Current Issue

2024 volume 46 – Utopian Imaginaries

Editor: Maria Barbu

Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies

Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România

ISBN 1582-960X (România)

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46

Print: Megaprint, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Pour commandes s’adresser à: https://edituramega.ro/.

Maria Barbu, Corin Braga

Introduction

The French term imaginaire [English: imaginary], as opposed to the traditional concepts of “imagination” and “fantasy”, is a seminal concept in the investigation of the cultural, literary, and artistic representations. It was proposed in the mid-20th century by Gaston Bachelard, Henry Corbin, Gilbert Durand and many others. While “imagination” defines the human faculty of creating random mental images, with no correspondent in the outside reality, that is, false, chimerical representations, the French term imaginaire designates the imaging or the imagining function of the psyche, its capacity to produce new, creative representations. For Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, it designates the “inner creative force of the imagination”1.

Humans relate to the outside world not only through senses and ideas, but also through images and representations. Their understanding of the world and their ensuing reactions depend on these subjective images. As neuroscientists have recently shown, the simple fact of telling stories (i.e., organising our experience in narrative terms by means of brain maps) is one of the most elementary and archaic “obsessions of the brain” (António Damásio). Rather than a dimension at the margins of the material and physical order of the world (both visible and invisible), “the imaginary” is intrinsically intertwined with it, over-determining the way we feel, read and represent (through artistic, literary, scientific, historical, religious or mythical discourses) both the reality surrounding us, the way we interact with it, and transform it. In order to understand human behaviour, anthropologists have to tackle the complex system of representations that underlies mental activity.

The imaginary pervades all human practices. It applies to a vast range of domains, from sociology and religion to literature and the arts. Social imaginaries comprise narratives, mythical events, historical characters, collective symbols which serve to make sense of history, to organise cultural memory and to configure the future. Charles Taylor defines “the social imaginaries” as follows: “By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”2. Images of the self (autoimages) and of the other (heteroimages) – the “other” being conceived as an individual or as a collectivity, worldviews and outlooks on nature, the universe and God, representations of geography, history, society and culture, literary and fine arts fantasy, theatre and cinema, music and dance, advertising and media etc. are all products and instruments of the imagining function.

Since their creation, utopias have been designed as imaginary – in vitro – explorations of alternative worlds and societies. Utopian authors used them in order to make and unmake the current reality, to propose alternative models for the existing state of European civilization, and to investigate “les possibles latéraux”3 of the history. Utopias can be seen as successors of the medieval topic of the Terrestrial Paradise4: if, during the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, the Garden of Eden was presented as a lost paradise, closed by God after the original sin, during the Renaissance, humanistic optimism led various thinkers and writers, such as Morus, to the conclusion that the lost paradise could be replaced with a city of men. Utopias are human-made ideal places, where people governed by reasonable and moral principles achieve a perfect society.

Nevertheless, utopian optimism was soon challenged by several theoretical critiques and institutional attacks, from the standpoint of Counter-Reformation theology, Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism. These ideologies addressed a series of decisive counter-arguments to the hope that mankind could by itself establish a perfect society and a paradise on earth. Starting with Joseph Hall (Mundus alter et idem, 1605) and Artus Thomas (L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, 1605), an important number of authors took on official and public censorship and reshaped their fiction into critiques of utopian visions. Instead of imagining ideal places, they began to conceive counter-utopian societies and terrestrial infernos.

Historians of the European literature have distinguished between two main species of utopias: classical (16th-18th centuries) and modern (19th-20th centuries)5. Within this historical blueprint, it is possible to make the distinction between several corpuses and sub-genres of the utopian genre: classical religious, rationalist or empirical utopias and dystopias, as well as modern scientist, social or postmodern utopias and dystopias.

With postmodern relativism and “irrealism” (Searle, Goodman, Putnam, Maturana), not only the human capacity of constructing ideal societies and perfect cities, but the concept of reality itself has been questioned and deconstructed. Possible worlds are becoming as real as everyday reality in literature, films, and the arts. These parallel worlds are either superior to the one we are living in (which is a terrifying place, like in The Matrix, Dark City etc.), or inferior, describing a nightmarish world we are heading to. Many dystopian (science-)fiction works imagine a future in which a disaster has already affected humanity. Efraim Sicher and Natalia Skaradol, for example, investigate the impact that September 11 had upon the conscience of the American public6. In this tragic terrorist event, reality became a reiteration, an acting-out of a series of catastrophic movies made in Hollywood (the headquarters of the hyperreal, as Baudrillard put it). Literary and cinematic experiences have undergone a “pictorial turn”, to use Jacques Rancière’s term, as images are no longer qualified in terms of deficient or excessive consistency. Utopian thinking becomes a powerful instrument in exploring, exposing and modelling the challenges of our contemporary society, the concerns, fears, hopes and projects targeting topics such as climate change, natural ecosystem decline, global resource depletion, our planet’s homeostasis, new social dynamics, migration and diaspora, fluid societies, race, gender, class, religious minorities and all forms of discrimination, the IT revolution, transhumanism etc.

The concept of the imaginary has therefore had various uses and roles in the way people looked back at their world or tried to envision its future, and this was precisely the focus of the 23rd Utopian Studies Society/Europe’s Annual Conference, which was hosted by the Centre for Imagination Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca in July 2023. Under the umbrella title of “Utopian Imaginaries”, the conference addressed a generous list of topics that included panels about imaginary communities, central and East-European utopias/dystopias, post-apocalyptical, racial and gender dystopic societies, feminist utopias, utopian social, political or literary imaginaries, utopias and dystopias in contemporary popular culture, transhumanist and medical dystopias, ecological dystopias or fictional, secondary worlds that again functioned as an utopic alternative to a dystopian present. This volume represents a selection of the papers presented at this conference, one that aims to offer a complex perspective on the numerous utopian or dystopian imaginaries involved in the constructs of our society.

The volume opens with an article to which its author, Vita Fortunati, chose to give the form of a confession. As one of USS 2023 conference’s keynote speakers and a researcher whose work has been dedicated to utopian studies to a great extent, she used this opportunity to describe both the development of utopia as a genre and her academic relationship with its changes, while also focusing her analysis on three of the most important utopian topoi (the journey, the island and the dream) and outlining some ways in which utopian thinking might solve some of the crises that the capitalist world is dealing with today.

Moving on towards a section dedicated to forms of utopian or dystopian social and political imaginaries, we first have Arthur Blaim’s study about the essential role played by slogans and catchwords in the construction of utopian-in-theory but (potentially) dystopian-in-practice imaginary communities. He discusses examples such as the Third Reich, the Fourth Republic of Poland, China Dream and Brexit, all of which succeeded in becoming very popular precisely because of their “nebulous utopian” slogans which attracted the public without making it aware of the exact ways in which this ideal state of their society would be attained.

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, another key-figure in the field of imagination studies, makes the recent pandemic of COVID 19 the subject of his article. Referring to a long tradition of governments that tried to gain total control over the body, will and life of their citizens, the researcher argues that this crisis marked the peak of an age characterized by concepts such as biopolitics and biopower, leading up eventually to the formation of a global transhumanist civilization. In a slightly similar manner, Ionel Bușe’s text contrasts two visions about humanity’s relation to the afterlife: the transcendentalist idea of immortality, present in numerous myths or utopias about the Terrestrial Paradise, and today’s transhumanist biotechnological revolution, considered in both its utopian and dystopian implications as product of the (post)modern immanentist scientific and positivist view.

As elements of utopian/dystopian social and political imaginaries are often portrayed in movies too, Barbara Klonowska selects Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door (2006) for the way in which its subject (Europeans immigrating to America at the turn of the 20th century) contrasts the diverse utopian projections of the ones searching for a better life there with the dystopian realities of the country. As it has historically been the case with the American Dream, the discrepancy between the New World’s imagined and real truth testifies for the essential role of the imaginary in the construction and functioning of a space.

In the next paper, Francisco José Martínez Mesa chooses to interpret a series of recent dystopias from an angle which emphasizes the similarity of their subject to the mythical, universal themes that have characterised social and political states of fear since the beginning of times. Nowadays the fear of the future seems to be defined by its immobilising condition which no longer encourages intervention, but it still gets problematised through timeless ideas such as the destructive intruder, the confrontation between the old and the new or the individual’s search for identity and meaning inside a labyrinth.

The following two articles bring forth examples of experimental utopian communities, real-life attempts to create spaces where the current state of things no longer clashes with the characteristics of an ideal society, but actually reflects them. The first one, the New Babylon urban utopia of the Situationists, sought to create opportunities that would reshape reality from within, its residents being also the architects of this new city-labyrinth. The New Babylon project is here presented by Hande Tunç with the purpose of revealing the diversity of new living possibilities produced by spaces which are shaped through their users’ imagination. The second text represents Michel Macedo Marques’s detailed description of the Brazilian Community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto’s history, endeavour and unfortunate destiny. In this case, the experimental community was mainly a peasant, agricultural one with a religious leader and cooperativism, self-sufficiency and primitive Christianity as their core values, which were eventually perceived as a communist threat by Brazil’s republican authorities and destroyed as a result.

The last study in this section follows the ways in which representative American movies from 2012-2015 portrayed and responded to its social, economic and political problems. Daniel Koechlin links the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement with some dystopian films made in the following few years, movies whose theme of class-war shed a new perspective on how individuals were personally affected by the recession, inequality and financial crises haunting their progressive capitalist society.

The second section marks the transition of the critical discourse towards the very rich category of utopian and dystopian literary imaginaries. With a theoretical approach that centres on Hegel’s Comic Consciousness, Andrew Bridges’s paper puts it next to B. F. Skinner’s portrayal of a fictional behavioural scientist – as it appears in Walden Two (1945). The study examines both the similarities and the differences between these two forms of self-consciousness and how they give shape to ideas such as freedom and value, as well as Skinner’s belief that a utopian community can be constructed on the basis of an effectively implemented science of behaviour.

Carmen Borbély takes us back to the 17th century by focusing on an example of early modern utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), a book that stands out among the others of its kind due to how it subverts the formal conventions of both utopia and the rest of the genres associated with the female imagination in that period. As a result, the article puts the novel in relation to the anarchetypal works’ lack of internal organisation, but it also ties it to the novelistic experiments that preceded the realist, strictly structured works of the 19th century.

Resulting from the collaboration of José Eduardo Reis and Chris Gerry, the next article investigates some utopian and dystopian aspects of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We (1924) and the ideas of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro. The study connects all three literary examples through the conflicting nature of modernism, a movement filled with crises that affected both one’s identity or means of self-representation and the larger political and social scene, altered just as much by war and destruction.

The section then shifts its attention to postmodernity, as Maria Barbu’s text follows again the theoretical concept of the anarchetype, but this time in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptical novel The Road (2006). Focusing on the (lack of) structure that a journey across America acquires in such conditions, her study reaches the conclusion that the narrative episodes, no longer bearing a signification that needs to be deciphered chronologically, reflect the de-centred vision of the postmodern subject and thus its anarchetypal way of travelling and of living as well.

J. M. Coetzee’s trilogy about The Childhood (2013), The Schooldays (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) is also addressed in the present volume, despite the numerous critical perspectives which don’t consider it related to the utopian/dystopian literary genre. Georgiana Tudor’s study underlines the trilogy’s similarity to the meta-utopic characteristics of Russia’s ‘70s – ‘80s novels by pointing out relevant connections between Coetzee’s works, his life during apartheid censorship, his fondness of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s texts and the conditions in which Nicholas II’s reign and the Soviet regime allowed Russian literature to be produced.

The next two articles take into account fictional dystopias that focus mainly on gender issues, specifically on women’s rights and roles in the society they inhabit. On the one hand, Elizabeth Russell looks at the relationship between women and war in a number of relevant works selected from the 19th century until present day: starting from John Ruskin’s ideal definitions of man and woman, she looks at novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte Haldane, Montserrat Julió and Christa Wolf in order to portray women’s essential yet often ignored connection to what is considered a manly activity par excellence. On the other hand, Hassan Nassour analyses Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018) through a feminist discourse that emphasises the prophetic nature of such dystopias: the novel depicts an oppressive society where the female body is colonized by patriarchal laws that make abortions illegal, thus creating a medium of political anxiety in which the four main female characters try to maintain their autonomy.

Lastly, Elisabeta Di Minico enriches this section with an analysis that could be situated on the border between literary and mediatic utopias/dystopias. Her paper looks at the ways in which superhero comics reflect the prejudices, hopes and fears of their times, as their depiction of otherness – be it in the form of hypersexualized or abused women, mutants, aliens or other monstruous characters – often depicts society’s racism, injustice, discrimination and violence towards its ethnic, sexual or racial minorities.

The third section of the journal is dedicated to the utopic and dystopic imaginaries of the Central and East-European space. Firstly, Kenneth Hanshew brings into the attention of non-Czech speakers two untranslated dystopias from this cultural space, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Return from Paradise (1961) and Jiří Marek’s The Blessed Age (1967). Both of these novels foretell aspects of what we are getting closer to experience nowadays in terms of artificial intelligence’s impact on humanity, while also highlighting the thin line separating utopia and dystopia when it comes to apparently perfect futures ruled by technology.

Moving eastwards, Mariano Martín Rodríguez comments upon a very thought-provoking piece of speculative fiction written on Romanian ground, namely upon Ion Talpă’s Through the Smoke Rings (1937). With gender role reversal and the projection of a feminist future – where women rule over men – as its central themes, the book is here subject to an examination that explores the internal rules of such a world, while also highlighting how the reader’s subjectivity towards these matters becomes the element which labels the text as utopia or dystopia. Within the same literary space, but with a perspective that highlights the image of Romania’s totalitarian period in literature, Ruxandra Cesereanu discusses three dystopian novels written during and about the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, but officially published only after its fall: A. E. Baconsky’s The Black Church (1990), Bujor Nedelcovici’s The Second Messenger (1991) and Ion D. Sîrbu’s Farewell, Europe! (1992-1993). Her analysis explores how these texts depict allegorically the relation between the oppressors (the secret police) and their victims, the former being portrayed in an occult light due to the manipulation and brainwashing they enforced upon the population.

This section is concluded with the contributions of Boris Lanin and Constantin Tonu, both of whom discuss the Slavic space’s relationship with utopia and dystopia. On the one hand, the former looks at a series of Russian post-communist dystopias from both a literary and a political point of view, linking Russia’s recent state of affairs with how the concept of the “state of exception” is both foreseen in these books and present there today. On the other hand, the latter writes an extensive survey of the Pan-Slavic movements’ utopic character: he starts from the middle of the 17th century with Juraj Križanić’s desire to unite the Slavic Christian world and goes all the way to the second half of the 20th century, when Nikolay Danilevsky advanced his creed that the historical necessity will have the young and powerful Slavdom replace the European civilization, already deep into its degradation and decline.

And finally, as another sub-section of the vast category of literary imaginaries, the last part of the volume consists in contributions that highlight the various connections between utopia/dystopia and the genre of science fiction. Corin Braga’s paper about how SF and utopian extraordinary journeys are presented in two ancient Greek novels (Antonius Diogenes’ Wonders Beyond Thulé and Lucian’s True Histories) opens the section, while also making one last mention of the anarchetype concept. Here it is used to praise the innovation proposed by the books in both content and form: they bring such scenarios in literature long before the Renaissance peak of classical utopian form, but they also reflect a freedom of invention that ignores the Aristotelian principles of structure and thus creates random sequences of narrative episodes that fit the anarchetypal definition.

The subject of the next article is a science fiction classic, namely Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Mauro Pala’s critical discourse revisits the novel – as well as its adaptation in film, Blade Runner (1982) – and connects them with the way in which Roberto Esposito understands biopolitics. Consequently, the paper links the fact that power revolves nowadays around body politics with Dick’s ominous foreshadowing of society’s posthuman transformation, present in the analysed novel long before the theorization of posthumanism as a concept towards the end of the 20th century.

Furthermore, the intersections between society, utopia, science fiction and their variations (especially during the 20th century) are also explored in Iren Boyarkina’s study about Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. The book has been historically situated at the intersection of multiple genres and has thus borrowed characteristics from all of them, a fact that gives complexity to how Stapledon fictionalizes the scientifical discoveries of his time while also revealing and satirising the vices of his contemporaries.

Yet another different perspective within the field of utopian literary imaginaries is proposed by Alexander Popov, who looks at key texts from Robert Shea, Robert Wilson, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon in order to define and delve into the two rhizomatically connected subgenres of utopian and paranoid SF to which these books belong. His punctual analysis of the selected fictional works is strengthened by a theoretical viewpoint as well, one that examines the similar conditions which determined the evolution of these SF categories in relation to concepts such as time, space and subjectivity.

Finally, a type of utopia which discusses the nonhuman well before the emergence of the nonhuman turn in humanities is considered in Ljubjica Matek’s paper, focused on J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). With an ecological view that digs into the implications of a postapocalyptic future caused by global warming, the study actually invites us to see things from the reversed perspective as well: the characters are described as passively adapting to the circumstances of the new world instead of trying to change them, whereby this future is paradoxically perceived as a primordial utopia precisely because there will no longer be humans to inhabit it.

The 46th issue of Echinox Journal has thus gathered contributions from multiple research areas where the concept of the imaginary occupies a central place (social, political, literary and mediatic studies). As may be seen throughout the volume, each paper comes with a unique perspective upon the matter at hand, creating a network of significations which proves, time and again, the continuously developing complexity of the imagining function of the psyche.

Notes

1. Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’imaginaire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2003.

2. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 23.

3. Raymond Ruyer, L’utopie et les utopies, Saint-Pierre-de-Salerne, Gérard Monfort, 1988.

4. See Corin Braga, Du Paradis perdu à l’antiutopie aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Garnier, 2010.

5. See Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998.

6. Efraim Sicher, Natalia Skaradol, „A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11”, in Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 1, January 2006, p. 151-179

Vita Fortunati

University of Bologna, Italy

vita.fortunati@unibo.it

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.01

Literary Utopias: My Personal Journey

Abstract: In my paper I point out that the study of literary utopias has been and still is a constant focus on my scientific research. It has accompanied me in different historical and political contexts, helping in analysing and interpreting their complexity. The metaphor I use is that of Utopia as a tree with deep roots from which many branches spread out. In my first book on this topic, I suggested that Utopia could be considered on the whole as a literary genre, characterized by a continuous metamorphosis over time and space. Within such a theoretical framework, I addressed how a variety of utopian main themes, i.e. the journey, the island, and the dream, have been treated in pillars of utopian English literature. Eventually, what fascinated me is that Utopia allowed and still allows me to look at major problems and questions of my contemporary time taking a “lateral” perspective and envisaging new, usually unexpected, political horizons.

Keywords: Literary Utopias; Utopian Structure; Symbolic Imaginaries; Island; Voyage; Dream; Contemporary Utopian Tensions.

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Utopian/Dystopian Social and Political Imaginaries

Artur Blaim

University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland

artur.blaim@ug.edu.pl

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.02

Nebulous Utopias. From “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” to “China Dream” The Use of Catchwords and Slogans in Constructing Imaginary Utopian/Dystopian Communities

Abstract: The paper offers a preliminary study of a phenomenon that could be termed nebulous utopia, an attempt to project an image of the ideal state based on the use of catchwords and slogans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive use, originally limited mainly to totalitarian states and war propaganda, has become the dominant rhetorical device employed by a wide range of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements aimed at winning popular support by appealing to a set of vaguely defined general values and objectives.

Keywords: Utopia; Dystopia; Totalitarian States; Political Slogans and Catchwords; The Third Reich; China Dream; Brexit.

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Jean-Jacques Wunenburger

Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, France

jean-jacques.wunenburger@wanadoo.fr

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.03

Santé publique, biopouvoir, gestion sanitaire des populations

Public Heath, Biopower, Sanitary Care of the Population

Abstract: Since Antiquity, starting with Plato’s proposition for an ideal state, a series of philosophers, political thinkers and policy-makers have fostered a model of the State in which the government is able to control both the will and the bodies of the citizens. This project, as Michel Foucault has shown, has been endorsed and developed in modern times. Contemporary governments have sought a way of organising the complete control of life: from birth to death, throughout one’s lifetime. This is how politics have evolved into “Biopolitics” and “Biopower”. With the recent pandemic of COViD 19, this tendency has reached its peak, leading to the emergence of a global transhumanist civilization.

Keywords: Public Heath; Population Control; Biopower; Transhumanism; Covid.

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Ionel Bușe

Université de Craiova, Craiova, Roumanie

ionelbuse@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.04

Du mythe de l’immortalité à l’utopie/dystopie transhumaniste

From the Myth of Immortality to the Transhumanist Utopia/Dystopia

Abstract: In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the “transhumanist revolution”, a by-product of the ideological myth of progress.

Keywords: Immortality; Myth; Utopia; Postmodernity; Transhumanist Revolution.

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Barbara Klonowska

The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

barbara.klonowska@kul.pl

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.05

**New World, Old Hope: Utopian Imaginaries in Golden Door by Emanuele Crialese**

Abstract: Golden Door (Nuovomondo), a 2006 film by Emanuele Crialese, tells the story of Europeans immigrating to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Representing various characters travelling there driven by diverse motivations, the film showcases different versions of a utopian imaginary vision of America. The article analyses the various ways in which the American ‘promised land’ is conceptualized in the film and how all of them are contrasted with and checked by the realities of the voyage and the Ellis Island reception centre. Referring to the concept of the imaginary, the analysis discusses mechanisms and functions of their production and their subsequent verification and contrast with the rather dystopian realities of the host country.

Keywords: Imaginary; Utopia; Dystopia; Heterotopias; Immigration; Promised Land.

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Francisco José Martínez Mesa

Grupo HISTOPIA / Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

frjmarti@ucm.es

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.06

The Role of Mythical Dystopias in the Age of Fear

Abstract: The general state of anxiety and anguish that currently prevails in contemporary societies is a breeding ground for all kinds of proposals – such as dystopias – that seek to unravel, question, or simply make sense of the increasingly incomprehensible and indecipherable world in which humanity feels confined. Of all of them, it is probably those who, like the ancient myths of antiquity, use novels and stories to exorcise and conjure up their ghosts, reflecting on and symbolically expressing all that shocks and frightens them as individuals and as members of a society, that contribute most to reappropriating and coming to terms with their fears. This article proposes an in-depth analysis of a type of dystopia that could be described as mythical and whose extremely overwhelming presence in the contemporary political and cultural landscape is clearly indicative of the prevailing climate of fear and mistrust in our societies.

Keywords: Dystopia; Myth; Narrative; Modernity; Fear; Late Capitalism.

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Hande Tunç

Özyeğin University, İstanbul, Turkey

hhandetunc@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.07

Imaginary Possibilities of New Babylon

Abstract: One of the best examples of experimental utopianism is the New Babylon urban utopia of the Situationists, which bases its existence on the creation of opportunities to “transform reality” and “shape the urban environment”. New Babylon, which is depicted as an unlimited labyrinth with its defined new social model and the new individual (homo ludens) who will become both a resident and an architect of the new city, gains visibility with its neutral structure and interchangeable interiors with technological systems. This study tries to reveal the diversity of new living possibilities produced by the spaces designed with users’ imaginations, on the axis of the New Babylon project, through the concepts of utopia, space, and representation.

Keywords: Urban Utopia; Layers of Possibilities; Urban Environments; The Imagination of the User; New Babylon.

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Michel Macedo Marques

Universidade do Porto, Portugal

Universidade Regional do Cariri, Brasil

michel.macedo@urca.br

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.08

Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto (1926-1936): Utopia in Northeast of Brazil

Abstract: José Lourenço was a religious leader who, in the interior of the State of Ceará, Brazil, organized intentional communities, formed by peasants, who practiced cooperativism based on primitive Christianity along the lines of the Jesuit missions. The Community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto, in particular, was home to around 2 thousand people who produced their own food, clothes, tools, among other things, and shared everything according to each person’s needs. The community was attacked and destroyed under the accusation of being communists and representing a danger to the Republic recently installed in Brazil.

Keywords: Intentional Communities; Utopia; Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto; Beato José Lourenço; Primitive Christianity; Cariri.

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Daniel Koechlin

Sorbonne Université, France

Le Mans Université, France

daniel.koechlin@univ-lemans.fr

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.09

“This Time We Take the Engine!”: Class War in Dystopian Films of the Occupy Era

Abstract: In the wake of the Occupy movement, a group of dystopian films were released that, despite many differences, share a unique series of characteristics. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Elysium and Snowpiercer, class war emerges as the main theme. The 99% are physically shut out from the world of the 1% by impressive barriers which must be destroyed through bloody struggle. The paper uses a critical approach, mainly Jamesonian, to examine historical, political, psychological and interpretative issues in this constellation of occupy-era films, and how they testify to the huge impact on the American psyche of the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing long depression, and the feeling of frustration that fostered Occupy. Of particular interest is the way in which these critical dystopias deal with the ideologeme of “ressentiment” while depicting the breaching of the residences of the elite by the pleb.

Keywords: Dystopian Films; Class Conflict; Science Fiction; Hunger Games; Elysium; Snowpiercer; Karl Marx; Fredric Jameson; Occupy; Great Recession

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Utopian/Dystopian Literary Imaginaries

Andrew Lee Bridges

California State University, United States

abridges@fullerton.edu

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.10

Utopian Freedom and Value Portrayed in Hegel’s Comic Consciousness and Fictional Behaviorism

Abstract: In this paper I explore the conceptual relatability of Hegel’s description of the Comic Consciousness found in the chapter on “Religion” in his Phenomenology of Spirit to Skinner’s portrayal of a behavioral scientist being tantamount to God, particularly in the fictional behavioral scientist’s ability to create freedom and value in Walden Two. I examine how the Self-Consciousness of the fictional behavioral scientist and the self-consciousness of the Comic Consciousness appear to embody a form of freedom that is able to transcend and create the values of their respective communities. I suggest similarities between these two shapes of self-consciousness and forms of freedom, as well as the disparities between them, express difficulties for understanding freedom and value in the conceptual context of both the idea of utopia and the “death of God.”

Keywords: Hegel’s Comic Consciousness; Fictional Behaviorism; Walden Two; Utopia; Freedom.

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Carmen Borbély

Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.11

The Extravagance of Form in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World

Abstract: With its inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of female authorship, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) tends to be read as a gendered variation on, or a parodic departure from, the Baconian prototype of the early modern politico-scientific utopia. At the same time, the text’s dialogism, formal heterogeneity and self-reflexivity have spurred theoretical claims surrounding utopia as one of the formal precedents sedimented into the bedrock of novelistic fiction. This study takes up some of these arguments and ponders the possibility of exploring Cavendish’s work as an early instancing of the anarchetypal decentredness of novelistic form.

Keywords: Margaret Cavendish; Utopia; Novel as Theory; Anarchetype; Form.

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José Eduardo Reis

Chris Gerry

Universidade do Porto, Portugal

jereis@utad.pt

cgerry@utad.pt

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.12

The Crisis of the Mind in the Modern Age and Its Poetic Consequences.

Examples from Texts by Joyce, Zamiatin and Pessoa

Abstract: This paper interrogates some of the utopian and dystopian characteristics found in three key modernist texts by Joyce, Zamyatin and Pessoa, the literary effects of which have been strongly influenced by the crisis of narrative self-representation and the allegorical demythification of totalitarian social and political experiments. Two distinct perspectives are deployed in order to achieve this: Paul Valéry’s dystopian cultural-philosophical reflections on the intellectual crisis of Western civilisation as presented in his 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”; and Frank Kermode’s essay on the contradictory nature of modernism, “The Modern”, published in 1965–1966.

Keywords: Modernism; Crisis; Paul Valéry; James Joyce; Yevgeny Zamiatin; Fernando Pessoa.

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Maria Barbu

Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

mariabarbu1998@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.13

Anarchetypal Journeys in Post-apocalyptic Narratives.

The Implacable Darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy is well-known within the literary world for his rather bleak writing, and The Road (2006) is without doubt one of the novels that exemplifies this characteristic the most. In an attempt to join the already extensive critical literature on McCarthy from an original perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine The Road by combining the analysis of the post-apocalyptic narrative’s elements with a focus on the characters’ journey itself. To this end, my approach would bring into discussion Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”, the opposite term for the archetype understood in a cultural sense, namely as a recurring model or an artistic constant. I argue that this concept, representative for the vision of the decentred postmodern subject, structures McCarthy’s novel through the way in which it builds the plot out of episodes that succeed one another in an unpredictable way.

Keywords: Cormac McCarthy; Anarchetypal Journey; Post-apocalyptic Narratives; Anarchetype.

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Georgiana Tudor

Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

georgianatudor.art@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.14

J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy as Meta-Utopia

Abstract: The present article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s fictions The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) have a typical form of meta-utopia in the context of Coetzee’s living during apartheid censorship and his affinity for the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and for the radical conditions in which the Russian literature was written during the Soviet regime and Nicholas II’s reign. Furthermore, the article uses the morphology of the utopian genre identified by Corin Braga as a method of analysis to underline the complexity of a meta-utopian structure where eutopia, dystopia, outopia and antiutopia are present in the same narrative world.

Keywords: J.M. Coetzee; Jesus Trilogy; Morphology of the Utopian Genre; Meta-Utopia; Edith Clowes; Corin Braga.

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Elizabeth Russell

Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

Liz.russell@urv.cat

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.15

War Zones and Dystopian Imaginaries

Abstract: The media today is full of violence and death, in films, world news, and in comic books. Not many citizens want their countries to go to war, but leaders and politicians spend vast amounts of money to increase the militarization of their country. The argument being to “prevent war”. The separation of women and children from the men in their families. Deaths and destruction. How can we understand “the reality surrounding us, the way we interact with it, and transform it.” This paper will discuss the relationship between women and war, based on various utopian and dystopian fictions, from Ruskin to today.

Keywords: Imagination; Women; War; Birthrates.

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Hasan Nassour

Shoolini University, Himachal Pradesh, India

hasannassour7@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.16

Abortion-Related Anxieties and Colonizing the Female Body in Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

Abstract: The essay explores the rising popularity of feminist dystopian fiction in literary studies, focusing on Leni Zumas’ novel Red Clocks. It investigates how political anxieties are depicted through the interior monologues of four main female characters, highlighting the colonization of the female body as they grapple with unwanted pregnancies and resort to illegal means for abortions. The study suggests that feminist dystopian fiction, exemplified by Red Clocks, can be prophetic, anticipating issues such as abortion rights restrictions in the United States. The paper underscores the genre’s role in raising awareness among women, depicting a world where men dictate how women should manage their bodies.

Keywords: Feminist Dystopia; Reproductive Rights; Patriarchy; Abortion; Anxieties.

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Elisabetta Di Minico

Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

elidimin@ucm.es

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.17

The Ages of Otherness: How Superhero Comics Reflect on Systemic Injustice and Racial and Gender Representation

Abstract: Presenting complex worlds where literary narrative, “visual experience”, and “esthetic perception” perfectly mix, comics, especially superhero comics, are an original, compelling, and useful medium for an analysis on otherness and intersectional feminism. Studying the Ages of Comics, the article will underline the evolution of the medium and the fictional and historical fears, prejudices, hopes, and claims of its stories, also revealing the utopian and dystopian grounds of these realities. Behind tight-fitting suits, masks, and superpowers (or super-technology), comics often hide serious, compelling, urgent themes, such as, just to name a few, identity, discrimination, violence, segregation, migration, injustice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, illness, ecology, urbanization, materialism, and many more

Keywords: Otherness; Embodiment; Comics History; Systemic Racism; Intersectional Feminism.

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Central and East-European Utopias/Dystopias

Kenneth Hanshew

University of Regensburg, Germany

krhanshew@yahoo.de

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.18

The Negative and the Positive in Dystopia:

Return from Paradise and The Blessed Age

Abstract: This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization’s impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek’s Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction’s prescience and part of Czech SF’s path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that “the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia.

Keywords: Czech literature; Dystopia; Utopia; Science Fiction.

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Mariano Martín Rodríguez

Independent researcher, Brussels, Belgium

martioa@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.19

When (Lesbian) Women Will Rule Over Men:

Visions of Future Gynecocracy in a Novel from Interwar Roman

Abstract: The growing assertiveness of the ‘New Woman’ inspired a number of speculative fictions on what the future would look like if women ruled over men. Future gynecocracy was also imagined in Romania in the interwar years. For example, Ion Talpă rewrote in his 1937 novel Prin rotogoalele de fum (Through Smoke Rings) the Hebrew story of humankind’s fall in order to narrate through myth how women will prevail over brutish men. The resulting order is based on all-female sociality, including sexual matters. Women treat degraded men as animals in the all-woman society of Talpă’s ambiguously dystopian narrative, which features lesbian sexuality as a matter of course. This work is innovative for its use of Modernist metafictional devices in order to suggest how subjectivity determines the alternate eutopian or dystopian possible endings of the novel, thus undermining its apparently masculinist message.

Keywords: Gynecocracy; Role Reversal; Lesbian Fiction; Masculinism; Utopian Fiction; Ion Talpă; Prin rotogoalele de fum.

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Ruxandra Cesereanu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

ruxces@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.20

Dystopias and Allegories about Communist Romania

Abstract: This study outlines a typology of dystopias and narrative allegories about Communist Romania, discussing three famous novels: The Black Church by A. E. Baconsky, The Second Messenger by Bujor Nedelcovici, and Farewell, Europe! by Ion D. Sîrbu. The three novels were prohibited from being published during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and became drawer manuscripts, seeing the light of print only after the fall of Communism, in 1990, 1991, and 1992-1993. Baconsky’s novel circulated in samizdat (between 1976-1977) and was made into a series by the Munich-based Radio Free Europe, which broadcast clandestinely inside Romania. Nedelcovici’s novel was translated into French in 1985, and was very successful. In Romanian literature, Ion D. Sîrbu’s novel is considered the most important “drawer” work. All three novels, as dystopias, allegories and parables, focus on three recurrent topics: the world of oppressors, the world of victims and the method of brainwashing.

Keywords: Romania; Narrative; Fiction; Dystopia; Allegory; Communism; Securitate; Victim; Brainwashing; Katabasis; A. E. Baconsky; Bujor Nedelcovici; Ion D. Sîrbu.

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Boris Lanin

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

borial2003@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.21

Some New Terms in Dystopian Studies

Abstract: This article brings two terms of political sciences, “state of exception” and “clash of civilizations” to dystopian studies. These terms help us to understand the hybrid nature of the dystopian genre. Almost in every Russian postcommunist dystopia we meet various kinds of state of exception. The concept of “clash of civilizations” convincingly describes many aspects of Slavic-Muslim dialogue in Russian dystopia. Russian military invasion of Ukraine had been predicted in dystopian novels the decades before it happened. The prophetic nature of the dystopian genre dictates the necessity of new analytical tools.

Keywords: State of Exception; Clash of Civilizations; Slavic-Muslim Dialog; Dystopia; A Torn Country; A Cleft Country; Orwellian Principles.

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Constantin Tonu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

costeaunot@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.22

The Pan-Slavic Utopian Imaginary

Abstract: Strongly influenced by European Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the German unification movement and German idealist philosophers, the Pan-Slavic movement (which took shape between 1830 and 1840) had an idealistic, utopian character from the very beginning. The aim of this paper is to analyse the utopian imaginary of the main Pan-Slavic projects, starting with the precursor of the Slavic idea, Juraj Križanić, then moving on to Herder’s image of the archetypal Slav, Ján Kollár’s plea for Slavic cultural reciprocity, Mikhail Bakunin’s proposal to transform the Slavic cause into a revolutionary, anarchic force, Mikhail Pogodin’s active campaign for the realisation of Russia’s full potential through union with the Balkan and Austrian Slavs, the Russian Pan-Slavism advocated by the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr, and ending with the pseudo-scientific perspective on Slavism of Nikolay Danilevsky.

Keywords: Pan-Slavism; Utopian Imaginary; Pan-Slavic Projects; Slavophilia; Slavic Reciprocity; All-Slavic Union; Slavdom.

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Utopia/Dystopia and Science Fiction

Corin Braga

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

corinbraga@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.23

Voyages utopiques et SF dans deux romans grecs antiques

Utopian and SF voyages in two ancient Greek novels Abstract: The Renaissance genre of utopia has its forerunners in the extraordinary voyages of the Roman Empire’s literature. Two of these adventure novels, Wonders beyond Thulé by Antonius Diogenes and True Histories by Lucian, from the 2nd century CE, stage different places with utopian characteristics (Hyperborea, Pythagora’s and Zamolxis’ communities, the Island of the Blessed, the Island of Dreams) or early SF traits (the Moon, the Sun, several aerial cities). Nourished by the rich imaginary of the ancient paradoxographia (historical, geographical and literary texts about the mirabilia of the East), these texts display a tremendous freedom of invention. Intended to copy or parody previous writings, in order to entertain and please their readership, they ignore all Aristotelian precepts of structure or the need for a global unified meaning, and develop random narrative scenarios, which I would characterize as “anarchetypal”.

Keywords: Ancient Greek Novel; Antonius Diogenes; Lucian; Extraordinary Voyage; Ancient Utopias; Voyage to the Moon; Anarchetype.

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Mauro Pala

Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy

mauropala61@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.

Dystopia Revisited:

Biopolitics as Remedy and Response to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Abstract: Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep? and its adaptation movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott feature a devastated earth where bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalks authentic human replicants, designed for a short term highly flexible labor power. A group of these androids infiltrate to the earth of the productive apparatus which manufactured them, trying to persuade their maker to re-program their genetic makeup. Biopolitics as conceived by Roberto Esposito is apt at exploiting the reserves of sense present in Dick’s critical scenario, and managing the mixing of languages of politics and biology, which originally were kept apart in the dystopic dimension of the novel and in the political philosophy tradition. Discarding the frontal approach to the categories of politics, Esposito urges to interrogate the categories of politics obliquely, thus entering the hidden layers of their meaning, fostering an innovative coexistence of opposites.

Keywords: Philip K. Dick; Ridley Scott; Posthumanism; Biopolitics; Android; Empathy; Immunity.

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Iren Boyarkina

University of Roma La Sapienza, Italy

iren.boyarkina@uniroma1.it

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.25

**Utopias and Dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon**

Abstract: This paper aims at analyzing utopias and dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. Taking into consideration that this narrative was already defined as a scientific romance and an anatomy with allegorical status, as well as McCarthy’s observation that Stapledon’s writing resists simple categorization and that its classification as science fiction or utopian literature is inadequate, this paper suggests several definitions for Stapledon’s work. The author also takes into account the ongoing dispute between utopian studies and science fiction scholars about the strong interaction between utopia and science fiction in the twentieth century. The possibilities of applying the conceptual integration theory to such a complex work of fiction as Last and First Men is explored.

Keywords: Utopia; Dystopia; William Olaf Stapledon; Conceptual Integration Theory; Blending; Parable; Science Fiction.

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Alexander Popov

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria

alx.popov23@gmail.com

Paranoid Imaginaries and Megatextual Utopianism

Abstract: The article explores the hypothesis that Utopian and Paranoid SF, both of which produced some of their most influential texts in the 1970s, co-evolved under structurally similar pressures and developed analogous conceptual instruments to engage with the question of totality. It proposes a theoretical model that situates the two subgenres in a network of conceptual positions regarding fundamental categories such as space, time and subjectivity. The model is then applied in readings of key novels of Paranoid SF: Robert Shea and Robert Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy, Philip Dick’s Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and VALIS, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

Keywords: Paranoia; Utopian Studies; Meganovel; Megatext; Philip K. Dick; Thomas Pynchon.

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Ljubica Matek

University of Osijek, Croatia

lmatek@ffos.hr

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.27

**J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: A Nonhuman Utopia**

Abstract: The paper explores J. G. Ballard’s visionary 1962 novel The Drowned World as an example of a nonhuman utopia. Although written well before the conceptualization of the notion of the nonhuman turn, the novel embodies the philosophical ideas of such a turn as it challenges anthropocentric hierarchy and represents humans as disempowered and reactive, rather than proactive beings. The Drowned World imagines a world regressing into a prehistoric, pre-human state due to the Sun’s extreme activity and radical warming in a process of entropy, as all human scientific and architectural achievements collapse in the face of the merciless sun and the advancing ocean. The urban space is turned into lagoons that resemble heterotopias, a space that accommodates the transitional phase in the process of imminent human extinction, which, paradoxically, is met with relief and embraced as utopian by the novel’s protagonist.

Keywords: J. G. Ballard; The Drowned World; The Nonhuman Turn; Heterotopia; Entropy.

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Library Survey

Paul Mihai Paraschiv

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

paul.mihai97@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.28

NARRATING THE INFINITE: MODERNISM’S RESISTANCE TO TEMPORAL CLOSURE

Carmen Borbély, Erika Mihálycsa, Petronia Petrar (eds.), Temporalities of Modernism, Milano, Ledizioni, 2022

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Georgiana Tudor

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

georgianatudor.art@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.29

UTOPIAN SUSTAINABILITY FOR CLIMATE CATASTROPHE DEPRESSION

Gregory Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet. Life after Consumerism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022

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Constantin Tonu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

costeaunot@yahoo.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.31

A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO CONTEMPORARY PAN-SLAVISM

Mikhail Suslov, Marek Čejka, Vladimir Ðorđević (eds.), Pan-Slavism and Slavophilia in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Origins, Manifestations and Functions, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer International Publishing, 2023

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Anca Pașca-Saturn

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

pasca.anca01@gmail.com

DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.30

BALKANISM, FROM COLONIZING DISCOURSE TO AESTHETIC VALUE

Mircea Muthu, Balcanismul literar românesc. Panoramic sud-est european. Confluențe culturale, Cluj-Napoca, Școala Ardeleană, 2017

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Book Reviews

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2023 volume 45 – Diasporic Voices / Different Voices: Resonance, Silence, and Performance

Editors: Laura T. Ilea, Mohamed Baya, Isabelle Galichon
Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies
Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
ISBN 1582-960X (România)
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45

Laura T. Ilea, Mohamed Baya, Isabelle Galichon

Introduction

This volume compiles texts from two international conferences: “Diasporic Voices: Tears, Silences, Laughter” and “In a Different Voice: Resonances, Silences, Counterpoints, and Performances.” Held in Cluj-Napoca on April 14, 2022, the former was a collaboration between the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Studies, the Centre for African Studies, and the Centre for Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean Studies at the University Babeş-Bolyai, Romania. The main objective of this conference was to explore the notion of diaspora through the prism of literary studies and political science while emphasizing the intertwining of tragedy and comedy. Held in Montreal from October 5 through 7, 2022, the latter (“In a Different Voice”) was an experimental workshop between Département de littérature française, Département de littérature et langues du monde, Université de Montréal, the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Studies at the University Babeş-Bolyai, and Unité Plurielles, Université Bordeaux Montaigne.

As coordinators of this volume, we emphasize the striking connections between the two conferences since both explored deviances, experiments, suppressed words, and, above all, silences and performances.

The conference Diasporic Voices: Tears, Silences, Laughter laid the foundation for this compilation by exploring the interplay of the tragic and the comic within the diaspora, with scholars from diverse backgrounds converging to examine the subtleties of diasporic cultural production. Throughout discussions, questions of time and place, and the intersections of reception with belonging and displacement emerged as central areas of exploration, emphasizing the emotional depths found in diasporic artistic expression.

One significant insight was the uncovering of a wide range of perspectives that showed how similarities and differences, repetitions, and adaptations are intertwined, emphasizing the roles of both uniformity and diversity, as well as originality and uniqueness. Primarily concerned with an inquiry into the tragic and the comic, the conference unveiled new understandings of literary works that shed light on the diverse experiences within the diaspora, directing attention to three core aspects: the presence of tears, moments of silence, and bursts of laughter.

Through the application of a diasporic framework to recent and classic works alike, the presentations provided unexpected interpretations that challenged conventional readings. Discussions revolved around the processes of evaluating cultural production within the diasporic context, questioning identity discourses and acknowledging the intricate and ever-evolving facets, as well as the fluidity of diaspora. Covering a diverse range of human emotions, these conversations enriched and broadened the examination of diasporic cultural production and served as a reminder of the ongoing significance of diaspora studies.

By examining well-known texts through a diasporic lens and engaging with lesser-known literature, the conference encouraged a revaluation of criteria used to assess artistic production within the diasporic context. This highlighted the distinctiveness of the notions of place and nostalgia, as well as the frequently overlooked importance of the interplay between light-heartedness and gravitas.

An opportunity to explore how diasporic communities navigate issues of space, time, and memory was provided by the conference, shedding light on how the intertwining of tears, silences, and laughter functions as coping mechanisms and expressions of resilience. It also became apparent that among diasporans, creative artistic voices are emerging as responses to the challenges and opportunities within the diaspora, often integrating innovative approaches in blending the tragic and the comic.

While the presentations and discussions reflected upon audience engagement with diasporic cultural production, they also prompted questions of interpretation within the field, and delved into the intricacies of understanding and evaluating diasporic cultural artifacts. The conference fostered a reconsideration of the audience’s role in shaping the perception and interpretation of diaspora, while also underscoring the significance of both tragedy and comedy in this ongoing conversation on the aesthetic value of diasporic cultural production.

Within the following pages, the examination of diaspora features prominently throughout various artistic landscapes. Transgressions of diaspora within the world of Commedia dell’arte are highlighted, shedding light on the role of improvisation in challenging cultural boundaries. Diasporic experiences come into focus through examinations of the works of Leila Aboulela, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monica Ali, with a particular emphasis on the connection between geography and identity. The complex discourses within Jewish-Romanian interwar literature are navigated, inviting exploration into projective spaces. Familiar texts by Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss are reevaluated through the lens of counterfactual narratives. Humour, laughter and self-critique within the Muslim diaspora are examined in narratives set in European superdiverse urban contexts. Jewish identity within Philip Roth’s The Plot against America is subjected to re-examination through counterfactual storytelling. A mapping the crossroads where Africa, jazz, politics, and revolution intersect within the diasporic context, in turn, creates pathways for exploring how diaspora develops and questions of identity arise.

Personal reflections on diasporic nostalgia are offered, encouraging a connection with the emotive aspects of displacement. The elements of tragedy in Malika Mokkedem’s work are likewise examined, encouraging a reassessment of their presence within the narrative. Hidden narratives within the literature of descendants of harkis are uncovered, urging engagement with the silenced voices in the diasporic context. Spaces of self-discovery and transformation in Lynda-Nawel Tebbani’s work are presented for exploration, with a spotlight on the role of interstitial spaces in diaspora. The literary contributions of Andrei Codrescu are reconsidered, shedding new light on his work, and creative responses to displacement and nostalgia within C.D. Florescu’s short stories are discussed.

While the conference Diasporic Voices addressed the diversity of diasporic experience, the conference “In A Different Voice” was inspired by the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice, a groundbreaking text introducing care studies. The idea was to advance the book’s discourse and explore the different voices that could give rise to new care practices. We focused mainly on the encounters highlighting the sensitive experience of the voice viewed as the expression of attention shown towards oneself and others, briefly as the foundation of relational ethics of interdependence and vulnerability. As organizers, we underlined the apprehension of the voice as a material phenomenon, pre-language and spontaneous vocal composition, the entanglement of human and non-human voices, and the voice of affects.

Our role was also to facilitate discussions and convey knowledge non-traditionally, based on experiments with voice, intensities, affects, and rhythms and with different layers of lecture and orality of poems. The most challenging part of this workshop was the encounter between researchers in letters and philosophy and researchers in care studies.

As a keynote speaker, Carol Gilligan of New York University addressed the performative aspect in her presentation, “Resonating Voices: Toward an Embodied Care Ethics.” She expounded on the under voice notion and the idea of freeing the natural voice. Gilligan considers the voice a literal barometer of relationships. Furthermore, her presentation focused on liberation ethics, reason and emotions, suffocated voices deciphering and increasing the capacity to learn how to read the under voices through radical listening. The latter stems from the crucial question: What happens to the voice? How do we retrieve it? Under these conditions, the most important experience would be the passage from judgment to curiosity, cultivating disruptive voices through theater and writing—performative acts that express themselves against the “forces that go in the world.”

Moreover, the conference proposed rethinking the ethical implications of conceiving the voice as a physical phenomenon whose materiality resonates in our discourses without being reduced to them, thus prolonging the essential questioning concerning voices that express, manifest, and mobilize the difference.

On the background of these theoretical and practical remarks, several workshops took place, namely the sound installation “Hallway Whispers,” workshops on “Choir of Emotions,” a somatic and auditory experience that aimed at attaining the catharsis without necessarily passing through discursive language; “Give Voice to Emotions,” through which we understood that the voice (placed between human intelligence, anatomy, and verbal expression) has a vital role in the expression of emotions. The particular vocal timbers of different voice devices are all singular despite the influence of DNA, language, culture, or hierarchical and generational conventions on how we express our voice. The workshop has allowed the participants to explore different vocal colors related to emotions and recognize their muscular and physiological support, which enlarges the specter of dynamics useful to their transmission.

Another workshop explored “the animal voice,” the hybridity of the human and animal voice inspired by practices highlighting the sacred spirit of animals in the Innu world. This was followed by the workshop “Valleys” and the idea of “sympoiesis” of the ecofeminist artist Donna Haraway, creating choirs made out of human voices and land sounds, reworked in the studio. The materiality of the voice served to explore the connection of human time to other temporalities (geological or ecological) to respond to the question of how to form a non-anthropocentric choir and to learn “to stay with the trouble?” The last workshop, “The Mirror Lecture,” was articulated in two tempos, starting in a low voice and finishing aloud, allowing the participants to seize the difference between the intimate reading of a literary text, compared to a public lecture of one’s own text.

As a follow-up to these two international conferences and workshops, we aimed to investigate how new and different voices can emerge: first, on the large scale of the Diasporic Voices, and second, by scrutinizing texts that highlight other, Different Voices. These intertwined voices result in volume 45 of Echinox Journal, Diasporic Voices / Different Voices: Resonance, Silence, and Performance.

We have thus put together contributions from various disciplinary fields (performative studies, literary studies, political studies, etc.), which explore the multivocality of diasporic struggles with an emphasis on the intertwining of the tragic and the comic, “the dialectical relationship between the idea of displacement and nostalgia for a lost time and space” (Ato Quayson), voices that provide a distinctive past to the person or community, involving satire, laughter, irony, and manifesto—but also texts which underline the apprehension of the voice as a material phenomenon; pre-language and spontaneous vocal composition; the entanglement of human and non-human voices and the voice of affects.

Diasporic Traditions, Transgressions, and Identities

Carmen Borbély
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.01

“Whence, then, is this change of sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour

Abstract: Following the lead of recent inquiries into The Woman of Colour (1808) as a sensibility narrative that fleshed out the unfinished project of abolitionism at around the time when the slave trade was being outlawed in England (1807), this study explores the intermingling between what Svetlana Boym has identified as two distinctly oriented strands of nostalgia, reflective v. restorative, that innervate the title character’s sensibility of (dis)enchantment with her homesteading voyage, as she is transported from her native island into another – partly ancestral yet also foreign and emetic – insular space, from which she eventually tries to expunge herself into a yet-to-be-undertaken voyage of return.

Keywords: The Woman of Colour, homesteading, restorative/reflective nostalgia, diasporic intimacy, circumatlantic diaspora

Literary Utopias: My Personal Journey

Utopian/Dystopian Social and Political Imaginaries

Nebulous Utopias. From “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” to “China Dream” The Use of Catchwords and Slogans in Constructing Imaginary Utopian/Dystopian Communities

Santé publique, biopouvoir, gestion sanitaire des populations

Du mythe de l’immortalité à l’utopie/dystopie transhumaniste

New World, Old Hope: Utopian Imaginaries in Golden Door by Emanuele Crialese

The Role of Mythical Dystopias in the Age of Fear

Imaginary Possibilities of New Babylon

Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto (1926-1936): Utopia in Northeast of Brazil

“This Time We Take the Engine!”: Class War in Dystopian Films of the Occupy Era

Utopian/Dystopian Literary Imaginaries

Utopian Freedom and Value Portrayed in Hegel’s Comic Consciousness and Fictional Behaviorism

The Extravagance of Form in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World

The Crisis of the Mind in the Modern Age and Its Poetic Consequences.

Examples from Texts by Joyce, Zamiatin and Pessoa

Anarchetypal Journeys in Post-apocalyptic Narratives.

The Implacable Darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy as Meta-Utopia

War Zones and Dystopian Imaginaries

Abortion-Related Anxieties and Colonizing the Female Body in Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

The Ages of Otherness: How Superhero Comics Reflect on Systemic Injustice and Racial and Gender Representation

Central and East-European Utopias/Dystopias

The Negative and the Positive in Dystopia:

Return from Paradise and The Blessed Age

When (Lesbian) Women Will Rule Over Men:

Visions of Future Gynecocracy in a Novel from Interwar Roman

Dystopias and Allegories about Communist Romania

Some New Terms in Dystopian Studies

The Pan-Slavic Utopian Imaginary

Utopia/Dystopia and Science Fiction

Voyages utopiques et SF dans deux romans grecs antiques

Dystopia Revisited:

Biopolitics as Remedy and Response to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Utopias and Dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon

Paranoid Imaginaries and Megatextual Utopianism

J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: A Nonhuman Utopia

Library Survey

Book Reviews

2022 volume 43 – Contemporary Eastern/Southeastern European Noir. Print-and-Screen Fiction, in a European and Global Perspective

**New World, Old Hope: Utopian Imaginaries in Golden Door by Emanuele Crialese**

**Utopias and Dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon**

**J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: A Nonhuman Utopia**