Utopian Studies Research Articles

Family in the Woods

Captain Fantastic, an independent drama written and directed by Matt Ross in 2016, and starring Viggo Mortensen, addresses several themes that are central to utopian studies: the viability of an intentional community removed from mainstream civilization, the possibility of living in harmony with nature, as well as the ambition to inculcate alternative cultural values by a radical educational program. The main character, Ben Cash, decided to raise his entire family of 6 kids in the dense forests of Washington state. While training them to survive under extreme circumstances in the wilderness, he also undertakes their entire education, encouraging individual thinking and a strongly critical attitude to mainstream American society and culture. The sudden suicide of his wife forces Ben to return to ‘normal America’, confronting him with both the consequences of his parental decisions and his potential responsibility in his wife’s death. The essay interprets the movie in the context of the American utopian tradition, particularly its individualist variety exemplified by the myth of the American Adam and the ideas of Thoreau's Walden (1854). Captain Fantastic fulfils a crucial generic criterion by skillfully satirizing some of the characteristic features and attitudes of mainstream American culture through the eyes of the children who experience it for the first time, subjecting the conventional ‘American utopia’ to a trenchant criticism. At the same time, it also questions the possibility of radical alterity: can a single family defy society by re-enacting a mythical American pattern and abandoning civilization to raise their kids in the woods? Do parents have the right to experiment on their children after their utopian hopes of opposing American capitalist society have been dashed? The clash of utopias is ultimately resolved by Ben's decision to admit his responsibility for his wife's mental illness and death and to give up the backwoods utopia and settle on a farm, conforming to another fundamental American symbol: the pastoral ideal of the garden.

Vernacular utopia

ABSTRACT This article engages with utopian studies as an interdisciplinary field, scrutinizing the contested, yet prevailing bifurcated conceptualization of ‘utopia’ as either an ideal or praxis. Drawing upon Leonard N. Primiano’s notion of ‘vernacular religion’ as a comprehensive approach for overcoming epistemologically problematic models in theorizing religion, I propose the concept of vernacular utopia as a methodological tool for the comparative study of utopian worldmaking beyond conceptual binaries, such as blueprint versus practice, or religious versus secular. My case example is New Harmony, one of the most famous 19th-century emigrant settlements in the US, where pietists and early socialists encountered and implemented their respective blueprints at the same geographical locale. Focusing on the historiographical roots of Primiano’s concept, my objective is to substantiate the vernacular perspective within historical methodology by illustrating how the approach fosters alternative perspectives on source materials and integrates new sources into the historical study of religion.

Development as Utopia? Road to a Better Future Between Fiction and Lived Utopian Practice

ABSTRACT Development as presented in the MDGs/SDGs is a well-planned step-by-step enterprise. If we dig deeper into the development debate, it is clear that the dilemma of eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable development is still unsolved, despite all efforts. Thus, development seems to be fictional in the sense of an unreachable utopia. Against this background, it is helpful to connect the development debate with utopian studies. We learn from utopian studies that there are not only fictional utopias as a vision of a just world, which may never be realised. There are also lived utopias that unpack alternative approaches to overcoming inequality or meeting ecological challenges, and which can be realised at least within a limited space. This applies to concepts from in the Global South, such as swaraj, buen vivir and ubuntu, or ecovillages and solidarity economies that present themselves as models for alternative development. As lived utopias, they follow future practice in a defined area in which the desired future becomes part of the present. These concepts are new models in the critical development debate. They are particularly successful in communities that share a common vision and common values. At the same time, there are doubts whether these models may be realised at the national or global. With regard to the fictional character of development goals, it is obvious that we still lack a feasible global strategy with a vision for the future that is attractive enough to gain global support and that can really be accomplished.

