Utopian Dream Research Articles

Ernst Bloch’s Laboratorium possibilis Salutis

The concept of the world as a Laboratorium possibilis Salutis represents a condensation of Ernst Bloch's imaginative understanding of the world and of history.1 This evocative phrase indicates a plane in which history does not entirely coincide with its own unfolding; a moment in which humanity is not curtailed by the facticity of the prevailing order. Over and above the facticity of what is-alienation and oppression-the world offers a workplace for well-being and the restoration of health and dignity, as well as the expansion of the humane ideal.Bloch propels the tradition of Hegel and Marx in accounting for the dialectical unfolding of history at large; he continues this tradition through an emphasis on the teleological characteristic of the human project, and retains a prospective moment of hope for the sublation of contradictions at the end of history, the fulfilment of human lack and the fulfilment of the human project through the realisation of a joyful and a just communal realm.Since the second half of the twentieth century it has become commonplace to treat any account of the unfolding of the human project at large (especially those with recourse to Utopian and/or dialectical traditions) with scepticism, caution and resistance. Particularly influential in this regard has been the rise of anti-totalitarian humanism-a tradition which has contributed to the dissemination of the suspicion that the worth of the human individual succumbs in the face of larger-scale accounts of the unfolding of history. Seen thus, antitotalitarian humanism is not confined to moral engagement with and reflection on the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century only.Anti-totalitarian humanism established its influence in various fields of philosophy. For example, through the influence of anti-totalitarian humanism memory has attained a new moral and philosophical significance. This tradition has focused academic attention on recent atrocities, arguing that the horrors of the twentieth century resulted from humane-sounding social ideals. This emphasis has resulted in a growing awareness of the dangers that lurk in social ideals with Utopian aspirations or pretensions. It is not surprising in this context that Utopian ideals are increasingly suspected of carrying the germs of totalitarianism.2 Antitotalitarian humanism can be understood to include any philosophical and moral engagement with past evils that explores the systemic violation of human dignity, as well as the critical awareness of the risks involved when a society sets itself the objective to create the preconditions for a more equitable social order. It should be added in this regard that through the influence of anti-totalitarian humanism memory has attained a cautionary and preventative significance. That is to say, the remembrance of the past-by way of the construction of memorials, public rituals, exhibitions and academic studies of the atrocities of twentieth-century European and colonial history-serves to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities and the derailment of ideals.3Anti-totalitarian humanism deserves acclaim for the manner in which it has contributed to the sharpening of our moral awareness and the expansion of our sense of moral experience. Notwithstanding these contributions and the philosophical plausibility of anti-totalitarian humanism, however, one has to question the premises established in contemporary Western culture and social philosophy through its influence. The extent to which the assimilation of anti-totalitarian humanism leads to a stigmatisation ofUtopiaas a figure of discourse is concerning, as this may result in an eventual impoverishment of moral discourse. While anti-totalitarian humanism serves to critically inform us in our pursuit of ideals, one has to question its premise that Utopian philosophies in general carry the seed of totalitarianism, as well as the assumption that in large-scale dialectical accounts of the unfolding of history the human individual will necessarily suc- cumb in the face of the indifference of history. …

Camping in a Mudhouse:: Ruins and Fragments as Tropes of Reflexivity

Suppose an artist were to release the [art]work directly into a that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur. The usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks? (Seth Price, 2012). If institutional interests operate such an enclosing grip on the representation of cultural production is the prospect of a place for art simply a utopian pipe dream ? Could it be that institutions themselves, such as the market-driven establishment are on the brink of ruin or at least shoring up against the spread of ruination and therefore in a constant nascent state – never a completed ideal – and opening up new places for all the time? (Michael Phillipson, 1995). This paper will focus on nomadic and fragmented contemporary artistic practices, speculating on a potential flooding of the system with discursive activity which occupies a zone between and society, between cultures of practice and cultures of bureaucracy. A model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur through engagement with invited groups and individuals, visitors and other parties, will reveal alternative (and more inclusive) practices that reclaim the places where culture has overlooked.

A Generative Populace: Benjamin Franklin’s Economic Agendas

A Generative PopulaceBenjamin Franklin’s Economic Agendas Karen M. Rosenthall (bio) Benjamin Franklin emerges as a point of origin for many different aspects of United States culture; he is rarely missing from debates about the texts and authors that catalyzed the tradition of American letters, and he is also a Founding Father of republican ideology (Davidson 134; Wood 215–17). When it comes to economics, Franklin’s fiscal models have been invoked across a spectrum of work on political economy. Karl Marx critiqued T. R. Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population for its “schoolboyish, superficial plagiary” (qtd. in Huzel 20) of Franklin’s populationist economic models, among those of others. Max Weber credited Franklin’s Autobiography with embodying “the spirit of capitalism,” thereby invoking his iconic life narrative as the progenitor of an entirely different set of political economy ideals (9–11). These divergent analyses demonstrate the flexibility of Franklin’s economic rhetoric. Although his works recognized the potential of agrarian republicanism, Franklin’s economic theories and popular writings also used the limitations of an agricultural economy to push for commercialism in the colonies and early Republic. Franklin quantified labor and valued productive work as contributions to the public good. In writing texts that identified and prescribed virtuous behavior and then transforming the production, sale, and purchase of those texts into a virtuous act, Franklin’s belletristic writings and his economic prescriptions worked in tandem to demonstrate how individual labor and American commerce served the common welfare. Franklin’s 1751 populationist tract “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.” provides a quantitative and qualitative examination of the relationship between a growing populace and land availability and use to comment on British economic policy in relation to American economic potential. The populationist hypothesis imagines an ideal ratio where the size of a nation’s populace is evenly complemented [End Page 571] by the amount of resources it produces, and when these figures are balanced, the polity becomes economically self-sufficient and stable. In “Observations,” Franklin adopts and adapts the theories of seventeenth-century British demographers who analyzed census figures alongside data recording land use, resource production, and import trade. Further, these demographers linked the long-term health of a country to its inhabitants and their ability to generate wealth (Carey 46–47). “Observations” exaggerates the potential yield of colonial agricultural production and sets high expectations for America’s laboring public, establishing the ideals that became central to Franklin’s economic thinking. Populationist theory was a part of the evolution of modern economic theory; Franklin used its emphasis on productive labor and self-sufficiency to make commercialism agreeable to a populace that was primarily committed to agrarian, republican values. In Franklin’s day, the dream that ample land would provide the basis for a thriving society was a powerful force in policy debates and in more literary efforts to imagine America’s future. American populationist theory advocated agrarian production at a moment when the English “public mind” was absorbed in its “mixed admiration of and horror at the factory . . . [and the] omnipresent problem of the unprofitable poor” (Heilbroner 52). Well before Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the British radical Jacobins promoted the “utopian dream of settling on a wilderness farm in America . . . [and this dream] lent ideological meaning to landed property in America and thereby determined its economic value” (Verhoeven 12). America’s vast expanses of “unsettled,” cultivatable land appeared as the answer to the resource production and urban crowding problems plaguing England. In recent years, historians who have studied landholdings, agricultural production, shipping demands, and involuntary labor practices have debunked the myth that early America was an economic utopia founded on available land (Matson 27–33). An “abundance of land became colonists’ most important economic resource” (Matson 26), yet the economic growth it provided has been exaggerated (Mancall and Weiss 17–19). The tract exaggerates the potential yield of colonial agricultural production, and its high expectations for America’s laboring public became central to Franklin’s economic thought. Franklin extols the virtues of labor and productive...

