EDITORS’ MESSAGE

This issue of Utopian Studies represents a journal milestone: thirty-five years of publication. Our gift to ourselves is the expansion of our editorial team, with Associate Editor Christian P. Haines overseeing the CRITICAL FORUM section of the journal. He is already at work on the FORUM for the upcoming special issue on Queer Utopias (vol. 36, no. 1). An associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Christian specializes in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to today, but his research and teaching interests extend to the environmental humanities, game studies, literary theory and continental philosophy, Marxism—and utopian studies. His first book is A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons (Fordham, 2019). A second and indeed a third are underway: The Scored Life focuses on finance and contemporary culture; and a future study of genre fiction, capitalism, and ecology (currently entitled Marxism, Ecology, and Form) is taking shape. He has contributed chapters to several edited volumes, and his articles have appeared in journals such as boundary 2, Genre, LIT, and Cultural Critique. He has also co-edited two special issues, one for Cultural Critique and the other for Minnesota Review. In short, Christian brings to the journal a valuable combination of expertise in literary and cultural studies, contemporary theory and philosophy, and editorial experience.We are also happy to welcome Kirsten Harris as the Managing Editor. Kirsten is a lecturer and Director of Teaching in Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. Her first book was Walt Whitman and British Socialism: The Love of Comrades (Routledge, 2016), and current research interests extend that interest into such areas as social print culture, the "socialist revival" in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry, utopianism, and the relationship between art and radical political movements generally. Kirsten actually is returning to the editorial team of the journal after a hiatus; we are grateful for her "institutional" knowledge in addition to her long-time dedication to utopian studies.Turning to the contents of this issue: Utopian Studies 35, no. 1, turns out to be an especially substantial set of essays and shorter articles.Among the contributions to the ARTICLES section you will find interesting (if unintentional) overlaps: Andreas Beck Holm's "Rousseau's Implicit Socratism: Utopianism in the Social Contract" and Jorn Janssen's "Hope Springs Eternal: Political Engagement in a Post-Anarchist Utopia" are meticulously argued studies of the political philosophies of two, obviously very different, figures: French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau on one hand and the post-Hegelian German thinker Max Stirner on the other, as read through the philosophical perspectives of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. Both essays seek to locate and describe the "utopian impulse" that dwells in the writings of Rousseau, particularly in the Social Contract and Second Discourse; and of Stirner, whose notion of post-anarchism, Janssen argues, "despite its anti-political inclination" nonetheless "finds solace in the tragic and ceaseless nomadic pursuit of societal amelioration."Another set of essays, by Ori Tavor and by Claudia Gärtner, describe contemporary efforts to imagine and to actualize sustainable communities that are based in traditional belief systems: Confucianism and Christianity, respectively. In fact, Tavor's "In Tradition Is the Preservation of the World: A Twenty-first-century Confucian Utopia" continues the trend of focusing on a particular philosopher, in this case Confucian philosopher Zhang Xianglong (1949–2022). While, Tavor argues, Zhang distanced himself from the label "utopian" he nonetheless drew from both ancient Chinese depictions of ideal societies and Western utopian models, and advocated—for over two decades—for the establishment of "Special Districts for Confucian Culture" (SDC) as sustainable green communities that could "offer an authentic Confucian alternative to mainstream urban society." Claudia Gärtner's "The Monastic Cell as Utopian Niche" describes a different kind of ecotopian space, the monastery. She shows how religious communities (their own kind of "special districts," for Christianity) can be regarded as forms of what she calls a refigurative practice. Challenging the typical view of monasteries as static and rule-bound, these religious communities model process-utopia ideals: not measuring success in terms of a righteous achieving of a perfectly sustainable community, but rather in terms of the persistent effort, despite any failures, to keep going. This kind of transformative persistence is applied as well to the communities' outreach efforts, designed to teach and encourage, rather than dictate.John Michael Duvall's "The Curious Tales of The Scarlet Empire," steers us quite away from sustainable visions, in describing a little known 1906 novel by David Maclean Parry, a former President of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The novel, argues Duvall, was an effort to counter contemporary, often left-leaning utopian writing with a "redemptive adventure romance narrative" that is not only anti-socialist but anti-utopian, instead "serv[ing] capitalist ideological purposes and has the protagonist combining tremendous wealth, a powerful faith in individualism, and a recovered masculine subjectivity to become a captain of industry and paragon of a hegemonic masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century." Interestingly, Parry evidently was aware of the suasive power of literature and art, and sought to fill a perceived gap in capitalist-friendly literature for a specifically middle-class reading public.The power of art underlies the argument of the final regular essay, "Paradise on Fire: Dialectics of Utopia in Edward Bond's The War Plays" by Asiyeh Khalifezadeh and Tahereh Rezaei. Reading Bond's plays through an Adornian lens, the authors demonstrate "how Bond's early confidence in the capacity of art to drive positive societal change evolves into a more nuanced position that recognizes both the enduring impact of cultural norms, and their tendency to recur throughout history." (Perhaps here there is even a connection with the Gärtner essay, insofar as Bond comes to a more incremental view of social change.) The authors conclude that by "summoning Adorno's utopian visions and his principles of negative dialectics and determinate negation," the dramaturgy of Bond's The War Plays "calls for a transformation of consciousness and an awakening achieved through critical reflections on the past and the present circumstances."The CRITICAL FORUM, "Cultural Encounters and Textual Speculations in the Mediterranean," features new scholarship in the growing field of Mediterranean studies specifically, and spotlights more generally the turn toward non-Anglophone and/or non-Western utopian and speculative writing and thought. The FORUM'S special editors are three Turkish scholars familiar to many of us: Burcu Kayışcı Akkoyun (Boğaziçi University), Emrah Atasoy (University of Warwick), and Merve Tabur (Utrecht University). Their introduction opens the conversation among the section's five essays, which together advocate "shifting from Western-centric approaches to more nuanced modes of interpretation with a specific focus on the Mediterranean, which has itself been a contested discursive site in Mediterranean studies." With references to Turkish and North African (here, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Tunisian) literary texts, the essays "explor[e] speculative configurations in the Mediterranean through literary representations of cultural encounters, social conflicts, and environmental crises"; they also emphasize the need to contextualize these representations historically, politically, and artistically. The Mediterranean itself, they argue, is more than a geographical site, but a transnational and transcultural domain demanding a reorientation of the general Western notion of "the Mediterranean" as "European," neglecting, at least conceptually, the presence of North African and Middle Eastern nations, cultures, and politics.Following the CRITICAL FORUM section, described above, we feature this issue's DESIRE LINES contribution, "Utopia on Earth? Sustainability, White Tourism, and Neocolonial Desire," by Robyn Fraser. "Inspired" by the example of the well-known (and UNESCO-protected) Auroville community in India, Fraser thinks about the phenomenon of spiritual tourism in "the East." Historicizing this site, Fraser places Auroville, "a utopian destination for white imagination and white self-actualization," with the broader history of Western travel to seek out a "more authentic" and ecologically gentler life, as well as a "deeper" spiritual experience. Fraser unpacks the colonialist and racist undercurrents of the history of this sort of travel—while also thinking about her own privileged position as a white American scholar who does fieldwork on labor practices and sustainability in Muslim-majority Bangladesh. As we seek a better world today, Fraser proposes, we need to acknowledge our own complicity in shaping the world as it is as we think about what we would like it to be.The DESIRE LINES section is followed by a RESEARCH NOTE contribution on "euthanasia in utopia" by the founding editor of Utopian Studies, Lyman Tower Sargent.This issue's BOOK REVIEWS section begins with Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan's White Power and American Neoliberal Culture (University of California Press, 2023), which is another outcome of the two utopian scholars' ongoing collaboration. For Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, the co-authored book contributes an important intervention as it delivers on one of the most persistent desiderata in utopian studies, that is, a sustained analysis of notions of race and white supremacy together with utopian/dystopian theorizations and critical readings. John Storey's review of Mark Schmitt's monograph Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) discusses the relationship of the field of cultural studies to utopia, noting the pronounced interest in utopianism of two of its founding figures, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. Storey suggests that Spectres of Pessimism represents a significant revival of utopianism in cultural studies.The BOOK REVIEWS section then turns to three books that are devoted to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction: Brian Attebery's Fantasy: How It Works (Oxford University Press, 2022; reviewed by Ana Tejero-Marín); Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras's co-edited essay collection Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2023; reviewed by Mariana Batista da Cruz); and Hua Li's Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press, 2021; reviewed by Shaoming Duan). With Li's monograph the section also turns from studies of contemporary American and British literature and culture to books that explore utopian visions in different areas of the world at different times: Chinese science fiction in the post-Mao era; Dante's search for a new utopian Romantic mythology in Europe, discussed in Daniel DiMassa's Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth (Bucknell University Press, 2022; reviewed by Brenda Deen Schildgen); and the roadmap to a fossil-fuel-free world laid out with a decolonial, indigenous-centered lens by Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker in The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada (Between the Lines, 2023; reviewed by Evangeline Kroon). The section concludes with Mark A. Allison's review of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by Kristen R. Ghodsee. Against the tendency of other recent works of "popular neo-utopianism" to focus on the public sphere (e.g., Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists; Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism), Ghodsee interrogates the domestic for utopian experiments that may help us rearrange the private worlds subtending the public sphere. Everyday Utopia showcases practices and institutions from around the world, with a particular interest in examples that are under-examined in the existing literature.There are three CONFERENCE BRIEFINGS in this issue. Reporting on this year's meeting of the Possibility Studies Network are Kseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and Luciana Dantas de Paula (University of Brasilia), who emphasize the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the collaborations and dialogues of this field. The report stresses the interest in new pedagogical practices that help students–and future students–navigating the assuredly difficult challenges ahead.The University of Salamanca hosted a semester-long series of connected talks entitled Early Researchers' Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction: Gendered Geographies across Time. This was the first such seminar, and according to BRIEFING authors Beatriz Hermida Ramos and Miguel Sebastián-Martín, the success of the "distributed" seminar spoke to the "buoyancy, diversity, and potential" of studies in Science and Speculative Fiction not just among young scholars, but among established faculty and, in an unusual turn from the standard academic conference, among the reading public, who were also invited to participate as equal partners in the discussions of speculative thinking, narrative form, and the practice of utopia.The Solar Media Collective at Concordia University sponsored a day-long seminar on "the multiscalar dimensions of just and hopeful energy transitions." Thus this event too focused on utopian practice: "day-to-day practices, coalition building, collective action, and the articulation of desires" that will mobilize communities toward strong commitments to the "struggles for justice" and to the creation of "a better world across scales." At the same time, however, the central role of hope was top of mind. "In José Esteban Muñoz words," the Collective concludes, "concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many."