Acting as if: the utopian political thought and actions of the US disability rights movement

This article studies the response of the US disability community to the prevalent assumption that disabled people do not have a future, in the form of the disability rights movement. It provides an exploratory discussion of the key role played by utopianism in the response. In doing so, the article adds to critical theorizing on the importance of utopia to the oppression of non-dominant groups and to transcending that oppression. I use utopian studies scholarship to interpret the activities leading up to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 as a minor utopia, characterized by an ambiguous, grounded, and provisional effort to imagine alternative ways of being. I articulate the central role played by a positive vision of disability and disabled people for this inversion of the historically negative relationship between utopia and disability. The article turns to disability activists to show that the movement countered exclusionary utopian approaches by acting as if it had a right to envision and enact a different, better future for all from the perspective of disability and disabled people.

Literature and reading under the light of intermedial and multimodality studies

Professor Grzegorz Maziarczyk specialises in contemporary English and American literature and culture as well as transmedial narrative theory. His main research interests include textual materiality, intermediality, relations between literature and new media, multimodal storytelling, utopia and dystopia. He has been a recipient of fellowships and research grants from the University of Notre Dame, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and European Society for the Study of English. He is the author of two monographs – The Narratee in Contemporary British Fiction (2005) and The Novel as Book: Textual Materiality in Contemporary Fiction in English (2013) – and the co-editor of five collections of essays, including (Im)perfection Subverted, Reloaded and Networked: Utopian Discourse across Media (2015) and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (2017). He has published widely in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Word & Image, Journal of Narrative Theory, Utopian Studies, Interfaces: Image, Texte, Language and Slavia amongst others. Since 2019 he has been Director of the Institute of Literary Studies at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence

Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence

Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a Prompt

Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a Prompt

The Past and Future of Utopian Studies

The Past and Future of Utopian Studies

Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian Studies

Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian Studies

Notas para o enraizamento da Utopia na imaginação da política através da performance

Abstract One can easily argue that since Marx and Engels demise of nineteenth century Utopian socialism, characterizing Utopianism as an “idealism deeply and structurally averse to the Political”, utopia has migrated into fiction. With no surprise, Alain Badiou has famously declared the “passion for the real” as the twentieth century’s “major subjective trait”. The (early) twenty first century has also succumbed helplessly to the eruption of the real. But the times we live today seem to be claiming for something else. Over the past two decades utopian thinking seems to have resurfaced. The severity and monumentality of the issues that afflict the world today are inciting a central question for artists: in the face of an imminent catastrophe, what is the use of utopian imagination at the end of times? What is the purpose of artistic endeavours in a finite world. Utopian (or dystopian) fiction and has always dealt with the envisioning of a future anchored in possible or impossible scenarios, helping the world to correct its wrong doings, to improve, to transform, to threat with dreadful outcomes or to denounce present inequalities. However, if we consider that the world needs to start a new narrative, performing arts can help us to expand imagination, freeing political thinking from the constraints of the real world and wide open to “social dreaming”. In this paper, I aim to combine a speculative reflection grounded on utopian studies and in political theatre considering that performing arts are in a particularly good position to intervene in “social imaginary. This frame incites us to rethink the possibilities of political theatre today and its ontology, fighting for the rooting of (artistic) utopia in the imagination of politics, trusting that art and theatre will be able to help us to invent scenarios that today seem impossible or that we have not yet managed to conceive.

Everyday utopias and social reproduction

This article analyses reproductive labour in everyday utopias. Everyday utopias refer to spaces and practices that experiment with alternative forms of life and create new social imaginaries. Drawing on ethnographic research in three everyday utopias in Finland, the article argues that labour plays a key role in transformative politics by prefiguring socially and ecologically sustainable forms of life not conducive to capitalist logic. The article brings together feminist social reproduction theory and utopian studies to shed light on different forms of reproductive labour in everyday utopias. It identifies four forms of labour: manual, affective, mnemonic and experimental. In particular, experimental labour foregrounds the importance of everyday utopias as sites of political imagination in which novel forms of life are actively developed and tried out. The article concludes by suggesting that everyday utopias subvert conventional understandings and practices of labour and social reproduction.

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.

The Utopian Vision of the Temple Scroll

Abstract Although the Temple Scroll’s divinely-commanded temple plan has frequently been described as “utopian,” there has been no sustained attempt to analyze the scroll in light of other texts that have been described as utopias/utopian, or in connection with utopian studies. This article aims to start that conversation, considering what insights about the purpose and function of the Temple Scroll might be gained from approaching it as a utopia. Such an approach demonstrates that the scroll’s temple is best understood not as a concrete plan for direct reform, but as an imagined counterfactual world, constituted through legal discourse, through which the composers sought to reflect on and respond to their current realities.

Ethnoracial Utopianism and Speculative Aesthetics after the End of History

Abstract Using a reading of Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill to frame our contemporary political moment, this article asks what techniques of cultural critique are available to the Left today when the strategies of imaginary worldbuilding have become so central to the ethnonationalist politics of the Right. It argues that the end of the Cold War prompted a reconfiguration of political identities and public discourse in both the West and the former Soviet territories—through distinct but interrelated logics—that highlighted the failures of liberalism in ways that set the stage for the mainstream return of fascist politics of white supremacy. In this context of alternative histories taken as fact, of conspiracy rhetoric seemingly impervious to reason, this article asks how we can respond in intellectually robust ways that will help us to ground an inclusive culture and build a better future, practices the author situates in the broad field of Marxist-informed utopian studies.

Real Utopia as a Method? Utopian-Sociological Paths from Jameson’s Universal Army to a Postcapitalist Post Office

This article uses Frederic Jameson’s An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army as the inspiration for a utopian-sociological method that brings together aspects of Erik Olin Wright’s ‘Real Utopias’ project and Ruth Levitas’ ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’. It argues that these different approaches can be bridged through presenting fictional sketches of imagined futures of potentially socially transformative institutions alongside more conventional sociological analysis of such. Two concepts associated with the discipline of Utopian Studies – education of desire and concrete utopia – are used to suggest that the British Post Office might perform a better utopian role than Jameson’s chosen vehicle of utopian transformation: the US Army. To further build this case, and to demonstrate one possible application of this method, the history, current condition and an imagined future of the Post Office are explored and some concrete steps in the utopian directions suggested by these are noted.

The Postcritical Utopia

ABSTRACT Taking Yanis Varoufakis’s novel Another Now as a case study, this article introduces and makes an argument for a new concept in utopian studies: the postcritical utopia. It begins by making four claims: (1) that Varoufakis has written a utopian socialist novel; (2) that this represents a retrieval of a historical form of literature; (3) that the utopia at its center takes the form of a utopian blueprint; and (4) that two objections to this utopia, posed by one of its main characters, complicate our understanding of Another Now, with implications for how we ought to classify it. It is then argued that Another Now’s combination of a systematic utopian blueprint with insights drawn from the tradition of the critical utopia qualifies it as a postcritical utopia. The latter concept is then considered in the context of utopian studies scholarship.

Технократические утопии в искусстве: трансформация телесности как будущее человека

The article is devoted to the presentation of the image of the future man in modern utopias of technological art. The author sees the peculiarity of the modern situation in Utopian Studies in the reorientation of utopian creativity from projects of global transformation of society to projects of human improvement, and in the latter case, from the socialization of the individual to changing his physicality. The “individualization” of utopia was complementary to the emergence and development of the transhumanism movement, which connects the possibilities of limitless personal development with scientific and technological progress in the field of bio- and nanotechnology. The emergence of transhumanism was a consequence of the convergence of two trends in new European culture: the atropomorphization of machines and the mechanization of humans (Tishchenko). Many representatives of technological art identified themselves with transhumanism and became conductors of its ideas into artistic culture.

Epidemia jako metafora preapokaliptyczna. Przypadek „Choroby Libenkrafta” Ołeksandra Irwańca

Metaphors are a way of understanding and expressing difficult and abstract matters. The image of a community infected with a fatal and disgusting disease is a popular medium for social criticism utilized in different cultural contexts, including the literary field. In this article, the author examines the specifics of the use of the maladic metaphor in the novel Libenkraft’s Disease by Oleksandr Irvanets. The various approaches to the issues that are the crux of the anxious and dark meaning of this text allow us to come to several conclusions. The perspective of utopian studies proves that — contrary to previous fi ndings — the novel should be classified as an apocalyptic utopia. Postcolonial criticism of the cultural representation of violence shows that Libenkraft’s Disease is one of numerous texts in Ukrainian literature that propose settling past accounts by way of revenge. The findings of René Girard and Susan Sontag allow us to confirm the dangerous closeness of the epidemic metaphor to the phenomena of symbolic violence and social oppression also in the contents of Irvanets’s novel. The confrontation between the visions included in Libenkraft’s Disease and the current situation in Ukraine prompts readers to conclude that, at least in the case of this novel, the author deserves to be called a prophet of the past.

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018)

Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia

This book is an application of the idea of critical dystopia to three understudied novels and the beginning of an argument about utopian desire itself. Emrah Atasoy, a prolific author who reviewed Turkish speculative fiction in a well-received 2021 Utopian Studies article, is modeling a search for hope in dystopian texts. In this book, derived from his dissertation, he examines three British novels written in three different eras of the twentieth century: Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), and P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992). In each novel, Atasoy argues, the protagonists move from an ignorance that served the interest of the dystopian forces to a resistant knowledge that should be read as offering hope, both as resistance and as knowledge.The book is organized in a straightforward way, with an introduction, conclusion, and then three analytical chapters, one for each of the novels. The introduction is expansive, offering both brief surveys of the nature of utopia and dystopia and a recounting of a number of themes taken up by dystopian texts: education, politics, gender roles, family life, and more. Layered onto this is a discussion of theorizing around knowledge and power and the transition from ignorance to understanding. The chapters focused on the individual novels are all similarly expansive. Atasoy offers biographical information about the authors along with considerations of the primary social and political events to which the authors might be responding. The analyses of the novels focus primarily on the motivations of the protagonists, but interspersed in the plot summaries are narrative cul-de-sacs explaining particular textual details (for example, the discussion of Theo’s choice of the Greek statue of Diadoumenos as allocation to leave a note for the Warden [James, 37]). These little detours are often interesting but can be distracting from the primary analytic focus.The analyses themselves also cover a lot of territory. The middle section of the chapter on The Children of Men (118–34) includes discussions of power, eugenics, religion, sexuality, punishment, assisted suicide, and immigration. Each of these is used to elucidate modes of social and political control wielded by the Warden, but the sheer number of issues included in the fast-moving analysis left me wanting more. Atasoy’s analysis of Quietus nicely captures the ways in which James has created a world where the elderly are both encouraged and manipulated to end their lives for the good of the whole. This discussion fits especially well with the larger focus of his analysis on modes of social engineering. Fewer themes and more close readings like this one would have deepened the reading experience. But for anyone beginning a project on one of these novels, this book is a good place to start.This book begins and ends with the interesting contention that times of catastrophe diminish the literary production of utopia, and potentially the capacity for hope itself. While the point of this book is not to defend this claim empirically, it is one worth considering for any scholar of utopia, or any person interested in the potential of future change for the better. The book may underplay the fact of twentieth-century literary utopias (there is a brief discussion of the feminist utopias written in the 1970s and 1980s), but it is surely correct that there is an imbalance in the production of utopia in favor of dystopia. Utopias are more challenging to construct and potentially (especially in this day and time) less formulaic than dystopia, which is an increasingly popular (and marketable) genre.Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a recent interview that “[utopias] shape people’s conception of what’s possible that could be good in the future.”1 Atasoy’s book offers the possibility that a close reading of dystopian texts might well help us uncover other ways of finding out what future good is possible. By extolling the value of finding the hopeful in the dystopian text, he is asking utopian scholars to facilitate discovering the ways in which “the utopian enclave does exist in the dystopian world” (151).