Utopian Research Articles

Symbole Nienawiści. Dewastacja Pomnika Józefa Piłsudskiego i Czwórki Legionowej w Krakowie – charakterystyka wybranych aspektów

SYMBOLS OF HATE: VANDALISM AGAINST THE MONUMENT TO JÓZEF PIŁSUDSKI AND THE LEGION QUARTET IN CRACOW – CHARACTERISTICS OF SELECTED ASPECTS The article analyses the concepts of and proposals for constitutional reforms put forward by one of the Polish democratic political groups, which was established in exile after the fall of the November Uprising (1830-1831). Young Poland, which was a part of an international conspiratorial organisation founded by Giuseppe Mazzini (Young Europe), an organisation marked by revolutionary democratism, which, according to Polish emigrants, meant primarily striving for national character, seeing its goal in regaining national independence lost by Poland as a result of partitions. In addition, however, the concepts of members of Young Poland strongly emphasized both Christian and Utopian socialist themes. The foundation of these concepts referred to republican ideas that arose from the Great French Revolution and were based on the principles of freedom, equality and fraternity.

<em>Roblox</em> and Meta Verch

<em>Roblox</em> and Meta Verch

The defence of Medea: The subversion of the femme fatale trope in William Morris’s 'The Life and Death of Jason'

William Morris (1834-1896) was one of the Victorian artists whose work extended beyond the totality of art that was cherished by nineteenth-century critics. Particularly in his early oeuvre, Morris engages with the political and cultural discussion on women’s emancipation and utopian society through the use of Arthurian and Hellenic traditions. The following article provides a detailed reading of William Morris’s portrayal of Medea in The Life and Death of Jason (1867). Contrary to the established association of Medea as a femme fatale, Morris’s depiction of the Colchian princess escapes the vision of femininity characterised by devouring sexuality, manipulation, and the urge to destroy men. Similarly to The Defence of Guinevere (published in 1858), The Life and Death of Jason refrains from a direct condemnation of Medea, who attempts to navigate her experience of betrayal and dishonour. Thus, the article attempts to examine how Morris reused Hellenic tropes to discuss the complexity of the female experience that transgresses the boundaries of time and place.

“It’s Absolutely Intense, and I Love It!” A Qualitative Investigation of “Pegging” as Leisure

In recent years, there has been growing interest among scholars in sexual practices as leisure behavior. The present study focused on “pegging,” which is a new term for the sexual practice of biological females (vagina) anally penetrating (i.e. with strap-on devices, sex toys) biological males (penis) among heterosexual couples. Drawing on our connections within alternative sexuality communities, we interviewed 17 individuals (10 peggers and 7 peggees) to investigate how their pegging practices may reflect specific leisure qualities. Findings suggest that pegging functions primarily as casual leisure largely in the forms of sensory stimulation, play, active entertainment, and pleasurable aerobic activity (for peggers using strap-ons). Pegging was associated with significant relationship benefits for participants, including thorough communication, trust, shared intimacy, and mutual pleasure.

Migrancy and utopia: the global network in Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT This paper attends to the utopian imagination circulating in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997). These texts exemplify the formal innovation assigned to migrancy fiction more generally, a genre characterised by its embrace of mobility in content as well as in form. Alongside migrancy novels, utopian fiction both maps and distorts the networks and infrastructures that generate wealth inequality on a global scale. But while previous studies have touched on the utopian implications to migration fiction, this paper elaborates on the affordances of placing these fields into full dialogue. To develop this last point, this paper draws from Mary Louise Pratt’s influential concept of the contact zone in order to acknowledge the different scales of utopian thinking within (and between) Tropic of Orange, which demarcates a specific utopian community, and Exit West, which imagines a global commons. Approaching these texts through the lens of the contact zone helps bring into focus how mundane technologies create inequality today but might be repurposed to radically remake society in the future.

