Utopian Studies Research Articles

Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse

Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan

Reviewed by: Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan De Witt Douglas Kilgore Can We Be Utopian? Tom Moylan. Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 312 pp. $120 hc, $39.95 pbk, $35.95 ebk. [End Page 576] Tom Moylan publishes his latest book at a time of widespread disquiet in Western democracy. He does not sugarcoat his judgement that we live in a dystopia, a neoliberal capitalist world order in which "fascistic politicians, regimes, and mass movements are gaining ground and feeding official and individual rage," fattening on a bottomless pit of "virulent xenophobia" (1). Even as he mounts a Leftist utopian response to this emergency, Moylan speaks to widespread fears of the racist kleptocratic nationalism that has gained mainstream power. As a result, Becoming Utopian sits comfortably with other recent diagnoses such as philosopher Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018) and historian Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020). Moylan's project, however, is not simply to tell us that we are in trouble; he seeks to show us a way out. It is, perhaps, comforting that the path he blazes takes us through more than a half-century of his work in the imbricated fields of sf and utopian literature. The comfort comes from the familiarity of the path—we are not starting in the dark—and his trenchant belief that the philosophers, theorists, writers, and activists who labor in these fields have formulated ways of thinking and acting that are helpful for meeting the current emergency. At base, he argues that if we are to save ourselves from a dystopian world order, we must become utopian. Becoming Utopian may be read on its own, but it is also a valedictory text, assembled from more than three decades of publications in other venues. For those of us who have been following along, the book is most usefully read as the third volume of a trilogy. The first volume is Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986), in which Moylan links science fiction with the utopian tradition and identifies the critical utopia as an important modality within it. The second work is Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (2000), in which he introduces the critical dystopia as a forensic tool for understanding science fiction's engagement with the sociopathologies of the late twentieth century. These volumes influenced how a generation of sf scholars read and understood paradigmatic writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler. Rounding out the trilogy, Becoming Utopian reminds us of that earlier work while reconnecting us to its theoretical architecture in Marxism, feminism, liberation theology, and political activism, all of which inform the author's life and scholarship. The result is not only an overview of critical debates around utopian desire and method but also a defense of contemporary science fiction as a medium through which we might model liberatory futures that are more than easily coopted prescriptions for lucrative media franchises. Being Utopian is not a book that you can consume in one sitting. While it reveals more of the writer than one generally expects from a technical treatise—I appreciated, for example, learning that Moylan comes from a Roman Catholic background similar to my own—it is densely packed and copiously footnoted, necessarily so. While his coverage of Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Darko Suvin, Donna Haraway, and Kim Stanley Robinson is familiar territory for an sf or utopian studies scholar, [End Page 577] some of what he considers may not be. Moylan's deep engagement with the philosophical ground of liberation theology (and why it matters), for example, is revelatory, for this reader at least. It forced me to pay attention, to put the book down and seek further acquaintance with the Left of a Christian tradition overshadowed by the aggressive rise of white evangelical nationalism. As a valedictory text that is deeply retrospective, Becoming Utopia does not follow traditional monograph structure. It includes ancillary material that frames the central chapters, establishing its author's influence in sf...

Zmieniać przyszłość. Utopianizm na łamach „Młodego Technika”

The aim of this article is to present the phenomenon of utopianism on the example of texts published in the Polish magazine Młody Technik in the years 1975–1985. The work refers to the findings of leading researchers of utopian studies and Polish thinkers of utopia. The texts are analyzed in terms of the presence of a desire narrative in them. The article also focuses on the multiplicity of problems raised in the texts from the journal. The conducted analyses show a strong presence of utopianism in the mentioned magazine in the declining phase of the Polish People’s Republic. They also allow conclusions regarding the reasons for the popularity of desire narratives. They are the result of the country’s socio-economic situation at that time. The analyzed texts show that it is necessary to revise the current negative view of utopia and to notice its constructive value, most clearly visible in the context of utopianism. Utopianism is one of the most important resentments of postmodernity.

