Editors’ Message

This second issue of Utopian Studies 34 comprises a variety of historically and theoretically grounded contributions, ranging in time and place from medieval Persia to Cold War America to contemporary global media culture. The issue opens with a surprising look back at utopian myth-making . . . by the U.S. frozen food industry. Author Justin Nordstrom reads a 1954 short story, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which foresees global cooperation, new technologies, and the emancipation of women from domestic labor—all thanks to the advent of frozen meals and microwave cooking. Nordstrom demonstrates how this “frozen fantasy” of the Cold War period reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs (from Cockaigne to Bellamy)—but also challenges their essential arguments.The next several articles reach back in time, first to twelfth-century Persia. In “Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (‘Belisa’) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked,” author Kaveh Hemmat revaluates the role of the medieval epic Kushnameh, as an anticipation of later utopian sources connected to Islamic political theory. Hemmat argues that the epic’s focus on the formative processes that make its “quasi-fictional” society of Besila possible results in an important precursor to More’s sixteenth-century text. The “invention” of the utopian genre may have deep roots, the author concludes, in the Kushnameh, with its interest in the development of a paradisiacal city, its articulation of universal monotheism, and its focus on geographical knowledge and travel.The geographical character of the island of Utopia is the subject of Chun Liang Lin and Mark Hansley Chua’s article, “Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden.” Participating in the longtime scholarly effort to “map” More’s island nation, the authors report on a mapping experiment that attempts to understand the geomorphology of Utopia according to metaphorical ideals of Renaissance humanism, rather than through mathematical calculation.“An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism” by Georgie Newson focuses on the seventeenth-century British philosopher’s proposal for a new “universal language” for use by scholars, travelers, diplomats and others during an expansionist era of exploration and trade. Newsom reclaims the “Essay” as “legitimately” utopian, contesting earlier critical dismissals of it as such and instead claiming it as an early example of what she calls “info-utopianism.” An info-utopian tendency can be located in a number of other early modern utopian works, the article contends, and it concludes with implications for contemporary utopian theory.The next two essays look toward anticipations of, and responses to, future crisis society: Rafael Baquero asks us to revisit the understudied contributions of Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, to contemporary efforts within the Marxist tradition to reclaim utopian Hope. By exploring Sánchez Vasquez’s Philosophy of Praxis and by highlighting its anthropological assumptions, this study demonstrates the extent to which his works provide theoretical underpinnings and resources for contesting contemporary discourses on the “end of history” and for recovering utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Finally, literary scholar M. Keith Booker revisits the stunningly drawn global posthuman world(ing) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in his article, “A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.” Booker argues that despite the twenty-third-century postapocalyptic setting, the text offers clear elements of hope and “utopian energies,” driven particularly, he argues, by “the motif of genetic engineering,” which opens up possibilities of a more enlightened politics, and of new kinds of relationality between the human and more-than-human world.The second half of this issue marks the appearance of several new Utopian Studies sections. We are delighted to launch The Critical Forum and Desire Lines. The Critical Forum is a space for critical conversation in a “bloc” of essays addressing together a specific theoretical problematic related to utopian, dystopian, and speculative texts or thought. The first Forum features four essays that emerged from a two-day seminar in April 2023 on the topic of antiutopianism and/in contemporary culture. The seminar was organized by Darko Suvin, who is well known to utopian and science fiction scholars, and Patricia McManus, author of the recently published Critical Theory and Dystopia (2022), whose introduction outlines the goals of this zoom seminar. Anchored by Suvin’s opening contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” responses from Antonis Balasopoulos (“Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation: Some Reflections”), from McManus (“The Shape of Power and of Pain in Game of Thrones”) and from Lazar Atanasković (“On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones”) take up various aspects of Suvin’s wide-reaching meditation. Balasopolous’s contribution speaks directly to one aspect of Suvin’s argument; as their titles suggest, McManus and Atanasković narrow their discussions to a single epic manifestation of the contemporary antiutopian mood: the Game of Thrones series.Our next section is Desire Lines, the second new feature of Utopian Studies 34.2. The opening essay by Assistant Editor Stephanie Peebles Tavera explains the purpose of Desire Lines in a “performative essay”: that is, she models the kind of contributions we hope to receive in her own inaugural Desire Line. Following this introduction are the first two Desire Lines received from readers. Ali Riza Taskale offers a thoughtful meditation on the notion of “boring utopias” by taking a backward glance at Edward Hopper’s “haunting” paintings of isolation and loneliness–and why they resonate in our own post(?)-COVID times. Finally, Mark Jendrysik recalls his first travel to and exploration of the utopian horizon in “Utopian Enterprises: Growing Up with Star Trek.” The experience of watching the original series (“TOS”) decades ago, he writes, steered him not only toward his career as a scholar of American literature and culture but also toward his first understandings of what “utopia” is, is not, or might be.Finally, the Utopian Studies practice of publishing Conference Briefings continues in this issue, with a compilation of responses to the Spring “Green Utopia Now” conference. Six young scholars and presenters report what they took away from an event that elicited new voices in the study of utopia and sustainability.This issue marks the first curated – from start to finish – by the new editors of Utopian Studies. We hope that this issue signals to new and longtime readers of the journal the vision that the editors have for the next generation of Utopian Studies: our commitment to showcasing cutting-edge scholarship in the field, to nurturing conversations between scholars regardless of professional status, and to providing a place for scholars to reflect on the import of own commitments to becoming utopian.