Queering Bangladeshi Blogging Networks: Legal Rights, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Politics of Blog Publics in Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ Activism

Abstract LGBTQ+ activism in Bangladesh is a comparatively less explored avenue in queer Asia studies. Although academic and socio-political conversations around hijra and transgender communities in Bangladesh are more often foregrounded, scholarly discussions around gay, lesbian, and bisexual experiences and identities are rarely pursued. This is partly due to the vitriolic and brutal treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual subjects and allies in the Bangladeshi nation-state where both socio-cultural ideology and legislative principles are dominated by pro-Islamic religious doctrines and colonial-time legislature that make non-normative sexual identities and acts invalid and punishable. Currently, the gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual queer communities of Bangladesh exist as “enclave publics” in the Bangladeshi online and networked media-spheres, particularly after the 2016 killings of Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi, leaders of the first organized Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ activist community. However, certain queer and decolonial counter-public formation around specific alternative Bangladeshi blogs and archival websites have opened new avenues for a more sustained LGBTQ+ resistance. In this article, I problematize the approach of Bangladeshi LGBTQ+ activism and critically analyze how adopting Western frameworks of queer activism, primarily based on pro-visibility, coming-out strategies, and pride rallies, presented itself with extreme existential challenges for gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual individuals in key digital platforms. I also re-evaluate liberal narratives around progressive digital activism in Bangladeshi blogging networks to argue how blog-publics in progressive and secular platforms like Somewhere in . . . fail to protest queer oppression and advocate for queer rights. The examination observes that so-called secular blogging communities in Bangladesh is only selectively progressive, and regarding questions around the rights of LGBTQ+ subjects, makes increasingly clear that conservative and religious doctrines continue to undergird its discursive and affective logics. Finally, I closely analyze Mondro (2019), an enclave queer digital archive and alternative blogging platform for LGBTQ+ subjects in Bangladesh, created in response to the oppression and hate queer subjects face in traditional blogging communities. Predominantly centering Bengali culture, heritage, and tradition, the Mondro community secretly arranges workshops for LGBTQ+ peers on issues around mental-health, healing, and suicide prevention. Here, I claim that alternative queer communities like Mondro, that remain hidden from traditional blogging networks and mainstream media, where queer bloggers and allies mostly post anonymously, is not necessarily a move backwards into the closet, rather a timely tactical intervention for queer identities and narratives to survive and possibly thrive within the digital networks of the Bangladeshi blogosphere. This is an approach that takes the issues around queer survival in Bangladesh seriously, acknowledging and reconciling both its own cultural historicities and its situatedness in a religious sectarian nation-state. To this end, I usefully investigate Mondro through Ahmed Sofa (আহমেদ ছফা) (1981) and Kuan-Hsing Chen's (2010) decolonial frameworks of placing Asia at the center of any conceivable model of networked queer resistance and LGBTQ+ world-making in Bangladesh.

Poryadok, paradigma i politika estetiki: reforma odezhdy v period nepa (1921–1928)

Based on the combing and analysis of historical documents and newspaper images, this paper examines the early Soviet social costume style in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, and the reasons for its transformation from the perspective of social history of art. The research shows that the dress reform during the NEP period of the Soviet Union experienced multiple model stages such as the paradigm shift from “simple imitation” to “self-construction”, and the discourse integration of “modern” and “national”. At the same time, the aesthetic discourse of socialist fashion, as the politics of aesthetics in daily life, become the mythic metaphor of socialist utopia in the process of constructing national ideology, social and cultural concepts and citizenship consciousness.

Formation and evolution of the agricultural commune “From darkness to light” in Ananiev district (1924–1926)

The content of the article addresses the history of the appearance and evolution of the agricultural commune “From darkness to light” from Lipetskoe village, Ananiev district. In the first part of the article is reflected the activity of the “Rai” monastery, which served as the foundation for the formation of the labor collective. The second part of the study mirrors the way the new agricultural entity is organized. The chronological limits are set between 1924 (the establishment of the agricultural commune) and 1926 – a year that started with the first inspection inside the village. Analyzed in general terms, the agricultural commune “From darkness to light” was itself a utopian experiment promoted by the Soviet authorities on the left bank of the Dniester River in order to restore on new economic, political, social and ideological ways the rural community of the AMSSR.

