#CallForPapers: New Perspectives on #Hawthorne and #Utopia

#Utopias #UtopianStudies #CFP #NathanielHawthorne #Literature

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/06/05/utopian-hawthorne

What Can You Do With a 'Failed' Postmodern Utopia?

Gibellina, known as “Sicily’s Marfa,” is looking to its visionary past for a future revival.#abandoned #utopias #artoutside #art #architecturaloddities #architecture #travel #section-Articles
What Can You Do With a 'Failed' Postmodern Utopia?

What the 'future histories' of the 1920s can teach us about hope - BBC Future

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240111-how-to-avoid-seeing-the-future-as-a-dystopia

> When picturing humanity's future, dark visions are everywhere - but are there alternatives? Historian Thomas Moynihan explores what we can learn from forecasters 100 years ago.

#Utopias #Communism #Marxism #Fiction: "...[T]he reality is that the suppression of open class conflict throughout society—combined with the generally low level of hands-on knowledge of production induced by deindustrialization—has tended to impoverish the practical or functional aspect of "political thought" in general and of discourse and imagination in particular. The result is that most signals of apparent political or strategic difference are in fact little more than an index of the tastes, aesthetics, and desires prioritized by different authors and audiences occupying their different subcultural niches in the cavernous marketplace. Today's utopias therefore operate over an enormous breadth: ranging from hyperbolic tales of the permanently-embarrassed futurist ("fully automated luxury communism"), to planning schema that would channel resources and populations at the behest of aspiring technocrats ("half-earth socialism," "degrowth communism"), to folksier fairytales of city-scale "communes" popping up like little mushrooms of self-organization in the interstices of society or under the umbrella of insurrection. Some of the more fanciful visions will contain the occasional moment of lucidity, while others are wholly detached from reality.

Despite their apparent divergences, all tend to operate according to a shared logic that is utopian not because it is imaginative but because it lacks any real substance or depth. Though their forms seem multifarious, such stories cast a single shadow onto that same flat surface, off-white. In other words, these utopias are unified less by the positive content of the worlds that they envision than by the fact that they all share the same glaring absences etched onto the same fictive flatness: first and foremost, we find the absence of "politics" itself, in the sense of some strategic sequence of struggle stretched between the immediate world and the envisioned utopia..."

https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory

Hi climatejustice.social! This is my #introduction after switching over from another instance. Thanks for having me.

I'm a software developer and #anarchist (writing texts on https://transform-social.org). My interests also include #utopias and the system change required to counteract the climate crisis, #anticapitalist #economies, #psychology, #mentalhealth, #coparenting, #conflictresolution, #atheism, and #polyamory. I also post cat pictures.

I'm queer, gendernonconforming, cis, white, slightly autistic, she/her pronouns.

I write in English and German.

#MarieLaurencin’s #Queer, #Feminine #Utopias Are Gaining Renewed #recognition

Laurencin’s #subjects live in evident #harmony with #animals, and offer #tender, #queercoded #gestures of #affection to one another, and with the exception of two early #portraits, #men are nowhere to be found.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Entertainment #TheArts #Painting #Representation #Culture

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-marie-laurencins-queer-feminine-utopias-gaining-renewed-recognition

Ok #fediBeer folks, has anyone done the #samuelAdams Utopias limited edition bottle?

Got a chance to buy one but, OUCH, $279 is a lot rich for me. Worth it? Fools errand? Super street cred?

@beersofmastodon @tastingcraftbeer #CraftBeer #beer #utopias

It seems to me there is a predilection in modern science fiction to discount all utopias but not to do the same with the dystopias. While I agree that utopias are generally out of reach for societies, there seems to be no balancing idea that dystopias are also out of reach. Indeed, they seem quite obtainable if you are to listen to a lot science fiction.

Personally, I think utopias and dystopias are both out of the question for our society in any near future. The first is too perfect and the latter is too imperfect. What isn’t out of the question is improving and failing societies. Again I think people tend to latch onto the failing societies as the way things are going and dismiss improving societies as impossible fluff.

I think that this is largely the triumph of cynicism over intellectualism. This is where the cynics are considered realistic and thus more important than the intellectuals.

I think that the truth of the matter is that cynicism is easier. It is easier to point out problems than to actually fix them. The intellectual not only thinks of the problem, they provide a possible fix to the problem as well and that is harder. This is why I believe intellectuals deserve praise over cynics. As such I prefer the more optimistic entries in science fiction.

But probably the main reason that I would wish to see dystopian science fiction wiped out as much as possible is because politicians keep trying to use the worst of dystopian SF as something to aspire to. We don’t want big brother and we don’t want the handmaid’s tale. But we are at the risk of getting both at the same time! Some politicians do want this, and are too stupid to think of how to run such a society. So they are inspired by dystopian SF. Quit providing a blueprint!!!!!

If the politicians are successful, then the cynics can say their SF foresaw the future accurately. Which gives them even more street cred. This is why we must say intellectualism over cynicism, improving societies over failing societies and even utopias over dystopias!

#cynicism #cynicismRealism_ #DonTProvideABlueprintToDystopia #dystopias #failingSociety #fixingProblems #gettingBigBrotherAndTheHandmaidSTaleAtTheSameTime_ #IWantDystopianSFWipedOut #impossibleFluff_ #improvingSociety #intellectualism #modernScienceFiction #pointingOutProblems #tooImperfect #tooPerfect #utopias

https://larryrusswurm.com/2023/09/16/dystopias-over-utopias/