Utopian Studies

abstract:

This article addresses the question of the actuality of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia by arguing for the centrality within More’s text of the question of forcibly displaced and economically “surplused” populations. Drawing upon Gramsci, this article posits the fundamental role of a dialectic between population and traumatic disaster in More’s text and the genre at large. After engaging with the most direct sign of this dialectic in Utopia, this article posits three interpretative advantages to reading it as a “fiction of population”: Such a reading, first, allows for an understanding of the logical consistency of the relationship between Hythlodaeus’s critique of the Tudor penal system in the first book and the highly disciplinary character of the Utopian society envisioned in the second; second, helps us grasp the existence of a similar logical continuity between the denunciation of European geopolitical rapacity (book 1) and the advocacy of Utopian colonialism as rational and just (book 2); and finally, problematizes the interpretive binary that posits Utopia as either a progressive/emancipatory or a fundamentally conservative/repression-laden work. It concludes by returning to the paradoxical nature of Utopia’s actuality, dwelling on its proximity to and distance from our own historical moment’s confrontation with the question of surplused lives.