The Lost and Sought Out of the Real World

As a typical postmodernist suspense comedy, "Rise to Fame" presents distinctive postmodernist cultural characteristics with its multiple deconstructions of history and reality without deep flattened image language, and alienated kitsch character group portraits. In terms of image style, the film uses the "parody" of form and the superposition and use of multiple images to build a confusing, absurd and real "social utopia" for us. In terms of narrative technique, the narrative strategy of "de-realization" disturbs and subverts real time, dissolves the serious disguise of the current society, and the director uses the marginalized and confused "Republic of China society" to subvert and challenge the sacredness and solemnity of the real society. In the diverse group portraits, the consistent face-painted characters are replaced by individual carnivals of freedom, thus casting a postmodernist veil on the entire film.

MANIFESTATIONS OF POSTMODERNISM IN HERMANN HESSE'S NOVEL “THE GLASS BEAD GAME”

The paper attempts to consider the connections between postmodernism, aesthetics and Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game referring to the history of the last most influential manifestation of the theoretical and aesthetic thought of the West – postmodernism, also characterized by paradoxes. Based on a number of fundamental principles of the aesthetics of postmodernism and data on the work of Hermann Hesse, the specific relations that connect Hesse’s work with postmodernism, are considered. This refers first to the ideas of the world as chaos, then aesthetic eclecticism, multiculturalism and finally game. Within the framework of the idea the world as chaos, the wide use of the concept of simulacrum in both Hesse’s and postmodernist works is considered. Aesthetic eclecticism, which is “the dominant sign of the culture of the postmodern era” (J.-F. Lyotard, I. Ilyin), is also found in Hesse’s novel in various manifestations. Multiculturalism, both as a social utopia and as an aesthetic principle, is also widespread among postmodernist aesthetes (especially L. Fiedler) and in Hesse’s novel. In the novel the East-West political and cultural dialogue also deepens. Finally, the game, being one of the stable European cultural codes, is rediscovered both in Hesse’s novel and in postmodernist aesthetics (U. Eco).

A Feminist Reading of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the representative feminist writers in the United States. Her novel Herland constructs a utopian society for women and breaks binary opposition between men and women. This thesis analyzes from two different perspectives -- space and environment, and ideology in a woman-dominated country to reveal the ability of females’ deconstruction of dualism and reconstruction of equality rebuild between people and nature, and between men and women with subjectivity and agency of women. On the other hand, by comparing patriarchal ideology in reality and feministic thoughts in Herland, this thesis also aims to reveal the advancement in this feminist utopia, thus indicating the practical significance of the novel as a social criticism by creating a female dominated utopia to explore the ways to solve the various social problems in patriarchal United States.

Scribbling Toward Utopia

I first invoke Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Jerusalem.” Her concern was to move away from the dystopia that parts of the United States had become through drug use and other temptations toward a more utopian state. My attempt uses a number of examples where utopias have been imagined and some where the main lesson is cautionary rather than optimistic. Even Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had its faults while the East German vision of a socialist utopia collapsed into tyranny and farce. My scribbles are modest attempts to promote a just society, a kind of utopia—maybe.

