Communist present. In spite of technological alteration, archived voices of colonial and National Socialist subjects manifest a vitalist aesthetic. With its concern for race, sound, and memory, the novel breaks new ground in telling the story of the National Socialist and colonial past in the aftermath of the Cold War.