Utopian Vision Research Articles

Hidden Archives, Closeted Desires, Postponed Utopias

How do queer intellectuals produce dramatic texts for utopian archival projects? How do (once) hidden theatre practices exist in a complicated relationship with the claims about covert or clandestine performances in the messy afterlives of such unorthodox archives? This essay explores such processes and how they unfolded in the context of Turkish opera by focusing on the work of Rıza Nur (1879-1942). Rıza Nur was a queer Turkish politician who created an archive of resistance to propagate his ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian vision for Turkey’s future during the country’s formative years. In addition to his proposed programs for Turkey’s revivification and the establishment of an ultra-nationalist party, the archive also included Nur’s memoirs, essays, poetry, and two of his librettos. Nur trusted this archive to multiple European libraries on the condition that it would not be accessible until 1960. Nur’s desire was that once his archive would become public, it would transform Turkish people’s understanding of the past, make them recognize him as an unappreciated true leader, and adopt his utopian vision. Rıza Nur’s librettos demonstrate how operatic writing can function as an undercover strategy of queer self-making. The librettos reveal how archives function not only as repositories but also as sites of production, and how dramatic texts can gain queer dimensions and political significance in relation to other texts. Archives can thus provide crucial insights into discrete theatre practices and create important opportunities to review and revise performance historiographies. Nevertheless, the limited scholarly attention Nur’s librettos have received suggests how disciplinary and methodological conventions may render dramatic texts invisible even when they are in plain sight. Finally, Nur’s ultra-nationalist and eugenicist utopian archive challenges the tendency to associate queer utopian performance with progressive politics.

Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds: A Forgotten 19th-century Japanese Political Scientific Novel with a Radical Message

ABSTRACT In 1882 Nukina Shunichi, a heretofore unknown ex-samurai from Hikone-fief, published his debut novel Voyage to Innumerable Star Worlds. The novel fits within the theoretical narrative according to which, following exposure to Western literature, early science fiction budded within political novels in Meiji-era Japan. Like other political works with science fiction elements from that era, this novel demonstrates negotiations between traditional literary tools and imported styles, content and themes. It is, however, remarkable from a thematic point of view. Nukina presents a critical futuristic vision of industrial progress, which is intertwined with his broader political message that describes the loss of social equality and liberty during the civilising process and ends with a utopian vision of anarchy. It is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pro-anarchism declarations written in Japan. By combining biographical research and textual analysis that are contextualised within literary and historical settings, this novel is a case study of the nuanced local reworking of cross-cultural flows during a period characterised by the influx of new tools and ideas. Moreover, it enables a glimpse into the active political lives of the anonymous Meiji ex-samurai, and into the wide range of their political deliberations.

Youth solving pandemics: hopeful futures in Maths Claesson\u2019s novel Pandemic

Are representations of pandemics in fiction always bleak dystopian tales understood as nature’s revenge on the modern Faustian man, or could they also express hope and expand our imagination in a time of environmental crisis? In this article, we analyse the young adult novel Pandemic (Swedish title: Pandemi, 2018) by Swedish author Maths Claesson. Pandemic is the third novel in a trilogy (2013–2018) with 15-year-old astronaut-trainee Linux as the main protagonist. During his astronaut program on a space station, a pandemic breaks out on Earth. While scientists on Earth struggle to isolate the virus and find a vaccine, Linux and his fellow astronaut-trainees are asked by the WHO to try out a simulation, a computer game aimed at isolating a pandemic outbreak and finding a vaccine. Their simulation is successful and eventually becomes decisive for the solution of the current pandemic crisis on Earth. Departing from Critical Future Studies (Goode and Godhe, Cult Unbound J Curr Cul Res 9(1):108–129, 2017), we focus on the figures of hope (cf. Moylan, Demand the impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination, Methuen, pp. 1–2, 1986) for a sustainable future and analyse how the novel is widening the scopes of possible futures. We show how the computer simulation and the successful solution of the crisis serves as a vehicle for a broader discussion about what kind of future we want, a future where the conquest of space offers new opportunities, e.g. for solving the environmental crisis. While normally in Y/A speculative fiction, technology is almost exclusively depicted as ostensibly serving human needs, in Pandemic it is thanks to technology, and the younger generation’s particular skills, that the disease is conquered. In this sense, the novel is hopeful since it depicts the younger generation as being capable of developing different thinking patterns from those of the adult society.

