Utopian Vision Research Articles

The Lullaby’s Utopian Function and the Green Utopian Imagination in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy

ABSTRACT The lullaby “The Meadow Song” in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy provides a narrative fulcrum and plays a vital role in reinforcing these novels’ thematic concern. However, extant criticism has not given due attention to its utopian function. Drawing upon Ernest Bloch’s philosophy of music and other critics’ theories on green utopia, this article intends to argue that the lullaby fulfills the utopian function of fueling Katniss’s and other rebels’ utopian imagination to fight for a better world of justice, equality, and freedom. It also posits that the green utopian community inspired by the lullaby in the last book of the trilogy functions not as an escapist pursuit, but as a micropolitical alternative in an era of global capitalism.

Horses as players in equine sports

ABSTRACT Though animal ethics in sport obviously applies most urgently to cases of animals at mortal risk (e.g., hunting and bullfighting) or vulnerable to various types of abuse (e.g., doping and harmful training practices), less obvious domains bear scrutiny as well. Here I examine whether we can strictly take not just riders but horses to be players in equine sports. There is an apparent tension in the concept of equestrian prowess, a peculiar blend of skills and attitudes, between regarding horses as subjects of persuasion or collaboration and treating them as objects of control. As our understanding of animal cognition and behaviour continues to improve, it becomes increasingly clear that animal intelligence and agential capacities are far greater than we formerly presumed. In this light, using Suits’s theory of games, I argue that horses are game players that sometimes consent (or assent) and sometimes refuse to play equine sports. Drawing on recent accounts of horse-rider partnership and on my own equestrian background, I conclude by sketching a utopian vision of what equine sports could be.

“Let us veil our meaning”:Holiday Romanceand the Second Reform Act of 1867

ABSTRACTDickens’s final completed fiction, Holiday Romance, is a neglected and misunderstood work. It is a suite of four short stories and what little critical attention it has garnered has missed the main idea behind the work. While most scholars who have written about Holiday Romance consider it as little more than children’s entertainment, it is better interpreted as political commentary on expanding voting rights. Read in the context of Dickens’s complex views on the Second Reform Act of 1867, this work reflects his support for expanding the vote, his pessimism that Parliament could introduce any meaningful reform, and also his anxiety over mob rule. Throughout the four stories, children dream of role reversals with adults, sometimes resulting in utopic visions and sometimes descending into disturbing fantasies of violence. This article explores the way Dickens used the image of the abused child one last time as a potent symbol of the need for reform.

Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks by Etta M. Madden

Reviewed by: Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks by Etta M. Madden Ilaria Serra ENGAGING ITALY: AMERICAN WOMEN’S UTOPIAN VISIONS AND TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS, by Etta M. Madden. New York: SUNY Press, 2022. 342 pp. $95.00 hardback; $33.95 paperback. It is a rare treat to sit in a nineteenth-century Roman salotto where upper-class American expatriates gather and exchange their impressions of Italy. This is what happens when you open Edda M. Madden’s volume Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. The book’s first pages bring the reader inside a Roman salon where American poet and educator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the guest of honor. The following pages leave the man behind to focus on three women who frequented these receptions—Emily Bliss Gould (1822–1875), Caroline Crane Marsh (1816–1901), and Anne Hampton Brewster (1819–1892)—and who asked the question, “What can we do to make this crazy, beautiful country better?” The author’s detailed archival research and her laborious deciphering of handwritten letters unearthed from long-closed drawers afford the readers this leap in time. It is no small task, and the author immediately indicates to readers of the uniqueness of her sources by asking: “How to capture the numerous abbreviations (often singular to the author), the underlining and double underlining, the superscripts, and the strikethroughs?” (p. xv). The answer is the secret of this book: by getting to know them personally and becoming privy to their habits and peeves, allowing them to take life in the pages. [End Page 165] Madden’s book allows an unprecedented, close look at a particular slice of nineteenth-century society, the American community in Rome, which may now have been forgotten but deeply influenced Italian culture and left some tangible traces. Even rarer is to learn the pursuits of the women in this society, who were already uncommon travelers—following their husbands’ careers, in two cases out of three—but also exceptional visionaries who had minds and projects of their own. Gould was not just the wife of American physician James Gould but also the founder of a home for poor children in Rome. Marsh was the wife of the United States ambassador to Italy, George Perkins Marsh (considered the first environmentalist), and a published poet and translator, an activist, and a philanthropist who financed Salvatore Ferretti’s “Free Church” orphanage. Brewster was proudly never anybody’s wife, a pioneer journalist, one of the first women correspondents from abroad, and an independent and non-conformist spirit. These three ladies were nearly the same age and spent an important part of their lives in Italy around the same time. Two died in the country: Gould in Perugia and Brewster in Siena. All three did not just attend and organize glitzy cultural and social events as part of their social duties but also pursued their own projects. Gould kept a long correspondence with George Marsh, the ambassador, asking for his help in fundraising and complaining about the ignorance of the men around her who, according to her, did not understand the culture they lived in. These letters reveal her frustration with the Italian educational and political system, the Americans in Rome, and their religious divisions. She was even arrested for meeting with Protestants in her home and defended herself well, her motivation boosted by the affront. The ambasciatrice Caroline Marsh, working side by side with her husband, was deeply affected by the extreme poverty she saw in Rome and the Italian countryside after a big flood destroyed the living quarters of the poorer people. Moved by the “incredible amount of idleness, poverty and beggary,” she fought to alleviate this misery by opening a Roman orphanage and school (p. 30). The rebellious Brewster spent her life fighting her brother for her inheritance and opposing his prohibition against her seeing her long-time friend and partner, Charlotte Cushman. She left many poems and astute articles in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Boston Daily Advertiser, New York World, Chicago Daily News, and Cincinnati Commercial. Brewster never lost her irony, recognizable in her words when she conceded a fight to Roman leader Rodolfo Lanciani: “I...

