Utopian Possibilities Research Articles

Mining, Racialisation and the Utopia of Desedimentation in Pedro Castera's Geological Writings

This article examines the close interrelation between racialisation and mining in Pedro Castera's Las minas y los mineros (1882) and Los maduros (1882). Castera's writings critically render mining as a profit‐driven extractive practice that relies on the stratification of inorganic and organic matter across racial lines. Minerals and racialised bodies are conceptualised as inert matter endowed with valued properties in the service of resource extraction. Simultaneously, Castera's ‘El Tildío’ conjures the utopian possibility of destabilising the racial stratification that upholds extractive colonialism and its legacies in the nineteenth century.

헉슬리의 『멋진 신세계』에 나타난 여성 유토피아 비전과 철인 통치 국가론

This article examines the vision of gender utopia presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and explores its utopian possibilities in Mustapha’s World State, which is compared to the philosopher-ruled state in Plato’s Republic. The theme of utopia has been approached differently in liberalism and socialism: liberal utopia prioritizes individual freedom, while socialist utopia emphasizes egalitarian community. The World State in The Brave New World abolishes patriarchy with advanced scientific and technological civilization and depicts a gender utopia without female reproductive labor, emotional labor, and care labor, while the actual main woman characters such as Lenina and Linda suffer pain and death. Therefore, Huxley’s World State represents an ideal gender utopia, while the female characters are evaluated based on their appearance and live tragic lives due to excessive national norms enforcing order. On the other hand, Mustapha’s World State embodies some of the ideal state described in Plato’s Republic, and the two polities are similar in that they are class societies based on stability ruled by philosophers. However, the World State places too much emphasis on community stability, suppressing individual freedom, emphasizing sensual pleasure rather than spiritual happiness, Eudaimonia of Plato’s polity. Eventually, Huxley’s utopia has an ideal structure of gender equality, but the women living there are not so happy. Although it is excellent in terms of stability and efficiency as an ideal politeia ruled by a philosopher, it has limitations that its educational method is rather oppressive, only indulges in pleasure, then represents a failed gender utopia in the end.

Digital education utopia

ABSTRACT This paper uses Levitas’s (2013) ‘utopia as method’ as a way to approach the histories of digital education and its utopian possibilities. The themes of emergence, openness and desire are woven through the three modes of Levitas’s method. First, an archaeological analysis considers the relationship between digital education, lifelong learning and utopia in the political programmes of UNESCO, OECD and the UK government. Second, Levitas’s ‘utopia as ontology’ considers how critical digital education might help move us from the paradigm of the locked-down ‘data subject’ within a human capital model of education toward emergent and more-than-human ways of understanding. Third, the method’s architectural phase is used to explore how a future for digital education might be imagined through the themes of ecopedagogy, diversity of knowledge and the end of institutions. The paper argues that the new twenty-first century utopian imagination might help us to imagine and build better futures for digital education.

Accommodating Nutopia: The nuclear ban treaty and the developmental interests of Global South countries

Abstract This article argues that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) would not have been possible without protecting the inalienable rights of states to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. While some Western states and NGOs have pushed to ban all applications of nuclear technology, this was unacceptable to a large number of disarmament-supporting states from the Global South and the Non-Aligned Movement. Without support from states across the Global South, the TPNW would not have achieved the required number of signatories to be adopted. Thus, we argue that to properly understand the TPNW, an appreciation of states’ interests and motivations beyond their more widely discussed frustrations with the pace of nuclear disarmament is essential. We also argue that nuclear weapons scholarship must pay more attention to perspectives from the Global South and the concept of Nutopia – a belief in both the dystopian potential of nuclear weapons and the utopian possibilities of nuclear energy – in its understanding of nuclear politics, past and present. Global South perspectives are often overlooked, and as such, current regimes of nuclear arms control and disarmament remain only partially understood in Western literature.