Zones of Eden: Utopian Fragments in Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod and E. P. Thompson’s The Sykaos Papers

Abstract The article offers a comparative account of Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod and E. P. Thompson’s The Sykaos Papers and examines their depiction of social and political realities during the late twentieth century, the meeting of socialist and ecological concerns in their fictional world, as well as their allegiance to William Morris’s utopian vision. The article also aims to place Williams’s and Thompson’s fiction in an often-neglected thread of the modern utopian tradition, which tends to combine utopian and dystopian elements.

Utopian Imagination in Ancient Iran: The Nostalgia of a Lost Paradise

Abstract Various manifestations of utopia, aspiring or conservative, idyllic or oppressive, credible or far-fetched, have long been elaborated in classics of literature, philosophy, and political theory. Nevertheless, utopian imagination has a tendency to transcend the boundaries of classic texts and debates. Presenting an account of an oriental utopia lost in history, this article revisits utopian imagination in ancient Iran. In particular, it discusses the construction of the utopian city of Varjamkard under Jamshid, one of the most popular Shahs or kings in Persian mythology. A paradise hidden from the world’s eyes, Varjamkard was built to protect people from the dire winter that was the manifestation of evil on earth; but then this earthly paradise was lost because of Jamshid’s disregard for a divine law. This paper aims to unearth an ancient utopian tradition, taking the concept of utopia to the less explored realms in history and times.

Being Human: Androids, Humans, and Identity in “Red Dwarf”

One of the more popular transhumanist ideas is the belief that technology will allow for the transfer of human personality into a machine or cyborg body. Additionally, some transhumanists believe that this transfer could happen with few to no problems, and that such a transfer would result in a definite improvement of the human species. The episode “DNA” from the humorous British science-fiction television series Red Dwarf presents a story that challenges this idea of the easy transfer of personality. The story of the android who gets his wish to become human allows the writers to invert the common belief in Western thought that being human is inherently better than being an imitation of a human, and that technologically upgrading human bodies will produce “better” humans. By inversion, the program presents the idea that clearer and more ethical thinking is needed regarding technological enhancement, and not the utopian visions of many transhumanists.

The imaginary of a modern city: Post-politics and Myanmar’s urban development

Theories of ‘post-politics’ provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this ‘age of post-politics’ are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the future of the project uncertain, our research conducted in 2019 revealed similar dynamics at play to those described more broadly in the literature on post-politics. We highlight familiar processes of delegation of decision-making, a proliferation of governance actors and an individualisation of policy issues. What is distinctive in Myanmar is the way a coalition of elite decision-makers have diluted and defused policy disagreements through the construction of a utopian vision of a modern international city. We see this imaginary of the modern city as a tactic to support the broader efforts of depoliticisation. This diverges from arguments that the imagination of social change is curtailed through the pragmatic post-political notion that ‘there is no alternative’. Instead, in the context of New Yangon City, utopian vision is integral to depoliticisation and limiting dissent. We conclude that attention to processes of depoliticisation is crucial in relation to mega project planning in Asia, and that a productive way forward for studies of urban development is not wholesale acceptance or dismissal of the notion of post-politics, but robust engagement with its critiques and promise.

How might Indigenous decolonization agendas inform Anthropocene historiography?

ABSTRACT Many Indigenous and post-development commentators view the hegemony of western conceptions of ‘development’ as profoundly implicated in the Anthropocene’s global ecological crises and underpinned by modernity’s extractivist and anthropocentric worldview and sensibilities. Meanwhile, as Kothari et al. note, secular modernity’s defenders persist in the presumption that modern science affords the definitive account of nature and reality, while the worldviews of Indigenous peoples are frequently delegitimised as unsophisticated or mere superstition. Accordingly, many Indigenous critics call for today’s Indigenous movements globally to challenge the dominance of western ‘heteropatriarchal’ styles of thinking. They suggest modernity needs to learn from Indigenous movements and traditions, not least for insights into ethical relationality with the animate Earth. Likewise, Arturo Escobar insists that contemporary academic ‘theory’ needs re-enlivening: bringing it closer to life and the Earth and to the work of those who struggle to defend them. This paper asks how Indigenous decolonization agendas, which struggle in defense of life and the Earth, might inform historiography in the Anthropocene. For example, Beverley Southgate has suggested that history has a utopian and therapeutic purpose – helping us escape the thrall of the past and orientate ourselves towards emancipatory futures. This paper suggests – in an era of ecological emergency – that history’s utopian imaginaries will need to be commensurate with that vivid experience of sensed ethical reciprocity with nature, to which indigenous traditional ecological knowledges (ITEK) bear witness. Some western historians question whether a coherent story for humanity is possible, given how systems thinking suggests global feedback and radical uncertainty condition our future. However, systems thinking also highlights the hierarchical nature of human-ecological systems and suggests that the deepest level for intervening in any human-ecological system is at the level of a society’s ‘mental models’ and ‘worldview’. This is the level at which interventions have the greatest leverage for radical system transformation and is the level that this essay focuses upon.

Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State

Published as part of the book series Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, Maxim Shadurski’s monograph The Nationality of Utopia: H. G. Wells, England, and the World State meets two major challenges. Firstly, this book offers original insights despite the density of scholarly works already devoted to Wells and utopia. The author’s focus is on two seemingly paradoxical notions which inform Wells’s vision of utopia, Englishness and universalism, which Shadurski redefines as complem...

Pyongyang Modern: Architecture of Multiplicity in Postwar North Korea

Abstract This article explores North Korea’s postwar reconstruction through the variegated features of architectural development in Pyongyang. The rebirth of Pyongyang as the center of both state authority and work culture is distinctly represented by architecture. In this setting, architecture as theory and practice was divided into two contiguous and interconnected types: monumental structures symbolizing the utopian vision of the state and vernacular structures instrumental to the regime of production in which the apartment was an exemplary form. The author makes three claims: first, Pyongyang’s monumental and vernacular architectural forms each embody both utopian and utilitarian features; second, the multiplicity of meaning exhibited in each architectural form is connected to the transnational process of bureaucratic expansion and industrial developmentalism; and third, North Korea’s postwar architectural history is a lens through which state socialism of the twentieth century can be better understood—not as an exceptional moment but as a constituent of globalized modernity, a historical formation dependent on the collusive expansion of state power and industrial capitalism. A substantial part of this article is a discussion of the methods and sources relevant to writing an architectural history of North Korea.

Between the utopian imaginaries of literature and international law: The question of the insurgent child in international legal discourse and Kris Montañez’s Youth

AbstractThis article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.

Aesthetics Naturalised: Schlick on the Evolution of Beauty and Art

Abstract In his earliest philosophical work, Moritz Schlick developed a proposal for rendering aesthetics into a field of empirical science. His 1908 book Lebensweisheit developed an evolutionary account of the emergence of both scientific knowledge and aesthetic feelings from play. This constitutes the framework of Schlick’s evolutionary psychological methodology for examining the origins of the aesthetic feeling of the beautiful he proposed in 1909. He defends his methodology by objecting to both experimental psychological and Darwinian reductionist accounts of aesthetics. Having countered these approaches, Schlick applies Külpe’s psychological distinction between stimulus-feelings and idea-feelings to collapse the traditional philosophical opposition between the agreeable and the beautiful. Both types of feeling, Schlick argues, result from humans’ adaptation to their environment. Because of this adaptation, feelings that were once only stimuli for action can come to be enjoyed for their own sake. This thesis underlies Schlick’s 1908 argument that art, qua mimesis, is necessarily inferior to aesthetic feelings directed towards the environment. Part of Schlick’s justification for this view is that humans are, through a long evolutionary process, better adapted to their environment than to artworks. Schlick nevertheless concedes that mimetic art can involve ways of abstracting from the objects it copies to produce idealised regularities that are not found in the original. Schlick thus concludes that art teaches its audience how to perceive the world in this abstract and idealised manner. This type of environmental aesthetics constitutes a means for reaching Schlick’s utopian ecological vision of a future in which culture will become harmonised with nature.

A Data Standard for Dynamic Collection Descriptions

The utopian vision is of a future where a digital representation of each object in our collections is accessible through the internet and sustainably linked to other digital resources. This is a long term goal however, and in the meantime there is an urgent need to share data about our collections at a higher level with a range of stakeholders (Woodburn et al. 2020). To sustainably achieve this, and to aggregate this information across all natural science collections, the data need to be standardised (Johnston and Robinson 2002). To this end, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) Collection Descriptions (CD) Interest Group has developed a data standard for describing collections, which is approaching formal review for ratification as a new TDWG standard. It proposes 20 classes (Suppl. material 1) and over 100 properties that can be used to describe, categorise, quantify, link and track digital representations of natural science collections, from high-level approximations to detailed breakdowns depending on the purpose of a particular implementation. The wide range of use cases identified for representing collection description data means that a flexible approach to the standard and the underlying modelling concepts is essential. These are centered around the ‘ObjectGroup’ (Fig. 1), a class that may represent any group (of any size) of physical collection objects, which have one or more common characteristics. This generic definition of the ‘collection’ in ‘collection descriptions’ is an important factor in making the standard flexible enough to support the breadth of use cases. For any use case or implementation, only a subset of classes and properties within the standard are likely to be relevant. In some cases, this subset may have little overlap with those selected for other use cases. This additional need for flexibility means that very few classes and properties, representing the core concepts, are proposed to be mandatory. Metrics, facts and narratives are represented in a normalised structure using an extended MeasurementOrFact class, so that these can be user-defined rather than constrained to a set identified by the standard. Finally, rather than a rigid underlying data model as part of the normative standard, documentation will be developed to provide guidance on how the classes in the standard may be related and quantified according to relational, dimensional and graph-like models. So, in summary, the standard has, by design, been made flexible enough to be used in a number of different ways. The corresponding risk is that it could be used in ways that may not deliver what is needed in terms of outputs, manageability and interoperability with other resources of collection-level or object-level data. To mitigate this, it is key for any new implementer of the standard to establish how it should be used in that particular instance, and define any necessary constraints within the wider scope of the standard and model. This is the concept of the ‘collection description scheme,’ a profile that defines elements such as: which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. which classes and properties should be included, which should be mandatory, and which should be repeatable; which controlled vocabularies and hierarchies should be used to make the data interoperable; how the collections should be broken down into individual ObjectGroups and interlinked, and how the various classes should be related to each other. Various factors might influence these decisions, including the types of information that are relevant to the use case, whether quantitative metrics need to be captured and aggregated across collection descriptions, and how many resources can be dedicated to amassing and maintaining the data. This process has particular relevance to the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) consortium, the design of which incorporates use cases for storing, interlinking and reporting on the collections of its member institutions. These include helping users of the European Loans and Visits System (ELViS) (Islam 2020) to discover specimens for physical and digital loans by providing descriptions and breakdowns of the collections of holding institutions, and monitoring digitisation progress across European collections through a dynamic Collections Digitisation Dashboard. In addition, DiSSCo will be part of a global collections data ecosystem requiring interoperation with other infrastructures such as the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) Registry of Scientific Collections, the CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities) Registry of Collections and Index Herbariorum. In this presentation, we will introduce the draft standard and discuss the process of defining new collection description schemes using the standard and data model, and focus on DiSSCo requirements as examples of real-world collection descriptions use cases.

Review: Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Review: <i>Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media</i>, by Claudia Costa Pederson

David Byrne and the Utopian Imagination

David Byrne and the Utopian Imagination

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

Abstract The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

World

World

‘Utopia’ failed? Social enterprise, everyday practices and the closure of neoliberalism

In the context of recurrent economic crises, ‘alternative’ models of economic organising such as social enterprise offer compelling examples of utopian imageries of a better future ‘to come’. Social enterprise qua utopia implies not only that alternative ways of being and co-existence are desirable, but that there is often a disjuncture between the desirable futures such utopian imaginaries project and the extent to which they are actualised or even actualisable in practice. The UK, which has long been considered the most conducive environment for social enterprise activity, offers a fertile ground to study this tension between utopian imagination and empirical actualization. Drawing from three large-scale research projects focusing on the social economy in Scotland and the North of England, this paper explores the link between social enterprise as a political program and as lived material practices unfolding under conditions of extreme resource scarcity caused by austerity measures. Our findings reveal that whatever utopian impulse social enterprise might contain, it is constituted, in the last instance, in the movement between ideas and everyday life, i.e. the aggregate of mundane practices, routines and experiences. Attentiveness to the precariousness instigated through austerity measures, such as social budget cuts, the key contribution this paper makes is to jettison approaches that treat social enterprise as a context-independent and totalizing ideal that divorces its utopian potential from the everyday practices through which this potential is being realized.

Class antagonism and the limits of utopia in Matthew Lewis and Robert Owen

The distinctive mark of the utopian imagination, as first outlined by Thomas More in 1516, is perhaps not so much its negative spatial quality, its self-presentation as a non-place or ou-topos, for...

On Utopus’ uterus: The colonisation of the body and the birth of patriarchal utopia in Thomas More’s Utopia

Following European exploration of the Atlantic, origin myths could now be projected onto a possible future and ‘undiscovered’ lands. Often the island proved the most suitable design for these projections to ensure the ‘perfection’ of the community and avoidance of corruptive external influences. These novel conceptualisations envisaged new social constructs to explain human nature, however, they continued to be overtly patriarchal. Gender essentialism and colonisation of the female body was an integral part of reproducing traditional utopian imaginings. Thomas More’s Utopia exemplifies this archetypal gendered conceptualisation of the ideal island society where female education serves to reinforce patriarchal structures and women are essentialised in terms of their fertility. This paper addresses the relationship between the geography of Utopia and the insularity and confinement of women as dominated ‘matrixial entities’ which is further reinforced by utopian cartography. In this context, I assert that the process of colonisation and islanding unsettles the immutability of these patriarchal constructs and exposes the dystopian origins of Utopia.