Learning to live: Anarcho-syndicalism and utopia in Spain, 1931–37

This article reassesses the debate around the meaning of ‘libertarian communism’ within the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement in the years prior to and during the Civil War. Drawing on recent historical and theoretical literature that argues for a non-pejorative and analytical understanding of utopia, it brings renewed attention to this aspect of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. The article focuses on the proposals for a definition of libertarian communism that were debated in the run up to and during the National Confederation of Labour’s (CNT) Zaragoza Congress in May 1936. It argues that a utopian imagination was central to the movement’s self-understanding and concrete achievements, and not confined to its more idealist currents.

404 Utopia Not Found: Cyberpunk Avatars in Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis

AbstractScience fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

Remembering the Herero-Nama Genocide in Namibia

The perils of national narratives

The perils of national narratives

Past, Present—and Future Perfect? Taking Psychiatry Beyond Its Single Message Mythologies

Past, Present—and Future Perfect?Taking Psychiatry Beyond Its Single Message Mythologies K. W. M. Fulford (bio) I am grateful to John Sadler and his colleagues for their generous invitation to contribute to this collection marking Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP)'s thirtieth birthday. True to our editorial tradition of "no nonsense" publishing, the "ask" was a reflection on PPP's past, present and future, limited to 500 words. In fact, one word does it for me—collegiality. Collegiality was our watch word from the start. I still treasure a group photo taken at an early pre-meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) convened by Michael Schwartz at his home in 1992, when, among other initiatives, PPP was conceived through transferring our then-nascent journal proposal from a small British publishing house to its current international publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press. Michael and I had met earlier by phone when he had called the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London to enquire about its recently launched Philosophy Group and (by mere chance) I happened to be standing next to the person who took the call! PPP, with John and myself its founder editors, was subsequently born as, and has remained, a joint venture between our two groups: and Peter Zachar's recent initiative in building closer links with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP) has taken us an important step towards the vision shared by Michael, John and myself that PPP should grow to reflect and represent a global open society of philosophy and mental health. As a pointer to the future, this global open society was no mere utopian vision but a joint commitment to what we conceived as a necessary ambition. Contemporary disenchantment with the repeated failures of translation of current narrowly empirical models of psychiatry, points to the truth of our German colleague, Paul Hoff's, characterization of the history of psychiatry as a history of serial collapses into single message mythologies. This disenchantment might seem to offer an opportunity for colonial expansion of philosophy into psychiatry (a re-assertion, perhaps, of phenomenology?). But PPP was born out of the "decade of the brain" and has remained throughout an ally of, not competitor to, the neurosciences. [End Page 3] So, while it is true that, with Peter's initiative, and with editorial and other innovations introduced by John, PPP is actively extending its reach (to new areas of philosophy, and to new voices, informed notably by experience as well as by training), this expansion remains a collegial not colonial enlargement of the field. I need hardly point to the challenges presented by the inclusive ambitions of such enlargement (not least to maintaining the highest standards of editorial and peer review). But PPP's collegiality provides the foundation for the work needed to deliver on these challenges. Even if imperfectly realized, this collegiality will help to take us beyond the single message mythologies by which our discipline has too long been hobbled. [End Page 4] K. W. M. Fulford K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford is a Fellow of St Catherine's College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick Medical School; and Founder Director of the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St Catherine's College, Oxford (valuesbasedpractice.org). Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press

“It’s People in the Swamp”: Du Bois against the Democracy of Things

AbstractW. E. B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), which has been called a “spiritual epic of cotton,” was inspired by Frank Norris’s “epic of wheat” The Octopus (1901), though the connection is rarely explored. This essay argues that Du Bois offers a crucial critique of Norris’s novel, specifically in contesting the ways Norris naturalizes capitalist exploitation by depicting the nonhuman power of the wheat and the railroad as the plot’s prime movers. Du Bois’s exposure of the forces allied against Black political power in the rural South and in the nation’s capital, and his utopian vision of collective world-building, offers an insistently human-centered rebuttal to Norris’s vitalist fantasy of salvific wheat. In so doing, Du Bois helps expose the limitations of, and model alternatives to recent calls by critics (aligned with New Materialism, Actor-Network Theory, and Object-Oriented Ontology) for a “parliament of things” or a “democracy of objects”—related claims for the supposed political radicalism of according nonhuman and human agents equal weight.“For Du Bois, the nonhuman world . . . may well have a kind of animacy, but its power is too tightly entwined with racial capitalism for it to serve as a democratizing check on human power run amok.”

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India. By Jessica Namakkal

The colonial history of India is frequently associated with the British Empire, yet the French Empire also had a long-lasting and significant presence in India. Jessica Namakkal illuminates this important aspect of India’s colonial history and its legacy in her engaging book, which offers original insights and contributions to various disciplines, including French studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, political science, and memory studies. Namakkal draws on a wide range of sources, perspectives, and original methodologies, including the study of archival material, the press of various nations, memoirs, interviews, visual media, and observations of the landscape and events taking place in contemporary Pondicherry, the former capital of the French Empire in India. The work highlights the complex entanglements, tensions, and rivalries between the British and French Empires that shaped India’s colonial history. The author offers detailed portraits of key figures who played important roles in defining the colonial history and the future of French India, such as Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa, Édouard Goubert, and Raphael Ramanyya Dadala, tracing their actions and examining their thought. The volume also explores the complex interrelations between identity, nationality, ethnicity, and caste of residents of French India, and highlights the ways in which attitudes towards nationality shifted in tandem with the evolving policies and politics of the Empire. Namakkal casts light on the various migrant trajectories which arose as a consequence of the French Empire in India, including the experiences of those who migrated from Europe to French India, those who sought refuge from the British Empire in French Indian territories, and those who migrated from India to France after independence. Through an analysis of various case studies, Namakkal explores the plight of French nationals of Indian origin after independence, who were frequently alienated from both nations. She also provides fresh insight into the experiences and political significance of mixed-race residents of French India, offering a new perspective on the concept of ‘creolization’ in the context of Pondicherry. A particular strength of the work lies in its novel approach to the concept of decolonization. The author argues that decolonization in the context of French India is not merely to be equated with liberation and peace, but suggests that it engendered violence, and remains incomplete in various senses. Namakkal casts light on the ways in which various aspects of the colonial regime, including divisions and inequalities between local and foreign populations, and the oppression of indigenous populations, continue today in the form of the settlement of Auroville near Pondicherry, which, despite the utopian vision of its founder, Alfassa, ‘exemplifies the phenomenon of anticolonial colonialism, a key concept in understanding neocolonialism in a postcolonial world’ (p. 183). This thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book, which offers insights into a frequently neglected aspect of India’s colonial history, is ­especially valuable to scholars working in postcolonial, French, and South Asian studies.

The Historical Books: 1 Chronicles–2 Maccabees

The Historical Books1 Chronicles–2 Maccabees Christopher T. Begg, Fred W. Guyette, Richard A. Taylor, and Thomas Hieke 556. [Levites of Memory in Chronicles; Historical Levites in Late-Persian Yehud] Ehud Ben Zvi, "Levites of Memory in Chronicles: and Some Considerations about Historical Levites in Late-Persian Yehud," Chronicles and the Priestly Literature, 281-304 [see #914]. In his contribution, B.Z. presents his view according to which the Levites in Chronicles are the "complementary other" of the priests as imagined by the Chronicler, rather than [End Page 189] as the latter's conflicting counterpart in reality. Reviewing the biblical and postbiblical sources about the Levites, he argues that the Levites as sanctuary singers and gatekeepers were never as influential a group as were the priests. B.Z. likewise interprets the Chronicler's depiction of the Levites as an instance of the "normalization" of social memory for purposes of social cohesion on the part of a small group of social literati in late Persianperiod Jerusalem. In other words, the Chronicler's depiction of the Levites reflects the literati's conception of how the Levites should have been viewed in the monarchic period on the basis of the literati's authoritative textual repertoire (including the Pentateuch and Ezekiel). [Adapted from editors' introduction, p. 8—C.T.B.] 557. [Atonement, Sacred Space, and Ritual Time in the Chronicler's Reading of the P Pentateuchal Narrative] Benjamin D. Giffone, "Atonement, Sacred Space and Ritual Time: The Chronicler as Reader of Priestly Pentateuchal Narrative," Chronicles and the Priestly Literature, 221-43 [see #914]. G.'s contribution reads and interprets accounts in Chronicles in light of texts of P and Ezekiel. Thus, e.g., he explains the motif of atonement and the extension of the festival in the Chronicler's account of Hezekiah's Passover (2 Chronicles 29) in relation to Leviticus 8–10 with its continuation in Leviticus 16 as well as Ezekiel 43–45. Similarly, G. interprets the narrative of Uzziah's incense offering in 2 Chr 26:16-23 against the background of Leviticus 10 and Numbers 16, and suggests a solution for the potential overlap between the Day of Atonement and Solomon's dedication of the temple (2 Chronicles 5–8) by reference to the appearance of the glory of Yhwh featured in Ezekiel 40 and 45. G. concludes that, as an early interpreter of Torah, the Chronicler seems to have charted a path that sought to include both the Deuteronomistic and the Priestly traditions (broadly understood) and both Levites and the Zadokite priests in their own specific and necessary cultic roles. [Adapted from editors' introduction, p. 7—C.T.B.] 558. [Chronicles; P; Scribes in the Postexilic Temple] Lester L. Grabbe, "Scribes in the Post Exilic Temple: A Social Perspective," Chronicles and the Priestly Literature, 201-20 [see #914]. G.'s essay approaches the overarching issue of the consonance and dissonance between the Chronicler's work and the Priestly materials of the HB from the perspective of priestly scribal culture. After reviewing scribal models from Egypt and Mesopotamia, G. narrows his focus to the priestly scribes in Yehud. Here, G. draws on a model from Homeric studies of transcribing oral traditions that he views as applicable to the formation of biblical texts. He concludes that P was produced during the Persian period by priestly scribes, whereas Chronicles was written in the early Greek period, a century or two later than P, by an individual or individuals close to the priesthood. With regard to the relationship between the two corpora, G. argues that the Chronicler(s) used a variety of sources in an inclusive fashion, not only the P document, but also a version of Samuel–Kings, oral forms of priestly and temporal traditions, and a utopian vision of a theocratic paradise. [Adapted from editors' introduction, p. 7—C.T.B.] 559. [The Righteousness of the Levites in Chronicles and Ezekiel] Christine Mitchell, "The righteousness of the Levites in Chronicles and Ezekiel," Chronicles and the Priestly Literature, 337-47 [see #914]. In her article, M. compares the notion of "righteousness" in Ezekiel 44 and 2 Chronicles 29 and suggests that these...

Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, by Duncan Bell

Reviewed by: Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America by Duncan Bell Marilyn Lake (bio) Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, by Duncan Bell; pp. ix + 465. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, $42.00, £32.00. “No one was white before he/she came to America,” wrote African-American writer James Baldwin in the magazine Essence (1970–present) in 1984. “It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country” (Baldwin qtd. in Richard Delgrado and Jean Stefancic, eds. Critical White Studies: Looking Beyond the Mirror [Temple University Press, 1997], 285). The condition of whiteness was also a preoccupation of W. E. B. Du Bois, Baldwin’s fellow countryman, whose 1910 essay “The Souls of White Folk” identified a “new religion of whiteness” sweeping the world: “Wave upon wave, each with increasing virulence is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time” (Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Independent [1910], 339). Both Du Bois and Baldwin saw Americans’ subjective identification as white as crucial to their sense of personal and national self and the related conceit that the United States was and must remain a white man’s country. In Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, the third volume in his self-styled “loose trilogy dedicated to analyzing the metropolitan settler imaginary” (3), Duncan Bell draws on Du Bois’s essay on the advent of the religion of whiteness to locate “Anglo-Saxonism” as the “foremost” expression of what Bell calls “transnational whiteness” (7). He argues that the “Prophets of ‘the religion of whiteness’ . . . galvanized efforts to institutionalize racial supremacy within and beyond the borders of Europe and the Angloworld” (8). Despite his focus on Anglo-America, Bell is not interested in American forms of subjective whiteness. He does not see the defensive and proprietorial dimensions of whiteness identified by Du Bois (“Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen,” [“Souls of White Folk,” 339]) and relatedly, the pivotal role of the rise of Asia in provoking such proprietorial assertions—and in provoking them afresh today as evident in current concerted efforts by the West to contain a newly resurgent China. In the nineteenth century, Asian immigration to former British colonies precipitated the expression of a new sense of self and galvanized the possessive claims advanced by self-styled white men’s countries against those they called Asiatics. Du Bois defined the [End Page 705] global dimension of the color line in 1910 as “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Gustave Spiller, “The Problem of Race Equality,” Universal Races Congress Papers [1911], 39). In London, the following year, the organizers of the Universal Races Congress, at which Du Bois spoke, stated their goal as the discussion of “the general relations subsisting between the peoples of the West and those of the East, between so-called white and so-called coloured peoples, with a view to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings and a heartier cooperation” (Du Bois qtd. in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 [Henry Holt, 1994], 283). The increasingly virulent assertions of whiteness, they feared, could lead to war. Bell is a British historian of ideas writing of Anglo-American dreams of Anglo-Saxon union from a British metropolitan perspective. His tendency to conflate the English idea of Anglo-Saxonism—at heart a theory of Teutonic history—with postcolonial formations of whiteness impedes his ability to explain the failure and fractured nature of the vision of Anglo-American unity that he delineates. His characterization of his subject as “the metropolitan settler imaginary” elides a conceptual distinction between two different subject positions—metropolitan and settler—key to understanding the ascendancy of whiteness (3). Bell’s focus in Dreamworlds of Race is the utopian vision of Anglo-American racial union that excited the imaginations of elite political thinkers, mostly British, in the late nineteenth century. He locates this dreaming in the context...

Growing a University: A Personal History of the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus in Dumfries

This personal account of the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus in Dumfries is offered as a case study to understand the recent trends towards satellite and branch campuses which form the latest phase of UK university expansion. It testifies to the enduring allure of the utopian vision and follows the struggle to survive in circumstances similar to those faced by the new campuses of the 1960s. While the details may be unique, a number of features and processes are described which may be endemic to those satellite and multi-institutional campuses which are changing the shape of higher education in the UK.

The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest ed. by Christine Waller Manca