Becoming-lithic: elemental utopian possibility in the contemporary ecocatastrophe

ABSTRACT This article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019), and the first season of the Icelandic TV series Katla (Netflix, June 2021) uncover an inhuman ecology whose vibrant, lively agency can be discerned within the geologic temporalities of deep time. Unlike their “Hollow Earth” precursors (a late nineteenth-century subgenre of the literary utopia), in which human protagonists ventured below the Earth’s surface to discover rich worlds of utopian alterity, these contemporary lithic texts revoke their characters’ human sovereignty in images of encroaching human-lithic intimacy: a process that I call becoming-lithic. In conveying the lively potentialities of geological processes such as the rock cycle, plate tectonics, continental drift, orogenesis and subduction, igneous activity, these lithic texts encourage readers and viewers to reconsider our relationship between the geosphere and the biosphere. I trace their emerging elemental aesthetics, asking how we might parse their inhuman moments of possibility and, in the process, undertake the urgent task of decolonising utopian studies.

Reaching for the Stars: The Zambian Space Programme and Alternative Imaginaries of Space Travel

Discourses of space travel have long been acknowledged as imbricated in the logic and language of colonial expansionism. Despite the dangerous uses to which romantic framings of these have historically been put, there is nonetheless a lingeringly aspirational quality to imaginaries of space travel whose emancipatory potential exists in strange tension with its discursive complicity in coloniality. A related tension reverberates in newer revisionings of postcolonial science or speculative fiction that point to the utopian possibilities of imagining otherwise, in the face of traditional science fiction’s embeddedness in colonial discourses of science and progress. In this essay, I explore this tension by way of an engagement with some lesser-known perspectives on and interventions in the Cold War space race. This entails an analysis of the Zambian space programme as refracted in a number of texts: A. K. Chesterton’s The New Unhappy Lords, Edward Nkoloso’s article, “We’re Going to Mars! With a Spacegirl, Two Cats and a Missionary”, Frances Bodomo’s short film Afronauts, and Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift. I propose that irony, satire, and the theatricality of space travel have provided entry points for the critiques of inequality and oppression manifested here, and argue that this has been used to undercut coloniality and white supremacy, albeit in very different, and often disjunctive and profoundly ambivalent ways. Though at times confounding, this ambivalence warrants nuanced exploration as it reveals both overlapping and incongruent strategies for resistance, and serves to contextualize appropriations, aspirations, and imaginaries of space travel today.

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel: Synthetic Realism by Charlotte Jones