WHAT “REALISTIC UTOPIAS” ARE — AND AREN’T

Abstract:Political theory is not a purely theoretical enterprise; it is intended to be practical and action-guiding. To perform this role, the requirements of political theory must be possible, and the standard of possibility it employs must be appropriate to the political domain. Because human beings vary in their capacity for morality and justice, a reasonably just society, as Rawls understands it, must not be expected. Despite his concerns to the contrary, the possibility of a just polity is not needed to ward off resignation and cynicism. There is a principled path between a politics of complacency that thwarts feasible progress and a politics of utopian aspiration that ends by inflicting harm in the name of doing good.

Imperial Normativities and Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s

Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, Soviet researchers in child biopsychosocial development became especially interested in the question of ethnoracial differences in the Soviet child population. During the First Five-Year Plan a specialist subarea of research briefly flourished within Soviet pedology. Dubbed the “pedology of national minorities,” it was fostered in concert with the broader efforts of the Soviet state to incorporate “backward” populations living in more peripheral parts of the Union into the normatively framed Soviet body politic as part of accelerated economic, social, and cultural “development.” Focusing on examples of psychometric research done on Uzbek children in Tashkent, Tatar children in Moscow, and more remote ethnic groups in Siberia, this article analyzes how the early-Soviet “pedology of national minorities” became embroiled in a complicated knot of contradictions in its attempt to account for and negotiate the ambiguous relationship between, on the one hand, normative deviations in the Soviet child population (a population that was expected to be unified into a single body politic, especially through the expansion and standardization of the Soviet education system) and, on the other, ethnoracial differences within this population in the distinctive context of early Soviet efforts to manage the Union’s federative structure along ethnonational lines through the Soviet state’s nationalities policy. The article argues that this contradiction between “deviation” and “difference” reflected one of the central dilemmas of Soviet modernity as a sociopolitical experiment – namely, how to adapt universalizing thinking and utopian aspirations to an “imperial” reality marked by nonsystemic diversity.

The Post-Body: Demographic, Economic and Social Dilemmas of the Present

We are all familiar with the idea that as a result of improvements in the standard of living there has been a significant improvement in the life expectancy of people in the developed world. In this article, I focus on a related development – the so-called ‘life extension project’. This program promises through extensive technological intervention to maximize both therapy (to remove suffering) and enhancement (to improve our capabilities) resulting in an indefinite prolongation of life. Radical bio-gerontology promises not only that humans will live well beyond 120 years, but they can do so without illness and disease. The utopian dream of radical post-humanism is that death, at least as we understand it today, is not inevitable. Hypothetically the outcome of the life extension project is the post-body. The ‘natural body’ is replaced by a synthetic or hybrid body – an assemblage of human organs supplemented with computers, nanotechnological machines, artificial organs, and a brain enhanced by drugs and medical technologies. In short, the ‘human’ will be ontologically transformed by technology. In the future society, there will be both humans, who do not have the benefit of expensive technology, and post-humans, who have the economic resources to finance such transformations.

Possible Worlds of the Pomarańczowa Alternatywa

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall provides an excellent background to consider how to think about what promised to be a possible world in 1989. Today, one must either blind oneself to the disastrous failure of the emancipatory endeavors prompted by liberal democracy, which took the form of the ethnic conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; accept neoliberal politics as the only recourse and possible world; regress to a recurring utopian dream that it will be still possible to construct an isotopia, a chronotopia, a heterotopia, or a utopia; adopt a cynical distance when faced with a chunk of the Berlin Wall in front of the Westin Hotel on which it is written “Property of the Westin Grand Hotel. Damages to the Wall are not permitted”; or return to the need to reconceptualize history in a manner which could help in critically evaluating the past and the time of the “now” in their complex, often contradictory historical materiality. This essay, using the critical work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, draws attention to the events in Poland between mid-1980 and mid-1989, which prompted a multitude of cultural and political phenomena of unprecedented representational heterogeneity hitherto underexplored. Using the streets actions of the Orange Alternative, it argues that theatre and visual arts during that period revealed the tension between the hegemonic lexicon of bureaucratic socialism, which was in the process of losing its power, and a new democratic authority, which did not or could not yet fully enunciate its operations and strategies. These happenings and street actions, which occupied a contested intellectual, emotional, and spiritual terrain claimed by the referents to the disputed ideology and power of the state and Solidarity/the Church, contribute to the discourse on possible worlds by resisting the course of the world and its reified residues, as Adorno would aver.

