When organizers Katie Stone and Raphael Kabo put together the program for Utopian Acts 2018, they themselves acknowledged that "to talk about Utopia in 2018 seems like an act of naïve, reactionary optimism." The world of today is rife with inequality, active bigotry against various marginalized communities, the continuing denial of the dangers of climate change, and increasing moves toward spaces of violence. Yet it is precisely because of this almost dystopian world that we inhabit that a day of papers, (...) workshops, activism, and affirmation based on human hope was so vital. Framing the ethos of the inaugural edition of this conference as a space that takes utopianism out of its intellectual ivory tower and into... (shrink)

While at the beginning of 2018 the success of Ryan Coogler's film Black Panther suggested a widespread desire to witness an Afrofuturistic utopia, that desire—or perhaps even need—has not always been acknowledged. Today, however, the film is one marker of a growing interest in expressions that speak to the combination of the utopian and the racial imaginaries.1 However, if Black Panther has inspired interest in utopia, there has simultaneously been a flood of dystopian visions marked by the attenuation of hope (...) that suggest a bleaker view, especially regarding race and nation. The rise of Brexit, Trumpism, the Le Pens' Front National, Netanyahuism, "Italians First," Bolsonaroan Brazil, and so on indicate a growing... (shrink)

In the penultimate stop of Colson Whitehead's 2016 The Underground Railroad, the novel's fugitive protagonist, Cora, arrives at Valentine Farm, a black settlement in Indiana—a place of respite and welcome after her previous stops along the way. Whitehead imaginatively reconfigures the historical "no-place" of his eponymous title—the clandestine, nineteenth-century networked path of fugitive travel for enslaved African Americans—as an actual series of rickety but functioning subterranean railroad lines. The novel follows the path of the teenaged Cora, who escapes from the (...) Randall Plantation in Georgia and rides these lines northward, relentlessly pursued all the while by Randall's notoriously punishing slave... (shrink)

My argument reconsiders Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako from the point of view of sf and utopian studies,1 arguing that the film presents an African-utopian impulse that intervenes in the stultifying political closure of capitalist realism and the ontology of debt perpetuated by structural adjustment programs. Given the radically unlikely events of the film's narrative, in which international financial institutions, represented in the film by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, can be held accountable to ordinary citizens and put (...) on trial, I argue that Bamako is best understood as a productive inversion of what Gary Wolfe calls an sf "alternate cosmology" narrative. As Wolfe... (shrink)

In 2015, the filmmaker, artist, and writer Penny Woolcock created an imaginary city, Utopia, at the Roundhouse, London, in collaboration with Block9. It staged a blend of miscellaneous pop-up installations featuring Londoners who were each telling their individual stories about inequality, consumerism, gentrification, education, crime, and social media.1 The narrative soundscapes set within an extraordinary design brought to light the parallel lives yet opposite experiences of people in urban environments and, at the same time, revealed their hopes and dreams.Woolcock's current (...) exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art in Oxford, England, shows a part of this project. The video, Utopia, depicts eight people... (shrink)

Historicizing the 1960s remains a difficult task. Depending on frames of reference and how one views the relationship between activism and radicalism, the sixties period of revolt emerged initially with the 1950s civil rights movement and found further expressions in the student movement, the Black Power and antiwar movements, women's liberation and gay rights movements, and a counterculture that ranged from direct action against the state to communal withdrawal.1 While no clean narrative exists, the variety of radical and activist projects (...) that developed in the postwar period carried into the 1970s, especially as former members of political organizations pursued more radical responses (Students for a Democratic... (shrink)

Eighteenth-century France was a hothouse of utopias.1 The French Revolution brought to a pitch aspirations for reforming the world through the spectacular representation of alternatives, and its utopias were often global in scope and orientation.2 The political crises and discourses of human rights emerging in France also provided opportunities and strategies by which people throughout the world could pursue their own objectives. The leaders of the slave revolt that rocked Saint-Domingue, then the most important colony in the French Empire, appropriated (...) the language of metropolitan revolutionaries, blending them with African political and religious traditions in their appeals to the... (shrink)

It used to be that a book on utopia that did not quote Oscar Wilde's homily about a map of the world without utopia was itself not worth glancing at, for it left out the one thing we thought we could all agree on. But what if the world map only serves to reinforce the systems of domination inherent to colonialism, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy? And why should the quest for utopia take us to the high seas anyway, rather than (...) surveying those existing social formations that resist oppression?For David Bell, Wilde was wrong. Utopia is on the world map, but it lies neither in the unexplored place on the horizon for which humanity is forever setting sail nor in some nonexistent linear future: following Tom Moylan's... (shrink)

Generally, utopias are those "so-called 'ideal societies' of various types"1 and are visions of the "most desirable ways in which the economy, society, and the state should be organized."2 In the same way, ecotopias are traditionally seen as imaginations of ideal states of the environment or "evocative images of a sustainable society"3 that have been envisaged by scientists, philosophers, designers, and architects, among others. They are treated as general blueprints that are to be realized and achieved in the future. However, (...) this definition has opened ecotopian thinking to criticisms that have caused it to be rendered as irrelevant in contemporary times and considered "dead for a long time."4... (shrink)

carrington places race and racism at the center of his densely written analysis of science fiction, fantasy, utopia, and other forms of popular culture. He moves easily between a broad range of forms, which include memoirs, television series, comic books, novels, novelizations, fandom and fanzines, and short fiction and fiction circulated on the Internet. Popular culture helps us to construct notions of identity and race, and for carrington many constituent groups, notably fans, develop its key concepts and values.Speculative fiction is (...) for carrington a framework that links these various forms of popular culture. Here, SF is a genre different from literature, as it is situated closer to, and is more deeply... (shrink)

Anderswo im Anderswann–Autofiktion als Utopie21.–23.03.2018 im Tagungshotel Schloss Gnadenthal, KleveDr. Yvonne Delhey, Prof. Dr. Rolf Parr und Dr. Kerstin Wilhelms Ihre Gemeinsamkeiten offenbaren die Konzepte der Utopie und der Autofiktion erst auf einenzweiten Blick. Die Utopie beschreibt–zumindest im alltagssprachlichen Verständnis–einenin die Zukunft projizierten gesellschaftlichen Gegenentwurf. Die Utopie [gr. oὐ und τóπoς,‚nicht', ‚Ort'] ist der Nicht-Ort, ein fi ktionales Produkt. Die Autofiktion wiederum hat ihrenUrsprung zwar in der Autobiographieforschung, adressiert im Gegensatz zur an Authentizitätund...

In a striking formulation, Ophélie Siméon describes her study as “an intellectual biography through a sense of place”. The subject of the intellectual biography is Robert Owen, the enlightened manufacturer turned universal reformer—and the father of British socialism. The place is the New Lanark Mills, the idyllic Clydeside factory village Owen superintended from 1800 to 1825. Owen’s spectacular entrepreneurial and humanitarian successes as a paternalistic manager served as the springboard for his subsequent career as a radical activist and socialist pioneer. (...) Concomitantly, the prosperity and happiness of the New Lanark community during his tenure provided “a founding myth of British socialism”.... (shrink)

Jason Lagapa’s Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry tackles a question that has been a difficult one to address for critics attempting to discuss contemporary experimental poetry in the line of “ Language writing.” This is a tradition that claims to be politically engaged but which nevertheless does not tend explicitly to exhort its readers to take concrete political actions. How can we thus judge this poetry’s political efficacy when there are no clear or obvious political actions (...) associated with it? Lagapa’s recourse to negative theology and utopian thought tells us that we should pay close attention to matters... (shrink)

The question of the true nature of justice, whether as a conventional product of human action and human limitations or as a universal ideal, is one that has inspired philosophical debate since Plato. In this volume a number of scholars wrestle with this question. They ask whether justice should be utopian, focused solely on the ideal, or whether just must be realist, taking into account the constraints of contemporary human existence. As the editors note in their introduction, it should come (...) as no great shock that the answer cannot rest comfortably and completely in either of these binary choices. But as in all great debates in philosophy, reaching a final answer to the question becomes much less... (shrink)

Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, first published by Yale University Press in 1979, has been the single most influential work in the history of academic science-fiction studies. As Veronica Hollinger observed: “Metamorphoses is the significant forerunner of all the major examinations of the genre”. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint make more or less the same point: “Disagreeing with him [Suvin] is a considerable part of SF scholarship—he... set... the terms by which SF has subsequently been studied”. Perhaps not quite (...) so significant for utopian studies, Metamorphoses was nonetheless a crucially important text here too. For the fundamental novelty of its argument lies in the... (shrink)