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Solarpunk Futures

Utopian Studies, Futures, and Anticipatory Studies all focus, if in different ways, on the past, present, and (alternative) futures. Utopian narratives anticipate, to cite Abensour, “what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now.”1 A tool that all disciplines use is storytelling—utopias as narratives by definition, Futures and Anticipatory Studies as critical and inquisitive tools. The Solarpunk Futures game taps into these disciplines by creatively exploring still-possible (Solarpunk) or radically new worlds and societies (utopia).The Solarpunk Surf Club is an artists’ collective that has dedicated its work to the creative, collective, and tangible imagining of our futures since 2020. Their first project, Græn R∞m, transformed a public art gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (US), into a space for utopian (re)creation. The “living room,” based on the entertainment industry’s “green room,” allowed visitors to digest art, think, read, and create new forms of (temporal) collectivity. As the Solarpunk Surf Club’s practice is rooted in the intersection between digital media and egalitarian social practices, surfing as a metaphor for the perpetual, flexible yet creative and democratic ways of accessing information and creativity, of communication and networking, seems apt. “Green room” in surfer parlance (so I learned) aptly designates the hollow that forms inside the wave just before it breaks. Artist Gary Hill describes surfing in the green room as a “moment of ecstasy—being inside the question that asks of itself while revealing itself.”2 Mittenthal links this moment to Heidegger’s understanding of clearing,Art, creativity, and (self-)transformation emerge from this open place, a space for contemplation, excavation, and, as I would add, utopian desire. These creative and “clearing,” perhaps grounding, processes are also one of the foundations of the collective’s next project, Solarpunk Futures, a beautiful tabletop card game, a work of art that creates moments of hope, inspiration and contemplation in the participants. Inspired by the principles of Solarpunk and social ecology, it seeks to replace the nihilism of cyberpunk and the trappings of the Anthropocene with “ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.”4 The game uses storytelling as a way of imagining new and different futures in a collective and empowering way—it is your story you are telling, not the story of others. George Monbiot underscores the need to tell different and new stories in our age of the Anthropocene:Rob Hopkins in From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want (2019) reminds us too that the imagination is and can be an accelerator for change by asking what if—change can happen. His book begins with a story of how things turned out okay. Each chapter poses a “what if” question: What if we took play seriously? What if school nurtured young imaginations? What if our leaders prioritized the cultivation of imagination? Hopkins addresses education, civic planning, politics, healthcare, exploring the role of imagination and the difference it can make to think outside of the box.6The Solarpunk Futures and Hopkins apply what UNESCO calls “Futures Literacy”—a creative and practical use of storytelling not only to make the participants more resilient for future developments but also to empower them by imagining their future roles and actions. Futures Literacy takes its cue from Anticipation and Futures Studies. The Futures Literacy Laboratories use action-learning and collective storytelling to make change possible—if you can imagine a different future (out-of-the-box thinking) where you are a participant, you can actively co-create this future. The principles here are collaborative storytelling and co-creation again, in short, practical utopianism.7The Solarpunk Surf Club see Solarpunk “as visionary utopian politics and aesthetic that critically engages the reality of capitalist catastrophe while maintaining a radical optimism about humanity’s hopes for a communal, ecological future.”8 The game taps into this. Through collective storytelling, and utopian desire, the participants access who they are and who they want to be in the future, and in what kind of society. The different cards provide the basis for this imagining:The second edition of the game has introduced the aspect of remembrance to acknowledge how change was brought about under great sacrifices and with great energy.As it is a tabletop game, Solarpunk Futures is also not reliant on technology. The artists’ edition is lavishly beautiful and is currently distributed to the kickstarter funders of the first edition. A second edition will be available in summer 2022 but readers can also download the cards, and a game book free from the website.10

Introduction

Introduction

The Skill of Imagining the Future: The Utopian Dimension of Soviet Revolutionary Festivities

This paper considers revolutionary festivities as one of the main manifestations of the Soviet culture of the 1917–1920s. Festivals varied in types and forms (mainly mass performances) and came to make part of the space of utopias in the first post-revolutionary decade. In this context, utopia is regarded as a cultural form of the sensual and rational comprehension of social reality. It produces ideas about happiness and harmony in response to the eternal human need both to foresee the future and to model it. According to recent findings in utopian studies (Ernst Bloch, Frederic Jameson, etc.), a utopia is articulated not in the form of literary texts containing the ideal blueprints of a new social order, but in the form of various intentions that contain the ability and skill to wish for the best, create alternative projects of the future, and criticise what hinders its achievement. Revolutionary festivities are interpreted as a set of value-based cultural practices – iconic actions and artifacts associated with memorable events, outstanding personalities, and special ceremonials. The use of the method of imaginary reconstitution of society (IROS) by Ruth Levitas and the model of a revolutionary festival constructed by Mona Ozouf as a theoretical tool make it possible to reconstruct the utopian dimension of Soviet revolutionary festivities. The festival chronotype is analysed through the prism of three modes of utopia as a method: archaeological, ontological, and architectural. There are interacting strategies or techniques – defamiliarisation, criticism, creating an alternative, and experiencing it – that work on the coherent image of a positive future. The research optics constructed in this way make it possible to reveal why, in the absence of holistic pictures of the future, revolutionary festivities nevertheless involved participants in forming a new political, social, and cultural order, as well as legitimising the revolution. The article refers to the description of the festivities in the publications of contemporaries of that epoch, i. e., authors (A. Piotrovsky) and critics (O. Tsekhnovitser, N. Shubsky et al.).

Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Utopian and Dystopian Themes in Tolkien’s Legendarium

Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common

Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common

Insistent Hope as Anti-Anti-Utopian Politics in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy

ABSTRACT This article discusses the politics of hope in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Drawing on scholarship in utopian studies, science fiction studies, and Africana studies, it discusses the ways in which Jemisin uses two intentional community experiments depicted in the trilogy as “critical utopias” in order to work through problems involved in collective living, including the potentially anti-utopian aspects of these communities’ shortcomings. Ultimately, despite the apocalyptic setting that has attracted the most attention from critics, this article argues that The Broken Earth ultimately affirms the necessity of utopian hope, even amid anti-utopian circumstances, and as such is an important and timely political statement. In a historical moment marked by social and racial strife and, in the literary realm, by what Sean Guynes calls “dystopia fatigue,” Jemisin’s trilogy does not promise utopia, but insists on the need for hope in seemingly hopeless times, the “anti-anti-utopian” orientation described by Fredric Jameson.

