Abstract
The following chapter contextualizes utopianism, taking Thomas More’s Utopia and early modern Europe as the starting point of utopianism as we know it today. It furthermore argues that studying utopianism cannot solely rely on content (what the new society would look like) but needs to consider the utopian form (how this new society is described). The idea of closure plays a pivotal role for the utopian imagination. By this ‘utopian formalism,’ literature on utopian practice is here revealed to offer comments on how to think ‘outside’ the contemporary systemic order and in how far this is even considered possible. The second subchapter offers a cursory overview of the European ‘utopian’ history of North America up until the American Revolution, establishing that utopia, as we know it, is heavily entangled with modern nationhood and imperialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Right-wing, White supremacist utopias and dystopias are a fascinating topic, although reading them can certainly be fatiguing. To my knowledge, this field has yet to be studied in depth. Taking online publications into account, Lyman Tower Sargent speculated in a talk on “Themes in U.S. Eutopias and Dystopias in the Twenty-First Century” (2016) that the right-wing utopia may be the fastest-growing segment of literary utopias, which underlines the importance of further research. Michael Orth’s “Reefs on the Right: Fascist Politics in Contemporary Libertarian Utopias” (1990) and Peter Fitting’s “Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia” (1991) offer a starting point. Kenneth M. Roemer notes that blatant White supremacism was common in late nineteenth-century utopias (Roemer 1976, 71; see also Chap. 5). Fitting draws attention to one problem regarding studying right-wing utopias: researchers are often reluctant to label right-wing literary utopias (as well as right-wing utopian communities) utopian because they think of utopianism as a feminist, and/or left-wing tool; hence, they do not want to apply utopian theory to these phenomena.
- 2.
Parks, monasteries, vacation resorts, cemeteries, and a range of other places designed by humans link to utopianism, a point that Michel Foucault persuasively argued in “Of Other Spaces” (1967) but they are not utopian as such. As Foucault speculates, all societies are structured to include different spaces, some of which resemble utopias to a certain degree and thus are ‘Other,’ so-called heterotopia s.
- 3.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica rang in the Enlightenment in 1687, one and a half centuries after More was beheaded in 1535.
- 4.
In order to illustrate this idea of utopian harmony that amounts to the absence of dramatic elements, Robert Elliott relates the following story (which he, in turn, took from Michael Harrington in Cacotopias and Utopias; Ferry et al. 1965): “at a writers’ conference in Moscow in the early 1930s André Malraux caused consternation by rising to ask, ‘What happens in a classless society when a streetcar runs over a beautiful girl?’ Gorky was hauled out of a sick-bed to deliver the answer, arrived at after a long debate: in a planned and classless society, a streetcar would not run over a beautiful girl. Years before, Etienne Cabet’s Icarians had come to similar conclusions; they had a law decreeing that there should be no accidents to pedestrians, whether caused by horses, vehicles, or anything whatever” (1970, 79).
- 5.
In A Modern Utopia (1905), the British author H.G. Wells criticized utopian conventions, taking issue with their tendency to stasis and their flat characters in particular: “The utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowhere and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. … But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic …. This is the first, most generalized difference between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time” (xvi).
- 6.
I myself could have never put it this smoothly and thank Kristina Baudemann for sharing this turn of phrase in a conversation.
- 7.
To illustrate how utopias relate to the historical context of their creation, scholars like to draw on the image of the mirror. For example, Michel Foucault argues that utopias “have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down” (1967, 24). Lyman Tower Sargent writes that “utopia is a mirror to the present designed to bring out flaws, a circus or funfair mirror in reverse” (2010, xiii).
- 8.
I develop this idea from various comments made by utopian scholars, specifically Dohra Ahmad, Antoine Hatzenberger, and Fredric Jameson. In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson does not explicitly consider such self-referential commentary in literary utopias. However, his analysis of the symbolic closure in literary utopias implies that form and content are intertwined to the point where they stand in for one another: “to confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition, and in which the break that simultaneously secures the radical difference of the new Utopian society makes it impossible to imagine” (2005, 85–86, my emphasis). The secession that occurs in utopian narratives (such as the trench that created Utopia) then symbolizes the act of creating, that is, trying to imagine, the no place. A similar parallel is drawn by Antoine Hatzenberger in “Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia” (2003): “When reflecting on the question of the frontiers of utopia, it is necessary to engage with the problem of its limits—in the two senses of the term. Drawing the boundaries too sharply is indeed a way to avoid addressing some important difficulties intrinsic to the communication between a community and that which lies outside and to the implementation of principles of justice in international relations. Following the theorists who reflect today on how democracy can be better institutionalized on a global level, and on how to create a global citizenship, utopians should consider this possible opportunity for expanding the framework of utopia” (126).
- 9.
- 10.
A related oversight can be observed in literary and cultural studies, which took considerable time to acknowledge futurisms and utopianisms in African American and Native American literature, for instance.
- 11.
Early exceptions to the erasure of Black utopian practice are Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published study on Africatown (2018), Sadie Smathers Patton’s The Kingdom of the Happy Land (1957) on the settlement of that name (1865–ca. 1900), Promiseland by Elizabeth Rauh Bethel (1981) on Promiseland, South Carolina (1870–ongoing), and William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease’s Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (1963). For more recent studies on utopian practice outside of the White privilege paradigm consider, for example, Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (2005). Charles Price et al. (2008) have discussed the Ghost Dance movement, the Rastafari, and the long-durée Maya movement as utopian. The collection West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (2012) includes an essay that views the Occupation of Alcatraz by a pan-Indigenous group of activists as utopian practice (Stone 2012), while another considers the communalism of the Black Panthers (Spencer 2012). Nele Sawallisch (2016) touches upon the subject in her work on Black people moving to Canada in the nineteenth century, for example, by discussing the Dawn settlement in Ontario (founded 1841). Very recently, Lyman Tower Sargent (2020) has compiled an extensive overview of African American utopianisms, including utopian practice, which may provide a useful starting point for those who want to contribute further to the field. Freedmen’s towns and settlements by Exodusters certainly merit further investigation and discussion, and such research will likely yield more examples of African American utopian practice.
- 12.
For this reason, I am reluctant to haphazardly apply a utopian framework to Native American settlements here without an alternative genealogy. I offer some small tentative suggestions on the complicated relationship between Native American cultures and utopianism in Chaps. 6 and 8. There, I am also pointing to scholars who have more fruitfully pondered the issue.
- 13.
There are, of course, exceptions to this observation: Feminist utopian communities do exist. Those in the Womyn’s Land network, for example, are exclusively female.
- 14.
These numbers only serve to indicate a trend. For one, the extensive bibliography does not claim completeness. Second, it cannot factor out the racial bias of the publishing industry and archives. Third, while nationalities, as well as ethnic minorities, are listed as categories, there is no category for White, or any comparable denomination, implying White to be synonymous with US American. This connects to point number four: the author (or the ethnicity of the author) of some of the works included may be unknown and so she/he would be listed as US American. Nonetheless, the extreme disparity indicates that utopia is a genre dominated by White people, especially when considering that Lyman Tower Sargent deliberately applies a rather broad definition of utopia for this bibliography. Corroborating these findings, Kenneth Roemer describes a similar trend at the end of the nineteenth century: looking at a sample of roughly two hundred utopian texts, he observes that the authors, “with few exceptions … were Protestant, native American, white, male, and middle-aged (about fifty-years old in 1894)” (1976, 9).
- 15.
On the subject of such projections, I recommend Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (1994) and Antonis Balasopoulos’s “Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism” (2004), as well as Dejal Kadir’s Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (1992). For an insightful discussion of later English utopian visions (from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) and how they influence the stylization of the United States consult Wil Verhoeven’s Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 (2013).
- 16.
Oneida (1848–1881) was a religious utopian community in New York, famous for practicing a system of regimented polygamy called ‘Complex Marriage’ and a eugenic breeding program (stirpiculture) which scandalized outsiders. As accounts of members illustrate, John Humphrey Noyes was a manipulative leader, his teachings were a gateway for sexual exploitation, and members were subject to various powerplays by him and other leading members: see, for example, Victor Hawley’s (1843–1893) dairy, or Tirzah Miller’s (1843–1902) memoir, both published and discussed by Robert S. Fogarty under the titles Special Love/Special Sex (1994), and Desire and Duty at Oneida (2000), respectively. On the other hand, Oneida granted all members the right to refuse sexual advances, had men and women participate in its communal industry, propagated birth control via male continence, organized childcare communally and emphasized adult education. I recommend the useful compilation of primary materials Free Love in Utopia: John Humphrey Noyes and the Origin of the Oneida Community (2001) by George Noyes and Lawrence Foster. Of course, interested readers should also consider John Humphrey Noyes’s own writings.
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Adamik, V. (2020). ‘That Excellent Perfection’: A Short History of Utopia. In: In Search of the Utopian States of America. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_2
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