Strange Forms

Strange Forms

Yugoslavia's Last Monuments

Yugoslavia's Last Monuments Christopher Linforth (bio) THE ERASURE of spomeniks began little more than a decade after Marshal Tito's death in 1980. The president of Yugoslavia had commissioned the construction of these Space Age monuments after the brutal Axis occupation of his homeland. Tito envisioned a new Soviet-style mythos for Yugoslavia—one rooted in futuristic utopianism. His embrace of this aesthetic, perhaps unusual for someone born in the small village of Kumrovec, aided his decades-long quest to unify his people. Using brutalist design principles, Tito's architects memorialized the socialist federal republic's dead and those who fought the invasion: his Partisan army. Over thirty years, thousands of these outsized concrete spomeniks appeared across the Yugoslavian landscape. Often built in remote locations, at battle sites or places of patriotic heroism, these monuments dwarfed their surroundings. In today's Republika Srpska, the Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska at Tjentište sits in a pleasant green valley, occasionally visited by glum-faced schoolchildren and hikers seeking to conquer the nearby peak of Sniježnica. The jagged dual wings of this spomenik, each some nineteen meters high, resemble a giant hunk of stratified limestone cleaved in two. Inside the poured concrete façade lies an unseen cagelike rebar structure. Not far away in the other entitized form of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the skeletal remains of another spomenik sit atop Mt. Makljen. Monument to the Battle for the Wounded (sometimes known as The Fist) commemorates the Partisan soldiers who defended the mountain pass from Axis troops. The blocky abstract fist rose to a height of fourteen meters and was painted white—a symbol of defiance against the fascist invasion. Decades later, in 2000, local vandals dynamited the spomenik; they blasted the concrete shell away and left only a rig of smoldering rebar. In the eyes of many, the brightness of Tito's utopian socialist realism faded dramatically during the Yugoslav Wars. The rallying call of a single Slav state felt hollow, meaningless, with so many dead. And spomeniks were a reminder of the false unity of the past. Indeed, the towering hubris of these monuments was starkly evident. The wars reignited the Balkans' historic factions—Serbs, Croats, Kosovans, Macedonians, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Montenegrins—to raise again past grudges and the specter of bloody nationalism. On the lips of the citizens of this dissoluted republic were places of mass death and ethnic cleansing: Batajnica, Vukovar, Bihac, Srebrenica. Click for larger view View full resolution Through the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of spomeniks were vandalized or destroyed or left to crumble away. Visit Košute, Drvar, or Kamenska to see slabs of broken concrete strewn across the landscape. Colorful graffiti is the only sign people still visit these areas. In other places, some spomeniks have been replaced by churches or new monuments documenting the victims of the wars. Plaques on these new monuments often revisit the resentments of the former Yugoslavia. Unresolved trauma is on full display. In recent years, there has been a worldwide interest in the most famous spomeniks, such as the stylized winged monument at Podgaric, a memorial to a local rebellion against the fascist Ustaše. Concurrently, within the former Yugoslavia, a growing fondness for the republic can be seen in hip café-bars, art exhibitions, even on reality television. Titostalgia draws upon a rose-tinted view of Tito's benevolence: his futuristic dream of a forward-looking and powerful Yugoslavia. Younger generations have started to valorize his life and work; they imagine a Golden Age of better times and when people said "brotherhood and unity" without a sense of irony. The spomeniks speak to these dreamers. These last monuments point the way to reconciliation: a future for them all. [End Page 9] Christopher Linforth Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (2022), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize; Directory (2020); and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (2014). Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Archiving Feeling in Yvonne Rainer's Journeys from Berlin/1971

Abstract Yvonne Rainer's third and most explicitly political feature-length film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (US/UK/West Germany, 1979) explores the relationship between personal and political trauma through the lens of the instability and violence that ravaged West Germany during the period commonly referred to as the German Autumn (1977). Through a close reading of the film's formal structure, this essay argues that Journeys from Berlin/1971 represents Rainer's attempt to imagine a feminist counterpublic in the form of a queer “archive of feelings.” This essay traces the film's narrative junctures, comprised of five distinct and incongruous tracks layered and juxtaposed in a collage-like form, arguing that Rainer creates points of connection between scenes of domestic intimacy and political violence. In doing so, Journeys bridges the typically privatized and historically negated realm of everyday traumas of women and queer subjects with the public space of political trauma and asserts the primacy of both within national histories. This essay further argues that the female revolutionaries who emerge within these charged touchpoints act as figures of queer possibility. Their explicit and often spectacular refusals and failures — of the liberatory promises of bourgeois motherhood on the one hand, and political activism on the other — deny any possibility of a reparative fantasy within the film. Made during a period of significant aesthetic and personal change in Rainer's life following her attempted suicide, the film's form as an alternative archive of feminist resistance ultimately acts as both catharsis and a means of bringing this alternative community into being.