Reviewed by: Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel: Synthetic Realism by Charlotte Jones Adam Grener Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel: Synthetic Realism. By Charlotte Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. xxvi+ 303 pp. £75. ISBN 978-0-19-885792-1. Charlotte Jones's book makes a rich contribution to a revivified critical discourse around literary realism by examining the philosophical import and aesthetic ambitions of an undertheorized period of the British novel. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel explores how key figures at the start of the twentieth century—Joseph Conrad, May Sinclair, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Ford—negotiate the competing demands of particularity and totality [End Page 130] that define the poles of realist representation. The subtitle, 'Synthetic Realism', names these writers' attempts to probe the ineffable metaphysical underpinnings of reality through a patterning and organization of the empirical. This term—and the book's methodology—draws on the conflicting philosophical meanings of 'realism': whereas realism was long tied to Platonic notions of universal but non-substantial forms, during the eighteenth century it came to denote a material world independent of but known through perception. While theories of realism are often oriented by questions of empiricism, referentiality, or mimetic fidelity, 'synthetic realism' turns our attention to the metaphysical dimensions of realist practice. Jones does not wish to limit synthetic realism as a mode of knowing to a defined period or historical situation, but her Introduction does explain why Edwardian writers were particularly preoccupied with using language to grasp the unrepresentable. In addition to inheriting a realist tradition that had become characterized by naturalism's analytical dissection of material reality, these writers were also responding to an environment of renewed scientific and philosophical interest in the invisible that was generated by (among other things) the discovery of radioactivity, the birth of quantum physics, and the flourishing of mysticism and occultism. Some of these writers actively engaged with contemporary philosophical developments and responded to them in their reflections on narrative technique. Chapter 2, for example, reads Sinclair's Divine Fire (1904) and The Creators (1910) against the neo-Hegelian idealism of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley to show how Sinclair's representation of empirical reality moves towards the linguistic realization of an unconscious unity that structures experience. Writing about the ineffable is not for the timid, and Jones is aware of sometimes straying into 'overwhelmingly abstract philosophical discussion' (p. 9). When these discussions do arise, however, they are usually conducted with an inviting clarity, and readers who might feel uneasy in this philosophical territory should still come to understand why it matters to realism. The most generative insights of the book are tied to its sustained attention to the dynamics of 'narrative movement' (p. 121) and 'internal textual processes' (p. 189). Realism is not simply about the relationship between the particulars of the world and the language that represents them, but about how representation organizes those particulars and—as these chapters show—the process of that organization. The first chapter, for example, illustrates how Conrad's language generates chains of metonymic association that move towards universal truths before interrupting the processes of allegorization and symbolization, while the third chapter argues that the dense accumulations of detail in Bennett's pre-war novels create patterns that cannot directly represent the order that subtends experience but can constitute that 'order occurring' in the temporality of narrative form (p. 154). Through readings of key novels such as Nostromo (1904) and The Good Soldier (1915), Jones addresses the philosophical significance of important aspects of realist representation, from metonymy and free indirect discourse to questions of genre and convention. The fourth chapter's account of the generic instability of Tono-Bungay (1909), for example, argues that Wells's realism aims to capture the [End Page 131] conditions of society but also to extend the temporal horizon of the present into an undetermined future where latent utopian possibilities might performatively emerge. As the final chapter unpacks the philosophical grounds of Ford's literary impressionism, it highlights the value of synthetic realism for both theorizing the realist aesthetics of the Edwardian novel and...

Cool Nature

In this essay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers sets out to address the period 1780–1840 in Sweden in a new way, by placing nature at its centre. With the help of ecocritical and transcultural theory, combined with renewed attention to the Swedish fine arts, learned discourses, and practices, we suggest a new approach to these revolutionary decades. The perceived dissonance, the interplay between climatic conditions and cultural template in early modern and modern Sweden, has not been fully addressed in current research, despite the fact that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a central issue in contemporary society and scholarship. Representations of nature situate the nation, they negotiate the relationship between a sensed reality and an ideal, between human and more-than-human beings. We suggest a focus on the unpredictable space created by negotiations of nature in Swedish representations during this crucial period, and, furthermore, on the ways in which this creative space is charged with utopian possibilities in the early Anthropocene. This is the background and the driving force of the planned research project ‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’.

Ребенок и детский опыт в работах Ролана Барта

This essay explores the ways Roland Barthes approached the figure of a child in his writings, from “Mythologies” to late autobiographical works. Throughout his career childhood appears to be a constant motive and a topic of Barthes’s reflection. He frequently associated children’s play or language with the dimension of immediacy, a utopian possibility of unity with the world as such and freedom from the symbolic violence of ideology. Barthes also acknowledged a crucial existential importance of childhood experience, showing how it structures later experiences such as love and writing.

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

‘Homelessness is a queer experience.’: utopianism and mutual aid as survival strategies for homeless trans people

Trans people are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, yet services poorly meet their needs. I explore how community support, anchored in queer praxis and concrete utopian thinking enables trans people to survive homelessness. Drawing upon interviews with 35 trans people who have recently experienced homelessness in Wales, I explore how queer practices of mutual aid, contextualized by utopian possibility, engender community support for trans people experiencing homelessness. I argue that trans and queer communities provide extensive, often exhausting, practical, material and emotional support which counters well-established queer exclusion within statutory services. I show that community support is critical to the survival of homeless trans people within a complex and unwelcoming system, and that informal crisis alternatives are enabled by idealism, hope and pragmatism. These findings are important in visibilising how shared precarity produces practices of care, in offering strategies to address inequitable service failures, and in demonstrating the relevance of queer theoretical approaches to housing justice.

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

Ah Bartleby! Study, learning, and pedagogy in Occupy Wall Street

On October 26, 2011, a post appeared on the Occupy Wall Street Library blog titled “I would prefer not to.” The constant refrain of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener became one of Occupy’s defining mottos, appearing on placards, T-shirts, and tote bags. The phrase became so symbolic that it was used on the posters promoting the general strike called for May 2012. Bartleby’s mode of passive resistance has been theorized extensively. His appropriation by OWS has been the source of much theorizing too. What I want to do in this paper is use Bartleby as a useful analogy for exploring the educational logic of Occupy Wall Street. While some read a dangerous and threatening “Bartlebyan inscrutability” into OWS’s various refusals (the refusal to issue demands, to address questions of political ontology, to specify conditions of success), I argue instead that the performativity of Bartleby’s refusal helps cast light on the need for pedagogical intervention in moments and movements of utopian rupture. The very indeterminacy of study as a mode of educational being within OWS—of “preferring not to” actualize potential, adopt a political subjectivity, elucidate any determinate ends—created a vacuum that precluded the movement from learning from itself. The oscillating state of permanent suspension, in which the utopian possibilities contained within the movement were held im-potential, led to paralysis and neglect. In contrast to the “weak” utopianism ascribed to OWS by Tyson Lewis, I conclude the paper by calling for a “strong” utopianism conceived as a collective endeavor and iterative process but one within which pedagogical organization plays a crucial facilitating role.

Belief in Hopeless Times: The Once and Future Lesbian in Putin's Russia and Beyond

Abstract In this article, written 2 1/2 years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I consider how lesbians and other queer women created lives in what was an increasingly totalitarian regime. Borrowing from Black queer feminist Afro-futurism, I try to open up space for survival in un-survivable conditions without in anyway suggesting that anti-Blackness and the anti-queer regime of Vladimir Putin are the same. In order to figure out how the tools of Afro-futurism can be applied to the homo-pessimism of Russia, I begin with the death of the lesbian as a utopian figure in the US and trace her rebirth in Putin's Russia. Then I turn to an LGBTQ magazine as well as five interviews with lesbian and queer women in Russia. By insisting on the utopian possibility of creating lesbian existence when such existence is denied, both the journal and the women managed to create some breathing room in a very anti-queer, anti-feminist and patriarchal state and society.

The Potentiality of Brown

The Potentiality of Brown Ariana Ruíz (bio) A Review of The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper. In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz proposes a strategy of critical hope that is actively practiced in response to a "here and now" that is not enough, especially for minoritarian subjects.1 Muñoz draws on this concept from the work on concrete utopia by Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to describe a type of hope that is indeterminate, anticipatory, and revolutionary. It is what Muñoz would later describe as "not announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining the way things could be."2 The practice and potentiality of critical hope (also referred to as "educated desire") underpins many of Muñoz's theoretical projects, including his final work, The Sense of Brown (2020). Published seven years after the untimely passing of the distinguished scholar of performance studies, queer theory, and Latinx studies, José Esteban Muñoz's The Sense of Brown delves into a theorization of "Brownness" and "Brown commons" that is driven by this type of utopian hope. That is, he explores a desire to know Brownness and what a Brown commons could be. While Muñoz does not explicitly engage Bloch here as fully as in Cruising Utopia, the two nevertheless continue to be linked in thought and theory. As the editors of The Sense of Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o tell us, the manuscript was produced concurrently [End Page 211] with Cruising Utopia. In fact, Muñoz had already started to develop and present on this project before the publication of his first book, Disidentifications (1999).3 With Muñoz's passing, Chambers-Letson and Nyong'o were tasked in finalizing a draft still in development that drew from about fifteen years of Muñoz's writing. Many of the chapters included in The Sense of Brown are revised and sometimes expanded versions of previously published journal articles and chapters in edited collections. And while the editors did not omit any of the chapters from Muñoz's draft and kept his initial sequence, they did add six chapters not originally included to help frame the narrative. The result is a manuscript made up of thirteen chapters organized in two parts. The first section of the book focuses on affect and Brown feelings, whereas the second section explores the concept of Brown commons. Given the strong connection among Muñoz's scholarship, those familiar with his earlier work will recognize many of the scholars he engages here, including (among others) Raymond Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Norma Alarcón, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This theoretical range—from performance studies and postcolonial theory to ethnic studies and continental philosophy—provides Muñoz the foundation from which to consider the relationship between affect and U.S. ethnoracialization of minoritarian subjects that runs throughout. Taken together with his earlier writing, what sets this project apart is the substantial attention to the field of Latinx studies by way of Brownness. The Brownness that Muñoz posits is of the present moment and, further, urges readers to not only recognize but also act on its utopian possibilities. The question then is, what is Brownness? Indeed, Brown takes many forms in Muñoz's analysis by way of Brownness, Brown feelings, sense of Brown, Brown commons, and Brown worldings. Each of the proposed variations work to describe a sense of belonging among subjects deemed at odds with normative national affect. In other words, building from the work of May Joseph, Muñoz maintains that the United States has established unofficial affective norms that are impressed in everyday performances of (White) citizenship. The failure of subjects to correctly perform these standards marks them as Brown. This is perhaps best illustrated and complicated in the fifth chapter of Muñoz's monograph titled, "'Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?' The Transmission of Brownness." The question, derived from W. E. B. Du Bois, addresses the way subjects can affectively recognize they are seen as problematic. Muñoz...

Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Review: Verde, by Federico Rios Escobar

Review: <i>Verde</i>, by Federico Rios Escobar

Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.

Urban Apocalypse, Global Precarity, and Uncanny Liminality in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance

ABSTRACT This paper will examine the representation of zombie apocalypse in Zone One (2011) by Colson Whitehead and Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. Whitehead and Ma both situate their narratives in New York City, a contested setting oscillating between utopian possibilities of progress and dystopian realities of alienation. The novels reveal the zombifying impact of capitalism that permeates local and global networks of exploitation, and perpetuates what Judith Butler identifies as precariousness and precarity of life. The representation of New York as a metonymic urban space, which displays the arrested development of global capitalism through a zombie apocalypse, renders Zone One and Severance critically relevant today. Whitehead and Ma articulate the catastrophic consequences of uneven development as well as the reader’s ontological proximity to the liminal category of zombies. I argue that the authors’ narrative choice of total collapse over survival in and of New York, albeit the discursive privilege of urban growth, is a powerful gesture of “creative destruction” toward unsettling, if not breaking, the detrimental cycles of capitalist repetition. Whitehead and Ma reflect the anxiety of the contemporary moment by subverting problematic assumptions about cityscapes and civilization with their innovative combination of urban fiction, zombie tropes, and apocalyptic discourse.

Military buzz: race, robots and insects

ABSTRACT Claiming to “let evolution do the thinking for you,” biologists are teaming up with roboticists and computer engineers in the emerging field of biomimetics to build animal-machines. One of the outcomes of these interdisciplinary collaborations is the development of biomimetic robot-insects: robots inspired by insect life. Biomimetic scientists assert that their technologies will be cleaner, greener, and more holistic, since they imitate Mother Earth’s own capabilities, including for waging war. For example, biomimetic scientists regularly cite the examples of Velcro – a technology inspired by the ways that burrs attach to the fur on a dog’s back – or solar panels – which are inspired by the way that leaves convert sunlight into energy. The specific focus of this article is on biomimetic insect-robot technologies; specifically the development of robots that imitate swarming behavior. Grounding the rise of these swarming technologies in a cultural context preoccupied with an increase in militarization, I show that although biomimetic scientists often claim that these technologies will be more environmentally friendly, in fact they rely upon reified assumptions about “Nature,” on the commodification of Indigenous knowledges, and on racist metaphors of terrorists as “swarms” as part of their technological development. Examining a specific swarm of insect-robots known as nano quadrotors, I demonstrate that the imitation of Mother Earth does not reflect the natural world as it is but instead works to shape that world, and, in doing so, I problematize the utopian possibilities suggested for biomimetic swarming technologies.