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Disrupting the Present and Opening the Future

ABSTRACTThis article examines the temporal rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future to discuss how the new generation of climate movement organizations offers ideas of an open future that can be acted upon. Research has shown how climate organizations create economic and social disruptions. However, as the article shows, they also create temporal disruptions. Taking theoretical inspiration from critical utopian studies, the article states that the climate activists should be understood as utilizing a disruptive utopian method that aims to disrupt the present and thereby open the future. The method relies on utopias that are relational and open, not static or absolute. Hence, the utopianism employed by these groups is not about closure and perfection, but rather about openness and offering alternatives.

Utopia Matters! The Importance of Utopianism and Utopian Scholarship

Abstract An argument for the importance of utopianism and a reflection on the current state of utopian scholarship that was to have been given as a keynote address at the annual meeting of Utopian Studies Europe in Bucharest in 2020.

Is the Future Soviet? USSR-2061 and the Reality of Utopia

USSR-2061 is a Russian futuristic online project that imagines a new USSR a century after Gagarin’s journey into space. This article connects the project to Soviet space utopianism and the nostalgia that followed it, while seeing USSR-2061 and its artefacts in the light of utopian studies. In particular, the project’s hesitation with regard to utopianism and its thirst for realism are situated within a classical utopian problem of how to achieve real, not only imaginary, transformations. Such realism generally coincides with Levitas’ (2013) framework of utopia as a method, and, as the analysis shows, it hinders the construction of “an image of a future” at which the project aims. Instead, the resulting narratives and visions commonly overlap with the official Russian political discourse that makes use of Soviet nostalgia, or fall into retrofuturistic replications of commonly satirized Soviet discourses. However, a different way of constructing utopia is also present in USSR-2061, even if it is never highlighted. To make utopia possible in anti-utopian times, one might need to rethink its place of possibility or topos. Theoretically, such an alternative is presented in connection to Latour’s (2017) Terrestrial, a place with agency that in utopian terms presupposes a transgression of the boundary between the real and imaginary, the political and cultural. In the same line, the paper argues that USSR-2061 might attempt the construction of a new utopia through rethinking space. This might be fostered through the inclusion of cosmist ideas such as those of Vladimir Vernadsky and Alexander Chizhevsky, whose intersections with Latourian framework have previously been observed.

(Im)possible Escape? H. G. Wells, Utopia and the World State

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.

Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age: Theorizing critical digital literacy and civic engagement

This article proposes a theoretical framework for how critical digital literacy, conceptualized as incorporating Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age, facilitates civic engagement. To do so, after reviewing media literacy research, it draws on utopian studies and political theory to frame utopian thinking as relying dialectically on utopianism and dystopianism. Conceptualizing critical digital literacy as incorporating utopianism/dystopianism prescribes that constructing and deploying an understanding of the Internet’s civic potentials and limitations is crucial to pursuing civic opportunities. The framework proposed, which has implications for media literacy research and practice, allows us to (1) disentangle users’ imaginaries of civic life from their imaginaries of the Internet, (2) resist the collapse of critical digital literacy into civic engagement that is understood as inherently progressive, and (3) problematize polarizing conclusions about users’ interpretations of the Internet as either crucial or detrimental to their online engagement.

Fictional games and utopia

This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. ‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot - or at least were not originally meant to - be actually played. The article’s objective is to explore how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion of fictional games and provides an initial articu­lation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation - even the most dystopian ones - is ultimately indeterminate and retains the possibility of change.

The Present as Past: Science Fiction and the Museum

This article explores the role that science fiction (sf) texts might play in the museum, offering a perspective on acts of collection, curation, exhibition, and museum architecture, to ask what the museums of science fiction futures can offer those of us concerned with the role and responsibility of the museum in the present. It draws together methods, content and reflections from a workshop held at the Horniman Museum with art and curation students from University of the Arts London in 2019, which explored the spaces and imaginaries of the museum. Over the course of this workshop, participants were asked to restage the museums described in three science fiction novels: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), and Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979). By bringing the spaces of science fiction into the museum, these interventions reframed the terms of our engagement with museum objects and provided a site for broader reflection on the nature of museum design and practice. This process of imaginative construction is extended into this paper, which crosses the fields of architectural design and theory, science fiction and utopian studies, and museum studies. It draws directly upon the interventions generated in the workshop, including photographs and descriptions which reflect on the critical potential present in multiple forms of knowing and the radical possibility inherent in collective acts of remaking. These fragments are used to direct research into museum practices, to situate these actions within wider theoretical contexts, and to explore the science-fictional as a mode of thinking and making as well as a source text.

Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives

Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives

Journey Through Utopia

Journey Through Utopia