Download or read book Utopian Legacies written by John Mohawk and published by Santa Fe, N.M. : Clear Light Publishers. This book was released on 2000 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradoxically, contemporary horrors like ethnic cleansing are deeply rooted in humanity's highest aspirations, which have given rise to countless similar upheavals and atrocities perpetrated over millennia. Although the ideals embodied in religion and philosophy are considered to be humanity's prime "civilising" force, religions that preach love have been used to justify bloody massacres, and utopian ideals have fomented intolerance and persecution of those who were perceived as obstacles to the realisation of an ideal society. John Mohawk, a distinguished Native American historian, examines this paradox and traces the role of utopian thinking as the rationale for religious wars, subjugation of indigenous peoples, genocide, enslavement, plunder, economic domination, and campaigns of world conquest from the time of the ancient Greeks. Mohawk examines the hidden dynamic within utopian thinking and the danger it poses when it is adopted by powerful groups who use it to serve their own interests. He points out that the danger lies not in the utopian ideal itself but in the parallel assumption that its followers are in possession of the only "truth" and are therefore justified in forcing their "better way of life" on other cultures or nations for the ultimate good of humanity. In a gripping historical narrative, Mohawk traces the impact of utopian thinking on the rise of Western culture in ancient Greece and Rome, the emergence of the Christian empire, and the holy wars of the Middle Ages. Showing how this mindset has shaped Western development, he makes it clear that the utopian legacy still influences contemporary social and political movements at home and abroad. Our greatest challenge is to find ways to defuse its harmful effects on cultures different from our own, while preserving our aspirations and personal ideals. Mohawk argues that only a pluralistic outlook can truly support peace and understanding among the peoples of the world.
Download or read book Utopian Thought in the Western World written by Frank Edward MANUEL and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 907 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors have structured five centuries of utopian invention by identifying successive constellations, groups of thinkers joined by common social and moral concerns. Within this framework they analyze individual writings, in the context of the author's life and of the socio-economic, religious, and political exigencies of his time.
Download or read book The Last Utopians written by Michael Robertson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman--who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature written by Gregory Claeys and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
Download or read book Utopian Audiences written by Kenneth M. Roemer and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do readers transform Utopia? How do they manipulate imaginary worlds to gain new perspectives of their own worlds? In order to answer these and other questions, this study employs a wide spectrum of reader-response approaches to define the nature and impact of utopian literature.
Download or read book Practicing Utopia written by Rosemary Wakeman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosemary Wakeman provides a sweeping history of "new towns"--those created by fiat rather than out of geographic or economic logic and often intended to break with the tendencies of past development. Heralded throughout the twentieth century as solutions to congestion, environmental threats, architectural malaise, and cultural anomie, today they are often seen as sad, pernicious, or merely suburban. Wakeman shows that hundreds of such towns sprang from templates and designs not only in North America and across Europe but around the world, revealing how different cultures dreamed of (re)organizing themselves. Wakeman also illuminates the missteps and unanticipated results of the initial optimistic choices and impulses.
Download or read book Brave New World Contexts and Legacies written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays provides new readings of Huxley’s classic dystopian satire, Brave New World (1932). Leading international scholars consider from new angles the historical contexts in which the book was written and the cultural legacies in which it looms large. The volume affirms Huxley’s prescient critiques of modernity and his continuing relevance to debates about political power, art, and the vexed relationship between nature and humankind. Individual chapters explore connections between Brave New World and the nature of utopia, the 1930s American Technocracy movement, education and social control, pleasure, reproduction, futurology, inter-war periodical networks, motherhood, ethics and the Anthropocene, islands, and the moral life. The volume also includes a ‘Foreword’ written by David Bradshaw, one of the world’s top Huxley scholars. Timely and consistently illuminating, this collection is essential reading for students, critics, and Huxley enthusiasts alike.
Download or read book History and Utopian Disillusion written by Jun Young Lee and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos' novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos' epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.
Download or read book The Nowhere Bible written by Frauke Uhlenbruch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia – “good place” yet “no place” – as a method and a concept in biblical studies. A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it – finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text. This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing – not obscuring – pre-suppositions brought to the text.
Download or read book Utopian Ruins written by Jie Li and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Utopian Ruins Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for understanding the documentation and transmission of the socialist past that mediates between nostalgia and trauma, anticipation and retrospection, propaganda and testimony. Assembling each chapter like a memorial exhibit, Li explores how corporeal traces, archival documents, camera images, and material relics serve as commemorative media. Prison writings and police files reveal the infrastructure of state surveillance and testify to revolutionary ideals and violence, victimhood and complicity. Photojournalism from the Great Leap Forward and documentaries from the Cultural Revolution promoted faith in communist miracles while excluding darker realities, whereas Mao memorabilia collections, factory ruins, and memorials at trauma sites remind audiences of the Chinese Revolution's unrealized dreams and staggering losses.
Download or read book Cruising Utopia written by José Esteban Muñoz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session
Download or read book Thinking Utopia written by Jörn Rüsen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called "end of utopia" ("end of history," "end of narratives"). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East.
Download or read book Nowhere was Somewhere HOW HISTORY MAKES UTOPIAS AND HOW UTOPIAS MAKE HISTORY written by Arthur E. Morgan and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopian Imaginings written by Victoria W. Wolcott and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-04-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture—with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging—Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.
Download or read book Unsettling Utopia written by Jessica Namakkal and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.
Download or read book Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History written by Marina Leslie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts—Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World—as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for charting out the relation of literary text to historical context. In particular, she examines the ways that both Marxist and new historicist critics have taken the literary utopia not simply as one form among many available for reading historically but as a privileged form or methodological paradigm. Rather than approach utopia by mapping out a fixed set of formal features, or by tracing the development of the genre, Leslie elaborates a history of utopia as critical practice. Moreover, by taking every reading of utopia to be as historically symptomatic as the literary production it assesses, her book integrates readings of these three English Renaissance utopias with an analysis of the history and politics of reading utopia. Throughout, Leslie considers utopia as a fictional enactment of historical process and method. In her view, these early modern utopian constructions of history relate very closely to and impinge upon the narrative structures of history assumed by critical theory today.
Download or read book Utopian Universities written by Miles Taylor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education, some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between 1961 and 1970. This volume offers a comparative and connective global history of these institutions, illustrating how their establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation sheds light on the social and cultural topography of the long 1960s. With an impressive geographic coverage - using case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia - the book explores how these universities have influenced academic disciplines and pioneered new types of teaching, architectural design and student experience. From educational reform in West Germany to the establishment of new institutions with progressive, interdisciplinary curricula in the Commonwealth, the illuminating case studies of this volume demonstrate how these universities shared in a common cause: the embodiment of 'utopian' ideals of living, learning and governance. At a time when the role of higher education is fiercely debated, Utopian Universities is a timely and considered intervention that offers a wide-ranging, historical dimension to contemporary predicaments.
