Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0223
Sangeeta Datta
abstract:This article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of the future, continuously engaged with and drawing from the past, in relation to my own creative practice as theatre and film director, curator, and singer-performer, a practice that continuously engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia. Through three case studies from the author’s creative engagement with Tagore’s utopia, the article explores (1) the building of transcultural utopias in which Tagore and Leonard Elmhirst participated and how Dartington Hall rapidly became a magnet for artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians; (2) Tagore’s opera Tasher Desh (Land of Cards, 1933), a powerful political satire on fascism/free will; and (3) the author’s feature film Life Goes On and the Tagorean construct of the absent-present mother figure.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0257
Sandeep Banerjee
abstract:This essay examines Satyajit Ray’s children’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) to interrogate the ways it signals the utopian. Contending that its utopian desire manifests through the trope of wish-fulfillment (in particular, the granting of boons), it illuminates the trope’s centrality in the film’s imagination and articulation of freedom. Moreover, the essay suggests that the film’s utopianism is also anchored in its irrealist aesthetics. Engaging with the film’s figuration of ghosts and its violation of the narrative structure of the real, the essay illuminates how these formal features inform, and are informed by, a utopian desire. Furthermore, the essay notes that despite its inherent utopianism, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne fails to resolve some of the more obdurate social contradictions in its diegetic world, especially around questions of class, gender, and caste. Arguing that these “failures” are in keeping with its utopian spirit, I suggest they draw our attention to the imperfections of our real conditions of existence and flag the limits of textual utopianism. In so doing, they refer negatively to the social field beyond pointing to the abiding importance of class struggle as the ultimate agent of transformative social change.
{"title":"Gestures of Refusal: Utopian Longings in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne","authors":"Sandeep Banerjee","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0257","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This essay examines Satyajit Ray’s children’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) to interrogate the ways it signals the utopian. Contending that its utopian desire manifests through the trope of wish-fulfillment (in particular, the granting of boons), it illuminates the trope’s centrality in the film’s imagination and articulation of freedom. Moreover, the essay suggests that the film’s utopianism is also anchored in its irrealist aesthetics. Engaging with the film’s figuration of ghosts and its violation of the narrative structure of the real, the essay illuminates how these formal features inform, and are informed by, a utopian desire. Furthermore, the essay notes that despite its inherent utopianism, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne fails to resolve some of the more obdurate social contradictions in its diegetic world, especially around questions of class, gender, and caste. Arguing that these “failures” are in keeping with its utopian spirit, I suggest they draw our attention to the imperfections of our real conditions of existence and flag the limits of textual utopianism. In so doing, they refer negatively to the social field beyond pointing to the abiding importance of class struggle as the ultimate agent of transformative social change.","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"257 - 273"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43682165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0274
Antje Daniel
abstract:Utopias in Africa is an emerging academic field. While we are witnessing an increasing number of fictional and ideological utopias, little attention is paid to lived utopias. The Green Camp Gallery Project is such a lived utopia, which predominantly strives for realizing desired future imaginations in daily practices. Localized in the urban context of Durban (South Africa), in a derelict house in the industrial area, the Green Camp strives for a “simple post-growth life,” which is closely related to nature and the philosophy of Ubuntu. In so doing, the Green Camp responds to the overlapping crisis of urbanity and offers an alternative future aspiration. The Green Camp is not perfect and it is not able to solve the deep problems of South African society, but it offers an “island” of hope and imagination in a challenging urban environment. At the same time the lived utopia reveals the agency of the urban marginalized and contradicts widespread assumptions concerning environmentalism. Based on a qualitative study, the article takes an unusual perspective by analyzing the imagination of lived utopia in an emerging utopian hotspot—Africa.
{"title":"“A simple post-growth life”: The Green Camp Gallery Project as Lived Ecotopia in Urban South Africa","authors":"Antje Daniel","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0274","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Utopias in Africa is an emerging academic field. While we are witnessing an increasing number of fictional and ideological utopias, little attention is paid to lived utopias. The Green Camp Gallery Project is such a lived utopia, which predominantly strives for realizing desired future imaginations in daily practices. Localized in the urban context of Durban (South Africa), in a derelict house in the industrial area, the Green Camp strives for a “simple post-growth life,” which is closely related to nature and the philosophy of Ubuntu. In so doing, the Green Camp responds to the overlapping crisis of urbanity and offers an alternative future aspiration. The Green Camp is not perfect and it is not able to solve the deep problems of South African society, but it offers an “island” of hope and imagination in a challenging urban environment. At the same time the lived utopia reveals the agency of the urban marginalized and contradicts widespread assumptions concerning environmentalism. Based on a qualitative study, the article takes an unusual perspective by analyzing the imagination of lived utopia in an emerging utopian hotspot—Africa.","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"274 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47150427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0291
Brian Wolfel
abstract:American Transcendentalism, as a nineteenth-century intellectual and social movement, can inform both the academic debate surrounding post-liberalism and the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global capitalism, and globalization more generally, defined the era subsequent to World War II until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The manifestation of global capitalism/globalization took place as a function of the rejection, whether conscious or unconscious, of the values embodied in American Transcendentalism as a modern reincarnation of immaterial and idealist Platonism. For example, American Transcendentalism valued renunciation (of economic consumption, dogmatic theology, and political participation), nature, and spirituality as the means for attaining an ideal personal life while also providing the building blocks for the attainment of a higher form of government and politics at the collective level. As a climactic global modern development, the COVID-19 pandemic provides empirical evidence for the diminishing returns that are inherent to the hegemonic commitment to materialist economy at the expense of corresponding devaluation of commitments to the ideals of transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson forecast the realization of such diminishing returns, in which he asserted the longevity of the impact of transcendentalism would be greater than that of the materialism in his era. Immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, American youth as a generation exhibited “transcendentalist” attributes such as decreasing commitments to religious and partisan affiliations and a trajectory of disillusionment with political participation. American Transcendentalism can be considered and applied as a source of inspiration to inform nascent deliberations on post-liberalism that invoke Platonism and the “transcendental.” In the context of the confluence of demographic changes, calls for post-liberalism, and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, transcendentalism and its prospective popular reincarnation in the twenty-first century can be applied to generate a new and heretofore hidden transcendental “end of history” narrative as an alternative to the bipolarity of the “end of history” debate (between materialist liberalism and materialist communism).
{"title":"American Transcendentalism and the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Brian Wolfel","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0291","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:American Transcendentalism, as a nineteenth-century intellectual and social movement, can inform both the academic debate surrounding post-liberalism and the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global capitalism, and globalization more generally, defined the era subsequent to World War II until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The manifestation of global capitalism/globalization took place as a function of the rejection, whether conscious or unconscious, of the values embodied in American Transcendentalism as a modern reincarnation of immaterial and idealist Platonism. For example, American Transcendentalism valued renunciation (of economic consumption, dogmatic theology, and political participation), nature, and spirituality as the means for attaining an ideal personal life while also providing the building blocks for the attainment of a higher form of government and politics at the collective level. As a climactic global modern development, the COVID-19 pandemic provides empirical evidence for the diminishing returns that are inherent to the hegemonic commitment to materialist economy at the expense of corresponding devaluation of commitments to the ideals of transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson forecast the realization of such diminishing returns, in which he asserted the longevity of the impact of transcendentalism would be greater than that of the materialism in his era. Immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, American youth as a generation exhibited “transcendentalist” attributes such as decreasing commitments to religious and partisan affiliations and a trajectory of disillusionment with political participation. American Transcendentalism can be considered and applied as a source of inspiration to inform nascent deliberations on post-liberalism that invoke Platonism and the “transcendental.” In the context of the confluence of demographic changes, calls for post-liberalism, and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, transcendentalism and its prospective popular reincarnation in the twenty-first century can be applied to generate a new and heretofore hidden transcendental “end of history” narrative as an alternative to the bipolarity of the “end of history” debate (between materialist liberalism and materialist communism).","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"291 - 316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44831579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0206
B. Bagchi
abstract:This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anti-colonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore (1930) and Gandhi (1931), especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article shows how British Christian and Quaker utopians and Indian utopians cooperated with each other. The article excavates the utopian experiments of Corder Catchpool, also a Quaker, in Darwen, Lancashire, where Gandhi stayed. Religion should be accorded an important place in our understanding of utopia, the article argues. A human propensity to create a paradoxical sense of futurity that does not negate the past, one that Tagore highlights in The Religion of Man (1931), is found in all the utopians discussed.
本文以印度诗人泰戈尔、反殖民主义政治家甘地和英国基督教活动家安德鲁斯为中心，探讨了20世纪初印度和英国对未来的跨文化乌托邦想象。本文以泰戈尔(1930年)和甘地(1931年)的两次英国之行，特别是他们对伯明翰伍德布鲁克贵格会学院的访问，以及甘地对兰开夏郡的访问为出发点，展示了英国基督教和贵格会乌托邦与印度乌托邦是如何相互合作的。这篇文章挖掘了科德·卡奇普尔(Corder Catchpool)的乌托邦实验，他也是一名贵格会教徒，住在兰开夏郡的达文(Darwen)，甘地住过的地方。文章认为，宗教应该在我们理解乌托邦的过程中占有重要地位。泰戈尔在《人的宗教》(the Religion of Man, 1931)中强调，人类倾向于创造一种矛盾的未来感，而这种未来感并不否定过去，这种倾向在所有讨论过的乌托邦主义者身上都能找到。
{"title":"Transcultural Utopian Imagination and the Future: Tagore, Gandhi, Andrews, and India–Britain Entanglements in the Early 1930s","authors":"B. Bagchi","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0206","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article focuses on the transcultural utopian imaginings of futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, anti-colonial politician M. K. Gandhi, and British Christian activist C. F. Andrews at the center. Homing in on two trips made to England by Tagore (1930) and Gandhi (1931), especially their visits to Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, and on Gandhi’s visit to Lancashire, the article shows how British Christian and Quaker utopians and Indian utopians cooperated with each other. The article excavates the utopian experiments of Corder Catchpool, also a Quaker, in Darwen, Lancashire, where Gandhi stayed. Religion should be accorded an important place in our understanding of utopia, the article argues. A human propensity to create a paradoxical sense of futurity that does not negate the past, one that Tagore highlights in The Religion of Man (1931), is found in all the utopians discussed.","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"206 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44735497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0346
B. Bagchi
{"title":"Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony by Sandeep Banerjee (review)","authors":"B. Bagchi","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.2.0346","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"346 - 349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44649120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0036
Marcin Pomarański
abstract:The beginning of the twentieth century was a period of an intense development of technological utopia. The advancement of the natural sciences at that time provided scholars and thinkers with a new perspective and a better tool for getting to know the universe. Thanks to this, utopian visions created at that time were more daring and ambitious than their predecessors. It is no coincidence that the first cosmic utopias were created at this time, positioning ideal communities outside the earth. Russian authors Alexander Bogdanov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky stand out among the creators of such utopias. These two renowned scientists, considered pioneers in their respective areas, presented within the span of slightly more than a decade surprisingly similar visions, one of them taking place on Mars and the other in the cosmic space. What sets the two narratives apart is the role they attribute to science and technology. Regardless of the fact that both utopias are characterized by a high level of scientific development and technological advancement, the scientific-technological factor is a vital determinant of the idealized community in only one of them. The key to understanding this discrepancy may be found in the works of British writer H. G. Wells.
{"title":"Science and Technology in Russian Cosmic Utopias from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Alexander Bogdanov","authors":"Marcin Pomarański","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0036","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The beginning of the twentieth century was a period of an intense development of technological utopia. The advancement of the natural sciences at that time provided scholars and thinkers with a new perspective and a better tool for getting to know the universe. Thanks to this, utopian visions created at that time were more daring and ambitious than their predecessors. It is no coincidence that the first cosmic utopias were created at this time, positioning ideal communities outside the earth. Russian authors Alexander Bogdanov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky stand out among the creators of such utopias. These two renowned scientists, considered pioneers in their respective areas, presented within the span of slightly more than a decade surprisingly similar visions, one of them taking place on Mars and the other in the cosmic space. What sets the two narratives apart is the role they attribute to science and technology. Regardless of the fact that both utopias are characterized by a high level of scientific development and technological advancement, the scientific-technological factor is a vital determinant of the idealized community in only one of them. The key to understanding this discrepancy may be found in the works of British writer H. G. Wells.","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"36 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44211180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0179
Tim Waterman
{"title":"Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common","authors":"Tim Waterman","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0179","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43560376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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