Reviewed by: The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest ed. by Christine Waller Manca Kaylee P. Alexander The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest. Edited by Christine Waller Manca. The David B. Warren Symposium, Volume 8. (Houston: Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022. Pp. xii, 175. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-0-89090-203-5.) The Power of Place: Defining Material Culture in Pre-1900 Texas, the Lower South, and the Southwest is the result of the eighth David B. Warren Symposium, a biennial event hosted by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens. This volume includes seven revised and expanded papers from the 2021 gathering. Focusing principally on Texan visual and material culture from the antebellum period to the early twentieth century, these contributions share a common thread vividly summarized by Alexis Monroe: “even in Arcadia, there is slavery” (p. 81). The first essay in the volume is Michael Grauer’s keynote address, “As Far as the Eye Could See: The Bugbees, from New England to the West Texas Plains.” Setting the stage for utopian visions of Texas at the turn of the twentieth century, Grauer surveys the history of the Bugbee family, who relocated from New England to Clarendon, Texas, in 1914. Assessing the Bugbee House and collections, Grauer argues that the family’s preference for traditional New England architecture and furniture mingled with a burgeoning taste for western themes, creating a “staunchly American space” (p. 29). Following Grauer’s essay, the volume’s focus shifts to nineteenth-century Texas with four pieces that, taken together, create an evocative backdrop for the Bugbee case study. Tara A. Dudley’s essay, “‘A Very Valuable Man’: Enslaved Builders and the Making of Texas,” focuses on the influence of enslaved craftsmen. Dudley argues that enslaved builders such as Joshua Houston were central to the persistence and evolution of Greek Revival architecture in cities like Austin and that to comprehend the “‘Texas experience’” we must recognize their contributions (p. 61). Likewise, Alexis Monroe’s “The Magisterial Gaze in Slave Territory: Henry Cheever Pratt’s Coons Rancho as Plantation Painting” considers the artist’s painting of a ranch owned by Benjamin Franklin Coons as a document attesting to mid-nineteenth-century expansionist politics. Her analysis ultimately relies on a convincing connection between this El Paso landscape and Nicholas Poussin’s famous depiction of Arcadia inspired by Virgil’s fifth eclogue. Monroe thus draws a meaningful connection between Pratt’s utopian vision of the American West and classical landscapes, both of which were defined as much by their enslaved populations as by their idyllic vistas. Melinda Creech’s “The Material Culture and the Cultural Landscape of the Polley Mansion, Whitehall” echoes similar themes explored by Grauer and Dudley in its investigation of often overlooked contributors to the visual and material culture of privileged spaces. The final three contributions examine intersections of material culture and commerce in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, respectively. Olivia [End Page 164] Armandroff’s essay, “William J. Frederich’s Scrapbook: A Palimpsest of the Visual Landscape of a Galveston Man in the 1880s,” studies a scrapbook that captured a snapshot of Galveston at the peak of its commercial success. Drawing a connection between the processes of nineteenth-century scrap-booking and modern-day social media usage, Armandroff demonstrates how the scrapbook format conflated “art and advertisement” (p. 107). She thus argues that “the scrapbooks created by nineteenth-century Americans” provide us with a “palimpsest of their visual worldview,” which was undeniably capitalist (p. 107). The next essay, Lydia Blackmore’s “New Orleans’s Place in the Mahogany Trade,” challenges traditional scholarship that emphasizes the British empire’s influence on the popularity of mahogany furnishings in the United States by drawing attention to French and Spanish preferences in New Orleans before the Louisiana Purchase. Finally, Sarah Duggan’s essay, “Gaineswood Geography: How Commerce Routes and Climate Shaped Life on an Alabama Plantation,” examines the Whitfield family’s geographic and financial expansion from North Carolina to Alabama. Duggan analyzes the design of the...

Family experiences of urban transformation: entangled bodies, hopeful imaginations and embodied utopias

ABSTRACT We offer an analysis of embodied utopias, the everyday ways in which children, young people and their families experience urban transformation – urban change which has been imagined, designed and planned to be utopian. Lavasa, a private sector, hill city development in the Indian state of Maharashtra, is one such utopian vision. We use the lenses of citizenship, control, precarity and performance to show how participants embody utopia. In sites of major infrastructural change, development can take years, if not decades. Thus, children are spending their whole childhoods navigating utopian urbanism. We expose a series of intersecting vulnerabilities, impacting on participant mobility, education and livelihood. Despite this, we find a hopeful narrative where participants positioned their bodies as part of urban change. Our focus on embodied utopia complicates understandings of neoliberal utopian urbanism.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Bishnu Prasad Rabha from an Indian Perspective: A Revolutionary and Cultural Icon of Assam

On January 31, 1909, Bishnu Prasad Rabha was born in Dhaka, which is now in Bangladesh, but was a part of pre-independence India. Gopal Chandra Rabha was Bishnu Prasad Rabha's father, and Gethi Das was his mother. During his time in college, Rabha actively participated in the Indian independence struggle. His active involvement in the fight against the British meant that, although attending several colleges, including Karmail Academic in Rongpur, Victoria College in Cooch Behar, and St. Paul's Cathedral Mission College in Kolkata, his academic education was never fully completed. In 1930, he took part in Gandhiji's Non-Cooperation Movement. Following India's independence in 1947, Rabha began to rebel against the wealthy landowners, known as Jamindars, who were abusing the common people. As a result, he became animosity with the government and had to hide from the watchful eyes. He joined the Communist Party in support of the freedom of the underprivileged and oppressed ordinary people. He carried a pen in one hand and a stein-gun in the other, both dedicated to the people's liberty. An equitable society was Bishnu Rabha's utopian vision. This research paper aims to examine Bishnu Prasad Rabha's involvement in the fight for India's independence, as well as his activism as a Communist Party member for the emancipation of the impoverished and oppressed common people. A legendary figure's life story and historiography can accurately reflect the social progress of a given era. Bishnu Prasad Rabha was a true bohemian and artist in arms who, against the backdrop of the eastern Indian subcontinent's liberation movement, emphasised a crucial role in the development of revolutionary ideas of a society. Rabha was recognised as the Assamese people's symbol, "Kalaguru.". In this paper, Bishnu Prasad Rabha a revolutionary and cultural icon from Assam is seen from an Indian perspective.

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen