Mapping Research in Utopian Studies

Mapping Research in Utopian Studies: Australia, Brazil, Poland, and Portugal

What is interesting in the descriptions of research being carried out in Australia, Brazil, Poland, and Portugal hereby published is the divergent traditions of research organization. These have been shaped not only by disparate understandings of how research should be conducted (individually, in groups, within a network) but also by national funding policies; additional factors are the geographic dimension of each country and the relevance of the concept of utopia to national history.

The article by Andrew Milner and Verity Burgmann reveals that although Australia depends for the sake of publications in English of Thomas More’s Utopia on British translations, it has managed to produce traditions of utopian writing of its own, of both a eutopian and a dystopian nature. These flourishing literary traditions have been paired with a consistent interest in utopian experimentation, especially in relation to agrarian communes and environmental radicalism. But in spite of the country still being today one of the most active utopian laboratories in the Western world, utopian studies has not succeeded in penetrating the Australian academy and inspiring the creation of a national network, a situation that Milner and Burgmann justify by evincing the vastness of the territory. However, as the article highlights, despite the absence of an organized network of research groups, individual researchers have made important contributions to the field; the details of these researchers and their contributions are offered by the authors of the article.

As vast as Australia in geographic terms, Brazil also went through the traumatic experience of colonization. It has faced the tension of, on the one hand, being seen as “the good place of the European imagination” and, on the other hand, imagining “counterutopias” that challenged the colonizers’ ideals. It has produced what Ildney Cavalcanti calls “an eclectic literary corpus that can be aligned with a utopian tradition in writing.” In the first section of her article, Cavalcanti maps out Brazilian utopian literature, emphasizing its multifarious nature, from the distant Cockaigne-like accounts of Brazil to recent narrative genres with a clear utopian concern (graphic novels, SF, steampunk, etc.), also taking into consideration the utopian/dystopian dimensions that inform Brazilian contemporary arts. In the second section, Cavalcanti describes the activity of five research groups that have been working in the field of utopian studies from 2000 onward, pointing out their topics of research, their forms of organization and the funding opportunities they have or are lacking, their links to undergraduate and postgraduate courses, the events they have promoted, and the publications that have resulted from their research. Some of the groups have just been launched, but plans made for the future certainly reveal fruitful soil for utopian studies in Brazil.

In Poland, there are currently two research groups working in the field of utopian studies in a systematic and organized way. Artur Blaim describes their research interests, the events they have promoted, the books they have published, and their plans for the future, making it evident that the field of utopian studies is promising in Poland not only because of these groups but also because utopia is a rapidly developing topic in other Polish academic centers. But Blaim’s article goes beyond a mere description of the groups’ profiles, offering an informed account of how Thomas More’s Utopia and the concept of utopia itself have consistently interested the Polish academy from the latter half of the nineteenth century, when utopianism was first equated with Socialism, to the postcommunist period, which has seen an impressive amount of publishing activity and an acknowledgment of American and Western European scholarship. Blaim’s “preliminary survey” of utopian studies in Poland reveals a long and rich tradition of theoretical discussion on the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia that definitely contributes to the one that has been promoted in English and in French over the past decades: a tradition written in Polish that begs to be discovered.

The article on Portugal demonstrates that ideas of utopia and the millennium have been embedded in the country’s national culture since the beginning and explains why...