You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul by Richard A. Horsley

Reviewed by: You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul by Richard A. Horsley Clair Mesick richard a. horsley, You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021). Pp. 236. $29. In You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them, Richard Horsley argues that Jesus and Paul have been misunderstood as merely "religious" figures. Instead, both are deeply embedded in their economic and political contexts and work toward the creation of an alternative economic model in opposition to Roman oppression. The book is divided into four parts: an introduction on methodology; analysis of Jesus's mission; analysis of Paul's project; and, finally, several chapters sketching out what both can offer a modern era dominated by global capitalism. Horsley's introduction is methodological, identifying and deconstructing assumptions that have governed much of the field of biblical studies. For instance, while biblical studies has operated with a post-French-Revolution division of religion, politics, and economics, H. argues that the biblical texts themselves contain no distinction among the three. Likewise, H. breaks down "print-cultural" assumptions, clarifying that biblical "texts" were received more through oral communication and performance than the dissemination of physical writings. H. follows this introduction with a chapter that surveys the biblical corpus on justice: some texts call for radical economic justice (Amos, Isaiah); many merely call for reforming existing economic structures (Deuteronomy); and a few even provide divine justification for exploitative economic systems (2 Samuel). Horsley dedicates the next four chapters to Jesus. His key argument—starting from the requests in the Lord's Prayer to "give us this day our daily bread" and "forgive our debts"—is that Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom of God is about economic subsistence through mutual aid rather than religious wisdom or apocalyptic prediction. H. situates Jesus's proclamation within a background of exploitation, taxation, and economic pressures on the Jewish people under priestly and political leaders (chap. 3). In that light, Jesus's ministry appears less a matter of an otherworldly kingdom of God than a renewal of the covenant community through social-economic solidarity (chap. 4). Likewise, Jesus's rejection of the priestly leaders, scribes, and Pharisees ought to be understood not as opposition to Judaism but as a condemnation of the temple-state's exploitation and economic extraction from the people (chap. 5). The sixth through eighth chapters treat Paul's alternative communities in the Roman Empire. In one of the most incisive chapters of the book, H. argues that both economic and sociological studies of the NT have been riddled with methodological problems (chap. 6). Economic scholarship has imported capitalist assumptions into its study of the Roman Empire, but H. makes the case that ancient Rome was no true market economy but rather a [End Page 358] political economy ruled by the demands and coercion of the empire. Likewise, prior sociological research—influenced by anti-Marxist sociological models in the 1970s—presented Roman society as a coherent system in which different socioeconomic roles and occupations all fit into a cohesive whole. The reality, however, was far more governed by inequality, poverty, and the exploitation of the many by an extremely wealthy few. Building on this foundation, H.'s next chapters present the early Christ movement as an alternative to the domination and exploitation of the Roman imperial order, turning first to Acts (chap, 7) and then to economic solidarity in the letters of Paul (chap, 8). Horsley's final section addresses contemporary implications. This section frames global capitalism as a new form of empire, the Bible as a tool of empire, and the field of biblical studies as complicit in empire (chap. 9). H. contrasts this with the biblical texts themselves. He traces the critique of empire and the call to political-economic-religious solidarity through the Hebrew Bible (chap. 10) and NT (chap. 11) and concludes in the latter half of chap. 11 with a call to create alternative communities in resistance to the empire of global capitalism. Not all will agree with the interpretive decisions that H. makes. One example is the use of Acts...

Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism by Arieh Saposnik

Reviewed by: Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism by Arieh Saposnik Noam Pianko Arieh Saposnik. Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. Arieh Saposnik’s Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism confronts a delicate historiographical dilemma: How should scholars interpret the centrality of redemption rooted in messianic visions of Jewish salvation within Zionist ideologies? Ever a flashpoint in debates about nationalism and liberalism, this question about Zionism’s historical relationship with notions of redemption cannot be easily separated from the contentious politics surrounding the post-1948 Jewish state. This book offers readers a [End Page 229] much-needed path through this politicized terrain to look closely at a critical trope in modern Jewish nationalism. Messianic and redemptive political visions do not map simply onto a secular nationalist movement with democratic aspirations. Indeed, scholars tend to view messianic impulses in twentieth-century politics, whether explicitly a call for an extrahistorical religious transformation or secular efforts to reimagine the world through a singular lens, as closely linked to totalitarian movements. Visions of future forms of social and political redemption thus stand in contrast to liberal ideals of multicultural and pluralist societies. An exploration of Zionism’s redemptions must acknowledge, and grapple with, the complex backdrop that modern historians bring to the study of ideologies that espouse very particular political visions of redemption. The strength of this book lies in the nuanced framework that Saposnik adopts to unpack the complexity of redemptive tropes across various Zionist ideologies. The study rejects the bifurcated historiographical legacy of this theme—to read references to redemption as symbolic language disconnected from traditional Jewish notions of messianism or as an embrace of messianic ideas that illustrates the extrahistorical, and perhaps even totalitarian, proclivities within Jewish nationalism. By avoiding the polarizing interpretations, Saposnik opens new ways of categorizing the centrality of visions of redemption in Zionist thought. Zionism’s Redemptions offers the “redemptive dimension” of Jewish nationalism as a novel category for reframing the conversation. Based on this reconceptualization, Saposnik argues that Jewish nationalism’s emphasis on redemption often served to capture a deep yearning for actively engaging in history to bring about universal ends and liberal objectives. Redemptive visions imbued Jewish nationalism with a radical desire to return to history through a variety of ideological perspectives (rather than messianic calls to transcend history). Zionist ideologies, Saposnik argues, turned to this discourse of redemption as a shared backdrop to explore a variety of political, social, and cultural directions—from exclusivist nationalisms that emulated aspects of European totalitarians to utopian ideals of human redemption. The discourse of redemption also served as opportunity to negotiate the relationship between Zionism and contemporary political and religious forces, including European nationalism, Christian notions of salvation, and Jewish religious traditions. Zionism’s Redemptions captures this diversity through textured and nuanced case studies. These case studies illuminate the multivocal conceptions of redemption woven through Zionist ideologies. Readers have the chance to consider this trope across subjects ranging from Diaspora-oriented Jewish nationalists such as Israel Zangwill to Zionists grappling with the presence of Christians who connected their own redemptive visions to the Holy Land. From these examples, Saposnik demonstrates that redemption served as a shared vocabulary for articulating deep internal ideological fragmentations within the Zionist movement. (Thus the significance of the book title’s reference to Zionism’s “redemptions” in the plural.) Saposnik’s study provides a much-needed alternative to viewpoints that perceive particularist nationalism and progressive universalism as inherently [End Page 230] mutually exclusive forces. In contrast, Zionist thinkers developed ideas of redemption that offered national movements as the ideal path toward cosmopolitan objectives. Many of the figures included in this study held these opposing forces together in their visions for the future. Certainly, the historical success of these objectives is a topic of debate. Nevertheless, Zionism’s Redemptions serves as a site to study the complicated relationship between striving for humanistic ends and advancing a nationalist agenda. This book thus sets the foundation for engaging the relationship of nationalist ideologies...

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization