Editors’ Message

Welcome 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 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 common land ownership. These scenarios represent a more “moderate” path toward social equality, Morris argues, than the more radical economic leveling proposed by the likes of Edward Bellamy or, indeed, Sir Thomas More.This issue’s CRITICAL FORUM developed out of a conference panel that took place at the University of Brighton’s USS Conference in 2022. This FORUM’s curator, Laurence Davis, notes that the original conference invitation to Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies, “suggested that utopia can be a catalyst for transformative change only if the study of utopia(s) is itself open, or ‘opened,’ to radical influences” and to more diverse voices and perspectives. Starting out with two questions—“Where do you see the value of utopian studies in our dark times?”; and “How can utopia and utopianism inspire activism and political changes?”—Davis and the other contributors developed another, slightly different question: “What might need to change in the field for utopian studies potentially be such a catalyst?” The final result is this FORUM “conversation” among six established and early career scholars. With an introduction by Davis, contributions follow from Antonis Balasopoulos (“Two Cheers for Blueprints”), Caroline Edwards (“Hope Draped in Black”), Julia Ramírez Blanco (“Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a Prompt”), Adam Stock (“Funding Utopia”), and Heather Alberro (“Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon”). As these titles might suggest, the FORUM looks both backward and, especially, forward; after a solid fifty years as an academic field dominated by Anglo-European scholarship, new directions in utopian studies are clearly opening up and are long overdue. The format of this FORUM is itself designed to “keep open” to resistances, critiques, or provocations: thus, the initial set of six essays is followed by responses from four of the FORUM contributors, addressed to one another, and inviting both themselves and of course ourselves to think through differences, agreements, and implications for future dialogue and work, both scholarly and activist.The DESIRE LINES section follows, with two contributions focusing on instantiations of utopian visual art. First, Miriam Rowntree, in “The Noble Impermanence of Waystations,” muses on an unusual and fanciful work of speculative installation art featured at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, near Gate 14. The installation, “Interimaginary Departures,” invites airport travelers to receive a ticket, based on “a series of whimsical questions” that will take them to “their mythical utopia.” Rowntree tries it out—and muses on how this experiment recast her own actual experience of travel from Austin to Rome and influenced, too, the way she reads stories involving utopian travel-narratives and other “flights” of imagination.The second DESIRE LINE comes from Alan Marshall, whose “Design Fictions Using Fiction” describes a fanciful project of Marshall’s own. Using what he calls “the literary method of urban design,” Marshall shares his own artistic renderings of “real-world cities set far in the future, each presented in utopian terms.” The design of each of these speculative future locales is based upon a specific literary work. The intriguing results of Future London, Future Moscow, Future Cuenca, and Future Budapest, which are reproduced here in this issue, are also featured at an exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany. As an invited artist, Marshall contributed 100 works for a special exhibition entitled “Ways to Utopia: Life Between Desire and Crisis” (running from April 1, 2023, to January 29, 2024).The BOOK REVIEWS section brings together six recent monographs and the new Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (reviewed by Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor), highlighting the historical depth of research currently being undertaken in utopian studies. The section showcases studies that work to revise and expand dominant canons of science fiction, such as Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (reviewed by Barnita Bagchi) and Jing Jiang’s Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction (reviewed by Yingying Huang). New books by Rhiannon Firth, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, and Kevin J. Hayes demonstrate the significance of utopian studies and utopian theory to such vibrant areas of research as social movement studies, the medical humanities, and book studies. Finally, Caroline Edwards’s Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (reviewed by Mark Schmitt) makes a critical contribution to utopian theory that promises to shape scholarship published in our journal for years to come.The issue concludes with CONFERENCE BRIEFINGS on four spring 2023 conferences. First, Laurie Fuller, Jenna N. Hanchey, and E Ornelas (“Existence as Resistance”) report on the forty-sixth WisCon (2023), detailing how in both its structure and content, WisCon strives for “the creation of liberatory futures in the here and now” through SFF. Next, Ilenia Vittoria Casmiri (“Ecological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing”) shifts the focus to the interdisciplinary study of environmental sustainability. The 2023 annual conference of the ECHIC (European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres) took up the vast topic of “climate apocalypse.” Various possible visions of “a desirable future world” were glimpsed through a diverse set of lenses including food studies and security, models of governance, planetarity, communications via the arts, literature, and the media. The third briefing calls our attention to a form of utopian thought currently gaining tremendous popularity: solarpunk. Ariel Kroon and Kees Schuller (“From Imagination to Action”) report on The Solarpunk Conference, which gathered a group of utopian thinkers who, as the briefing authors explain, are typically “unfamiliar” with the academic history and tradition of utopian writing, and coming up therefore with solarpunk futures that are often radically different and open. The BRIEFINGS section closes with a synopsis of The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-COVID Times, a conference co-sponsored by the University of Huelva (Spain), and the University of Calgary (Canada). Pedro Mora-Ramírez, María Amo-Hernández, and Paula García-Rodríguez (“Answering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures”) speak to the conference’s focus on the “relationship of utopianism to capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, gender and posthumanism,” in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featured speakers included award-winning fiction writer Larissa Lai (The Tiger Flu; Salt Fish Girl); and SF scholar Sherryl Vint. This expansion of the CONFERENCE BRIEFINGS section of Utopian Studies signals our interest in keeping the readership up to date on the latest scholarly and public-facing conversations regarding the vitality of utopian thinking and expression, beyond the pages of journals or books.You are invited to be in touch with ideas you might have for stand-alone journal articles, as well as for a CRITICAL FORUM or a DESIRE LINES contribution. In addition, do not hesitate to notify us of any new monographs or essay collections related to utopian, dystopian and speculative literatures, as well as upcoming conferences you would like to see covered. Please be in touch with us by email at utopianstudies2024@gmail.com.

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