Adult Education as a Heterotopia of Deviation

We argue that municipal adult education (MAE) can be seen as a place for displaced and abnormal citizens to gain temporary stability, enabling their shaping into desirable subjects. Drawing on a poststructural discursive analysis, we analyze policy texts and interviews with teachers and students. Our analysis illustrates how two distinct but interrelated student subjectivities are shaped: the rootless, unmotivated, and irresponsible student; and the responsible, motivated, and goal-oriented student. The difference is that the latter of these subjectivities is positioned as desirable. MAE provides a temporary place in time, a heterotopia of deviation, allowing students to escape precarious employment. The heterotopia places the students in a positive utopian dream of the future. A utopia is not a real place, and what is to become of the students after finishing MAE is not determined; the students themselves should shape it. If they fail, in line with a neoliberal governmentality, it is their own fault.

Utopian Dreams and The No. 9 Bus to Utopia

Utopian Dreams and The No. 9 Bus to Utopia

J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism by Katherine Hallemeier (review)

Katherine Hallemeier.J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 201. US$90. Well-known for his preoccupation with ethical questions about responsibility to and interaction with others, J. M. Coetzee offers one of the most intriguing archives for critics of to consider. Katherine Hallemeier's J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism, focused on his recent fiction (beginning with 2007's Boyhood), provides a thorough examination of Coetzee's engagement with a variety of forms of Hallemeier offers a persuasive argument for reading Coetzee's later fiction as interventions into contemporary debates about the nature of and, particularly, its ethical implications. The book begins by outlining two ways of categorizing current theorizations of and their links to sympathy: rational cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism. The first posits sympathy supplements reason while the second imagines that sympathy is extrarational (16). Both are similar insofar as they a perfect human sympathy that is never interrupted by the of misunderstanding or inequality (17). In her examination of and its enactment in Coetzees fiction, Hallemeier notes that Coetzee critiques these models through a suggestion that paranoia can undergird the privileging of rationality while an emphasis on the affective can uncritically reinforce gender stereotypes. Hallemeier goes on to identify another strand of cosmopolitan thinking in which might offer a useful interruption of vision of sympathy [as] dramatically by envision [ing] a that admits to the possibility of experiencing the self-as-other (97-98). Yet as Hallemeier illustrates through Coetzee's exploration of the limited cosmopolitan potential of shame (100), is not without its similarly utopian aspirations for emotion and its ethical potential. This analysis of the role of sympathy and in current cosmopolitan theory (roughly the first three quarters of the book) offers a thorough overview of the field and its variety of approaches to both affect and universality. For those who are new to this body of theory or those who would appreciate an outline of many of the key approaches to cosmopolitanism, this part of the book will prove very helpful. At the same time, Hallemeier demonstrates how fiction might provide a useful additional voice in the critical debates surrounding the forms cosmopolitan practice might take, experiment[ing] with the possibility that thinking through an idea across different genres enables conversations that are incommensurable [approached differently but with shared priorities] yet complementary (16). …

Recreation specialization in ocean cruising

This study investigated specialization theory [Bryan, H. (1979). Conflict in the great outdoors. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Publishing Company; Bryan, H. (2000). Recreation specialization revisited. Journal of Leisure Research, 31, 18–21] in ocean cruisers. Cruisers have quit their jobs and traded in their land-based life for a life afloat cruising on their own boat to live a utopian dream [Macbeth, J. (2000). Utopian tourists – Cruising is not just about sailing. Current Issues in Tourism, 3(1), 20–34]. The following criteria defined a cruiser in this study: boat ownership, living aboard and at least one passage. An additive specialization index was given to 330 cruisers as part of an online survey. Quantitative results showed cruisers are highly specialized and that differences existed between less and more specialized cruisers. Supplemental analysis revealed gender differences in specialization.

Pop, Collaboration, Utopia: Bruce Conner's BREAKAWAY in 1960s Los Angeles

San Francisco artist Bruce Conner established himself as a major figure in postwar underground cinema with his first film, A MOVIE (1958), a masterpiece of found-footage montage. Yet Conner also shot several films with his own camera, many of which feature a nude or partially clothed female performer and, in some cases, a pop music sound track; these films include COSMIC RAY (1961), VIVIAN (1964), EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966), and THE WHITE ROSE (1967). This essay examines a work by Conner that combines all of these elements, 1966's BREAKAWAY, an experimental dance film he made in collaboration with Los Angeles choreographer and actress Toni Basil. Shot over a period of two years in Santa Monica, BREAKAWAY draws from Conner and Basil's mutual involvement in both the Hollywood entertainment industry and the West Coast artistic underground through its curious fusion of pop and avant-garde sensibilities. This essay argues that BREAKAWAY is an inherently collaborative and cross-disciplinary work that self-reflexively invokes the utopian aspirations of the American underground and popular culture during the mid-1960s, especially through its utilization of rock and roll, a genre rooted in vernacular African American music. To unpack these connections, BREAKAWAY is analyzed in the context of two contemporary films in which Basil played significant roles: The T.A.M.I. Show (dir. Steve Binder, US, 1964), a groundbreaking concert film that signaled a new era of on-screen racial integration, and the classic psychedelic road movie Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, US, 1969).

Eat, Pray, Buy a House: Utopian Visions of Italy in the New Millennium

This article explores the peculiar combination of literary memoir, utopian dream and material culture that sprung from a number of books written about Italy (living in Italy, buying a home in Italy, moving back to Italy) in the new millennium. The famous <i>Under the Tuscan Sun</i>, published in 1996, constitutes one of the earliest and most famous examples of this new genre. According to the Tuscan Sun book, it is not longer enough to travel somewhere, but the traveler needs to commune with the land by owning a piece of it. While relatively new, this particular sub-genre, defined by a critic “brick and mortar travel memoir,” has yielded insightful analyses about travels and the encounters with the other in the 21st Century. Memoirs about living, as foreigners, in contemporary Italy are weaved with the utopian dream of finding something in Italy something real: a real sense of community, real food, real feelings, plus a landscape where human interventions have been gentle and capable of creating real beauty. The article examines a number of memoirs written in recent years about Italy. This analysis is conducted primarily from the point of view of utopian studies, but it also explores issues of authenticity and materiality, thereby offering an analysis of the way Italy is nowadays perceived, imagined and idealized in contemporary travel literature.

Thomas Jefferson's philosophy of education: a utopian dream

Thomas Jefferson's philosophy of education: a utopian dream

“Good” news from nowhere: imagining utopian sustainable accounting

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide a ray of hope, in the form of a Morris-style utopian dream of a sustainable world, as a basis for new forms of accounting and accountability in contemporary society. Design/methodology/approach – The method is four-fold, weaving together an auto-ethnographic approach, a contextual dialogue between accounting academics and lobbyists, a Morris-inspired utopian metaphor and a stakeholder accountability event in the form of oral disclosures written as a song cycle. Findings – Current efforts at integrated reporting are unlikely to change how large companies do business in order to address the risk of climate change in the short term. If the UN reports on climate change are correct, the authors need to take immediate action. The authors argue that, instead of waiting for climatic disaster to lead to a paradigm shift in corporate practice, “monetisation” of the costs of climate change is one way to encourage integrated thinking and sustainable busines...

Urban revolution and Chinese contemporary art: A total revolution of the senses

Urban transformation in China has been hailed as a revolution. The pace and scale of change as well as the grand narrative of transformation have been characterized in terms of superlatives – the tallest skyscrapers, the largest shopping malls, the longest bridges and highways, the fastest trains – testifying to the teleology and progress of China’s dream of prosperity. However, behind the sleek and glittering façade lies a story of exclusion, violence, dispossession, and destruction – the ruins of a civilization. This article engages with this side of the story by exploring the dialectic between urban transformation and the parallel development of the visual arts, which has created new regimes of visibility and new hierarchies of representation. In new and large cities alike, the visual arts have been manifesting affections that permeate the contemporary world, creating new possibilities for ‘distributing the sensible’. This article focuses on the artworks produced by Zhang Dali, Dai Guangyu and Jin Feng, whose subject matter involves common people, and it engages with three crucial discursive formations: violence, socio-economic inequality, and utopian dreams. These artists are producing a ‘history from below’ (to borrow E. P. Thompson’s expression): rescuing the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. They are making ordinary people assume the importance of the extraordinary. From the point of view of aesthetics, they are enacting a total revolution of the senses and, in Rancière’s words, making ‘heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals’.

Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems

Freely Revised and Edited:Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems Dani Spinosa (bio) It might seem strange that in order to write about anarchism and authorship in the poetry of Jackson Mac Low, I write not about his early poems in which he pushes the limits of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, deterministic methods, and computer systems designed to produce diastic poems1 but, rather, about his often critically neglected poetic sequence, The Stein Poems, composed between 1998 and 2003, ending just a year before his death. Among some of the last poems he ever wrote, The Stein Poems serve as a kind of combination of a lifetime of experimentation with indeterminacy and chance. As he himself asserted in a cover letter sent [End Page 91] accompanying a submission of some of these poems for journal publication: “I returned to using a deterministic procedure in April 1998, when I began writing the poems in the Stein series, but now I always, to some extent, modify the results of the procedure, making personal decisions of different kinds. My writingways came together” (Thing of Beauty 376). In The Stein Poems, Mac Low returns to deterministic methods of writing, which he had more or less abandoned, only to adapt these chance-based procedures by making clear (and unapologetic) the moments in which his individual taste intervened in, or added on to, the deterministic process. In this article I argue that The Stein Poems bridge the gap between the anti-egoic poetics popularized throughout Mac Low’s career by the avantgarde (and especially by artists like John Cage, whom I will discuss further). Occupying a unique mediatory position, The Stein Poems showcase Mac Low’s anarchist poetics in that they produce texts that function not as utopian dreams or political tracts but, instead, as what Mac Low himself terms “analogies of free communities.” The poems encourage the reader to perform interventionary tactics in the production of meaning and to play a significant role in the meaning-making of the poems themselves. Ultimately, I use the unique position of The Stein Poems to argue that Mac Low’s anarchist poetics and politics are best understood not necessarily or exclusively in relation to aleatoric or nonintentional writing methods but primarily in relation to the role of the reader (who is thus performer and perceiver) in this quasi-intentional work. To do this I should first look to chance and the role of the ego in his work more generally and how his grappling with these issues led to the composition of The Stein Poems. It would seem from Mac Low’s publication history that his writings about and discussions of the chance-based work of John Cage is what sparked the decision to produce The Stein Poems in this fashion. Cage and Mac Low were friends and often colleagues, but it was not until after Cage’s death in 1992 that Mac Low started to write critically about his work. Published in Richard Kostelanetz’s Writings about John Cage (1993), Mac Low’s article “Something about the Writings of John Cage,” examined, specifically and critically, the role of taste and authorial intent in Cage’s chance-based work. He then revised and expanded the article as “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s” for inclusion in David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch’s Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art. At the same time, he was engaged in the composition of 154 Forties, poems written in a more traditional compositional method, incorporating an emphasis on prosody and caesural spaces. In 1998, between the two Cage articles, Mac Low, as he stated in the quotation above, “returned” to deterministic [End Page 92] methods, but it was under the caveat that he no longer pretended that this was not, ultimately, an egoic process. This decision was clearly triggered, at least in part, by Mac Low’s work on Cage, in which he rails against those who misinterpreted or misunderstood Cage as having refused or eliminated the presence of the ego and its concomitant authorial intent via indeterminacy. For Cage, Mac Low writes, “chance was always constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by...

Undeniable Forensic Evidence

What constitutes “evidence?” In exploring how queer studies may be equipped to respond to Ferguson and beyond, especially in light of the verdict to not indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, I want to leave the realm of the legal-juridical, knowing this system has a historic and continuing role in defining, facilitating, and perpetuating the lived realities of racism. I wish to conceive of other modes of evidence as prompted by the genealogy of speculative thought and utopian aspirations of queer theoretical scholarship. To do so, I revisit three trailblazers of (queer) critical race critique before I make a “sideways reading,” to riff on Siobhan Somerville’s tactic for unsettling the too-often segregated discussions of homophobia, sexism, and racism, to make a geographical move from Ferguson, Missouri, to Columbia, South Carolina, where I witnessed three separate but interlocking events in the lead-up to the decision on Michael Brown’s murder that demand to be counted as proof. In moving sideways across race, gender, and sexuality, and regionally from the Midwest to the South, I intend to continue the work of dislodging sexuality as the only privileged site of queer inquiry and to cast the events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, and Columbia, South Carolina, as synchronic, pertinent, and interconnected. In 1991 Julie Dash’s avant-garde film Daughters of the Dust introduced the “speculative fiction” of South Carolina as the turn-of-the century setting for queer Gullah counter-communities. For Dash, “speculative fiction” describes a narrative mode with the capacity to promote deeper, more complex, and yet truer understandings of black queer populations and their precarious position in North American cultures. I want to return to Dash’s term, to nod at the historic

The re-emergence of self-managed co-housing in Europe: A critical review of co-housing research

This article reviews a decade of co-housing studies and publications, to identify major themes and research gaps. Generally, co-housing is seen as a promising model for urban development, and most empirical case studies report active and diverse communities, creating and maintaining affordable living environments. However, numbers are small and there is as yet no quantitative evidence to substantiate the claims. Nevertheless, important lessons can be drawn from co-housing as an integrated practice to meet today’s societal and environmental challenges. Rather than its utopian ambitions, the frictions with current institutional frameworks point the way to transform these into more adequate agents of development.

The Color of Experience: Postwar Chromatic Abstraction in Venezuela and Brazil

In the aftermath of World War II, South American artists and critics saw color as a key to liberation from the crisis of the art object and the related crisis of modernity. In so doing, they resisted an entrenched postwar suspicion of color's expressive qualities that elsewhere resulted in color either being repositioned as readymade or purged outright. The essays comprising “Color and Abstraction in Latin America” investigate what was at stake in this resurgence, in 1950s and '60s South American abstraction, of color as a central problem of perceptual experience and subject construction. First, color was conceptualized in relation to material experience, as a corporealization (whether individual or collective) that relocates us as subjects. Second, color became the basis for a complex negotiation that laid claim to chromatic abstraction as a universal project through its localized articulation within the developmentalist contexts of postwar South America. Third, all of these artists and writers contextualized their aesthetic maneuvers in relation to Europe, positioning their work as a resuscitation of the historical avant-garde's utopian aspirations in the wake of the latter's failure in the aftermath of World War II. The essays collected here reassess the role of color in postwar art, to reconsider in light of the varied experiences of developmentalist South American nations what are by now familiar concerns regarding the effects of the commercialization of human imagination and memory, the pervasiveness of culture industry spectacle, and the corrosion of subjectivity imposed by industrial capital.