Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor

Welcome to Utopian Studies 36.2, with this uncharacteristically short message from the Editorial Team. This is a special issue on the topic of afrotopias, compiled by Guest Editors Antje Daniel (University of Vienna), Magnus Echtler (University of Bayreuth), and Melina Kalfenis (University of Bayreuth). In following the previous issue on Queer Utopias (issue 36.1) this afrotopias issue extends the editors' welcoming of contemporary critical perspectives that assess and challenge utopian studies as a field. Queer Utopias featured work that reconceptualizes traditional models of utopian community and of both utopian political and aesthetic theories, in light of contemporary understandings of sex, gender, the body... Read More.

It is impossible not to acknowledge at the outset that we lost one of the intellectual giants in our constellation, Fredric R. Jameson (Duke University) on September 22, 2024, at the age of ninety. It is hard to imagine what “utopian studies” would be without his decades-long interventions in Marxist political and literary theory and narratology, and his particular devotion to the now vibrant state (and to the status, finally) of science-fiction studies and utopian studies, to which he contributed such deep theoretical heft. In the next year Utopian Studies is planning a special issue on the legacy of Jameson to utopian studies specifically. The guest editor of this issue is Editorial Board member Phillip E. Wegner... Read More.

We open by acknowledging the passing of one of our Advisory Board members, Dr. Ronald R. Creagh, Professor Emeritus at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, who died on September 8, 2023, at the age of ninety-four. A sociologist and historian, Dr. Creagh was a very prolific and much-admired author and activist, best known for his many publications on anarchism, libertarianism, utopianism, and American intentional communities. Utopian Studies is grateful for his wide-ranging work, his political commitment, and his service to the journal over many years.You have in your hands (or on your screen) a substantial (and we hope exciting) double issue of Utopian Studies. In addition to seven regular articles, you will... Read More.

This issue of Utopian Studies represents a journal milestone: thirty-five years of publication. Our gift to ourselves is the expansion of our editorial team, with Associate Editor Christian P. Haines overseeing the Critical Forum section of the journal. He is already at work on the Forum for the upcoming special issue on Queer Utopias (vol. 36, no. 1). An associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Christian specializes in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to today, but his research and teaching interests extend to the environmental humanities, game studies, literary theory and continental philosophy, Marxism—and utopian studies. His first book is A Desire Called... Read More.

White Power and American Neoliberal Culture, by utopian studies scholars Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan, feels like a tour de force. I say "feels" for a reason: if you live in America, what you read in this book feels entirely familiar, sketching out U.S. racialized socio-political dynamics. But I also experienced a feeling of uncanniness, as Ventura and Chan expose the underbelly of a white supremacist United States—in which I happen to live. I have not read so clear and so well historicized an account of the kinds of events that prompt me to say, almost nightly, "This country is insane." The book does not change that opinion—but it does do something else: it makes sense of the insanity. It is a diagnosis of... Read More.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Last Man by Mary ShelleyJennifer A. Wagner-LawlorMary Shelley. The Last Man. 1826. Edited by Chris Washington. Norton Critical Editions. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023. xxiv + 571 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9780393887822.New critical editions of well-known literary works serve several important functions, and those designed specifically for students serve two of the most important: to introduce readers to texts that were overlooked during and since the author’s time, but that might find greater favor today; and to re-introduce to a new generation of students classic texts that have lost critical favor or been neglected. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is a novel long overshadowed by brilliance and resilient legacy of her first novel, Frankenstein (1818), written at a mere eighteen years of age. As so often happened to nineteenth-century women who published under their own names, both Frankenstein and The Last Man were hammered critically by male reviewers (and often by the few female ones) unable to believe any woman, and certainly no “good” woman, could compose these stories. And by 1826, Mary Shelley had already gained notoriety thanks to her association with the radical politics and “free-loving” Shelley-Byron circle). No wonder then that contemporaneous reviewers—even as they brought themselves to compliment the narratological and formal accomplishment the novel represents—could not countenance either its content or its author, as the novel “violated” certain forms of literary and gender propriety: indeed, the novel was deemed the product of a “diseased imagination” (The Monthly Review).Modern assessments of the novel are far more admiring of Shelley’s sophisticated examination of national and cultural mythic structuralizations, and receptive to the boldness of Shelley’s profoundly ironical assessments of them. In this new Norton Critical Edition of The Last Man, Chris Washington comes to the text with a refreshingly undeferential approach to Shelley’s Romantic forebears and immediate companions. Not because they [End Page 582] deserve being knocked off their pedestals, but because—granting all that—Shelley’s text has a lot more to give to us. This is the first time the Norton Critical Edition series has produced an annotated critical edition of The Last Man (Broadview’s appeared in 1996), and it is therefore both welcome and well overdue. For this reader, The Last Man is in some ways arguably superior to Frankenstein, certainly better written and developed. Frankenstein packs the greater punch, but The Last Man picks up and reweaves, on a much larger loom, the same thematic threads: justice and judgment; hospitality and generosity; family love and ethical obligation to community and nation; “civilized” and “wild” spaces. These themes are figured not only in terms of landscape but also in terms of geopolitical organization (i.e., the West vs. “the East,” presumed source of the virus); the bounded- vs. unbound-ness of the creative imagination (also tied to cultural notions of civilization and wilderness); solitude and loneliness; alienness and otherness; alienation and self-alienation and/as dehumanization; the human and the posthuman. While part of Frankenstein’s greatness is its narrative concision and stylistic spareness, the greatness of The Last Man, written by the more mature writer, intellectually and technically (and without the interference of Percy Shelley), is how fully Shelley “fleshes out” those entanglements in this later novel.Setting aside therefore the inclusion of “the usual suspects” (xx) of earlier editions, Washington gives space to critical approaches that are not focused so intensely on the influences of Shelley’s biography. In an excellent introduction Washington emphasizes the various ways in which this novel opens up to (still) intractable political and human rights issues: slavery, imperialism, nonheteronormative genders and sexualities, and precarious lives.Washington addresses particularly what Shelley’s text has to offer—and does offer—to today’s students. He shares his own experience of teaching this novel during COVID times, finding the students, used to speed of communication and multimedia delivery, resistant initially to the narrative’s pacing, and reintroducing them to the pleasures of the slow build-up of plot and setting, as well as the excruciating tension of watching a slow-burn approach to seemingly unavoidable catastrophe. But Washington rejects...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantWelcome to Utopian Studies 34.3, the final issue for 2023. We want to start by thanking subscribers (and of course authors!) for their patience as this new editorial team has worked its way, together, through a new “look” and a new format for the journal. This issue reflects all these changes, with a balance of academic articles, an important Critical Forum, several Desire Lines contributions, Book Reviews, and Conference Briefings.The first three stand-alone articles share an interest in the strategic variations of genre and medium that make utopian and dystopian studies so rich. In “No Exit: Death Drive, Dystopia, and the Long Winter of the American Dream in Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest,” author Eric Smith features director/actor Harold Ramis’s filmic utopia/dystopia “dyad,” Groundhog Day (1993) and The Ice Harvest (2005), which bookmark a long decade’s worth of economic and political change in the United States. Focusing particularly on “noir” aspects of the later film, Smith traces Ramis’s “strategic reactivation” of film noir as a medium-specific variant of Tom Moylan’s definition of the critical dystopia. The following article, “The Social Prison: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as Post-Anarchist Critical Dystopia” by David Miller, also locates a “strategic reactivation,” this time through the deployment of tropes of carcerality. Positioning the novel’s preoccupation with imprisonment within anarchists’ “longstanding critical engagement” with prisons as state apparatus, Miller argues that Le Guin deftly recalls to us the utopian register of anarchism. Tracing dystopian themes and images of carceral justice through the novel, Miller demonstrates that Le Guin points the reader “toward an open-ended politics of continuous process” that might lead toward a freer society.Peter Sinnema (re)introduces a “long-neglected” work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s Upsidonia (1915). Taking a cue from Karl Marx’s observation that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” Sinnema reads Marshall’s text as a farce, and tracks Marshall’s deployment of farce’s “essential maneuvers” of [End Page viii] return and repetition. In staging an “upsidonia” reversal of capitalist principles and relations as “serious buffoonery” (Marx), Marshall’s critique of contemporaneous capitalist formations, argues Sinnema, also places into relief an alternative political model—the one that Marx advanced. In short, this article explores a third formal or generic “strategy.”The final two articles follow Sinnema’s in focusing on utopian literature’s engagement with economic thought. Signe Leth Gammelgaard brings to our attention a Swedish classic by Karin Boye, the dystopian novel Kallocain (1940), which few anglophone scholars are aware of. Beyond detailing the novel’s close engagement with contemporaneous economic thinkers, Gammelgaard also makes a case for our closer attention to interwar dystopian literature’s engagement with economic thought, including mathematics and statistics, a perspective too often overshadowed by the increasingly dark domain of European and global politics and political thought. Contextualizing Kallocain within the early theorizing of the Scandinavian welfare state, Gammelgaard sees this novel as exemplary of the kinds of critique “centered around the citizen’s emotional and interior lives in new planned communities.” Broadening the argument regarding the important role of economic thought and planning in dystopian writing during that period of political peril, Gammelgaard concludes that “new lines of critical inquiry regarding literary texts from the interwar period” are overdue.Finally, Donald Morris investigates three likely more familiar texts from just before and after the turn of the century: Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland (1891), Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland: The Old New Land (1902), and H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905). Morris charts these authors’ common interests in “easing” the effects of wealth disparities that cause social unrest—particularly the increase in rates of poverty. The three novels present alternative “scenarios” in which these disparities are recalibrated, as it were, using a similar set of tools: education, universal healthcare, social safety nets, fiscal transparency, confiscatory estate taxes, and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantThis second issue of Utopian Studies 34 comprises a variety of historically and theoretically grounded contributions, ranging in time and place from medieval Persia to Cold War America to contemporary global media culture. The issue opens with a surprising look back at utopian myth-making... by the U.S. frozen food industry. Author Justin Nordstrom reads a 1954 short story, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which foresees global cooperation, new technologies, and the emancipation of women from domestic labor—all thanks to the advent of frozen meals and microwave cooking. Nordstrom demonstrates how this “frozen fantasy” of the Cold War period reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs (from Cockaigne to Bellamy)—but also challenges their essential arguments.The next several articles reach back in time, first to twelfth-century Persia. In “Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (‘Belisa’) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked,” author Kaveh Hemmat revaluates the role of the medieval epic Kushnameh, as an anticipation of later utopian sources connected to Islamic political theory. Hemmat argues that the epic’s focus on the formative processes that make its “quasi-fictional” society of Besila possible results in an important precursor to More’s sixteenth-century text. The “invention” of the utopian genre may have deep roots, the author concludes, in the Kushnameh, with its interest in the development of a paradisiacal city, its articulation of universal monotheism, and its focus on geographical knowledge and travel.The geographical character of the island of Utopia is the subject of Chun Liang Lin and Mark Hansley Chua’s article, “Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden.” Participating in the longtime scholarly effort to “map” More’s island nation, the authors report on a mapping experiment that attempts to understand the geomorphology of Utopia according to metaphorical ideals of Renaissance humanism, rather than through mathematical calculation.“An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism” by Georgie Newson focuses on the seventeenth-century British philosopher’s proposal for a new “universal language” for use by scholars, travelers, diplomats and others during an expansionist era of exploration and trade. Newsom reclaims the “Essay” as “legitimately” utopian, contesting earlier critical dismissals of it as such and instead claiming it as an early example of what she calls [End Page vi] “info-utopianism.” An info-utopian tendency can be located in a number of other early modern utopian works, the article contends, and it concludes with implications for contemporary utopian theory.The next two essays look toward anticipations of, and responses to, future crisis society: Rafael Baquero asks us to revisit the understudied contributions of Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, to contemporary efforts within the Marxist tradition to reclaim utopian Hope. By exploring Sánchez Vasquez’s Philosophy of Praxis and by highlighting its anthropological assumptions, this study demonstrates the extent to which his works provide theoretical underpinnings and resources for contesting contemporary discourses on the “end of history” and for recovering utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Finally, literary scholar M. Keith Booker revisits the stunningly drawn global posthuman world(ing) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in his article, “A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.” Booker argues that despite the twenty-third-century postapocalyptic setting, the text offers clear elements of hope and “utopian energies,” driven particularly, he argues, by “the motif of genetic engineering,” which opens up possibilities of a more enlightened politics, and of new kinds of relationality between the human and more-than-human world.The second half of this issue marks the appearance of several new Utopian Studies sections. We are delighted to launch The Critical Forum and Desire Lines. The Critical Forum is a space for critical conversation in a “bloc” of essays addressing together a specific theoretical problematic related to utopian, dystopian, and speculative texts or thought. The first Forum features four essays that emerged from a two-day...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantThis issue of Utopian Studies: The Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies comes to you under new editorial leadership. Before introducing ourselves, I wish first of all to extend thanks to former editor Dr. Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University), who served the journal for fourteen years. Her consistent attention to the best scholarship in utopian studies throughout her editorial tenure is deeply appreciated by all who have worked in the field.As a long-time member and former president of the Society for Utopian Studies, I have been engaged for thirty years in utopian studies, mostly from a literary perspective, and mostly focusing on feminist and queer utopian theory and expression. As a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, I am within walking distance of the University Libraries’ Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection, housed within Eberly Family Special Collections Library in University Park since 2003. To this day, the Lewis Utopia Collection continues to expand its holdings of literary and historical texts pertaining to utopian and dystopian thought and literatures, as well as science fiction and related forms of speculative world-making.I am joined by a new Assistant Editor, Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, who has just published her first book, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (2022). As one of a “new generation” of utopianists, her influence on the development of the journal will be quickly apparent: don’t be surprised to learn about a podcast series on utopia; or about new kinds of short writing that may join the standard academic article. She is also an award-winning scholar whose work on feminist utopian literature engages women’s and gender studies, disability studies, medical humanities, and critical archival and recovery practices.We are also joined by a new Book Review Editor, Dr. A. Elisabeth Reichel, assistant professor of American Studies at Osnabrück University. She is the author of Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship [End Page vi] of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict (2021), and it was the poetry and anthropology of Ursula K. Le Guin that first drew her into utopian studies. She brings to the journal a keen interest in questions of economic justice and the significance of utopian literatures to ideas about economic freedom and collective economic living. Finally, we welcome Manuel Sousa Oliveira as Editorial Assistant. Manuel is a Ph.D. student at the University of Porto.This new leadership is signaled by a new cover design for the Utopian Studies journal. The cover features a modern stylization of the Kesh Gyre of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), set against a sunrise fade in the background. The original gyre symbol is reproduced inside the journal, opposite the contents page. We feel that this symbol represents a kind of feminist hope, a symbol of possibility, and a sign of new beginnings and community. These are all values we hope to embody during our editorial tenure. They are things the world needs more of right now. We wish to thank Theo Downes-Le Guin, the youngest son of Ursula K. Le Guin; Margaret Chodos, artist for the artwork of Always Coming Home, including the Kesh Gyre; and the Ursula Le Guin estate for graciously offering permission to feature this image of the late writer’s world-building in our pages.Utopian Studies also enjoys a new editorial description, the text of which you can find on the journal’s Penn State University Press webpage:Now in its thirty-fourth year of publication, Utopian Studies: The Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies publishes scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects related to: utopia and dystopias; utopianism in any creative medium; utopian theory, including political and economic theory; and intentional communities. While retaining the journal’s unique interest in the history of utopia, dystopia, and their expressions in aesthetic and political movements, the new editors are eager to receive submissions offering...

While the words “utopia” and “anticipation” frequently appear together in discussions of the concepts of utopia and dystopia, little attention to the relationship of Anticipation Studies to utopian studies exists. Moreover, the relevance of literature and the arts to Anticipation Studies seems almost invisible. This essay focuses on the structuring of the original utopian narrative, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, in order to understand how this seminal text conceptualizes utopia’s relation to past, present, and future. This analysis focuses on the complex framing devices characteristic of utopian narrative, as well as its open-endedness. The embedding of narratives sets up the dynamic movement between past, present, and future – the various forms of temporality – that allows us to clarify the nature of utopian anticipation.Throughout the chapter, I attempt to connect utopian textual and conceptual theory to specific concepts in the emerging field of Anticipation Studies, with which Utopian Studies, a long-established interdisciplinary field, have not yet engaged. Of particular interest is the notion, promoted by Miguel Abensour, that utopia is always a disruption and thus not an anticipation in any “natural” or logical sense: “what matters is the orientation toward what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now” : 407, 2008). From this premise, we can reintroduce a neglected literary term from science fiction theorist, Darko Suvin: the novum. The eruption of a future from a point of radical alterity – an ontological accident – opens up radical implication for the nature of utopian anticipation and futurity.Finally the essay suggests that Robert Poli’s and Robert Rosen’s description of an anticipatory system as comprising “the predictive model of itself” within the genre’s formal characteristics is in fact present in the structure of the utopian narratives: that is, that the persistence of utopia – as a literary genre and as a political concept – inheres in the narratological structuring of the possibility of another story and another listener. Utopian narrative thus ultimately anticipates not only temporal relationality, but an ethical relation between the outside narrator, the utopian traveler/narrator, and the reader. It anticipates another story.

It is a common socio-moral practice to appeal to reasons as a guiding force for one’s actions. However, it is an intriguing possibility that this practice is based on fiction: reasons cannot or do not motivate the majority of actions—especially moral ones. Rather, pre-reflective evaluative processes are likely responsible for moral actions. Such a view faces two major challenges: i.) pre-reflective judgements are commonly thought of as inflexible in nature, and thus they cannot be the cause of the varied judgements people rely on in everyday life, and ii.) if reflective reason-based judgements do not play a strong causative role in judgement, why do people rely on the articulation of reasons in their moral practices? We argue that the pre-reflective judgements motivating moral actions are embodied in nature. The experience of the rightness of an action that drives a person to act depends on the sensorimotor interactions that have cultivated an agent’s perspective on the world. These interactions are embedded in relational contexts, relative to which judgements are individuated. Because of this relational embeddedness they are more flexible than they are commonly thought to be, enabling us to explain the variety of human behavior by appealing to them. The Anglo-European practice of appealing to reason as if they were propositional belief-statements motivating actions can be accounted for as nothing more than an idiosyncratic way of constructing narratives to clarify and express the relational context of intentional actions.

The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was to compensate for the absence of a programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity.