The Year 2016: A Review of the Events Held in Six European Countries

The year 2016 was unprecedented for the field of utopian studies: to mark five hundred years since the publication of Thomas More's Utopia, a variety of events were organized all over the world, from seminars, workshops, and conferences to fairs, festivals, performances, concerts, cycles of movies, exhibitions, book presentations, and special issues of academic and nonacademic journals. However, although the word utopia was used in the title or description of these events, they were not always directly related to More's masterpiece: more than the text that originated the utopian literary tradition, it was the spirit of utopia, that hope that Ernst Bloch described in all its nuances, and its revolutionary power that seemed to be the focus of the commemoration.

An examination of what was actually commemorated in 2016 is important, as these events shape the collective memory that is at the basis of collective identities. As Maurice Halbwachs indicated in his groundbreaking studies on memory, societies cannot "remember" anything literally, but they have a "memory" that works like that of individuals. Through a process of selection of names, dates, and events, a narrative is shaped, resulting from the interaction, communication, and contribution of the media and institutions.¹ The past, as such, does not exist—it is continuously reconstructed and represented. What, in the past, is remembered and how it is remembered are of the utmost importance to understanding the way collective identities are built: the past, as a discursive construct, is reshaped to justify the options of the present. This study of the events held in 2016 in six European countries where the utopian tradition is well rooted aims to assess how the commemorative year contributed to reshaping the identity of these nations and the way they face their future.

Methodology

This study entailed four stages. Its preparation dates from the end of the year 2015, when the Centre for English, Translation, and Anglo-Portuguese Studies (University of Porto and New University of Lisbon) created a program to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia. The program, which relied on an Internet site for communicating all the activities to the public, aimed at promoting "the notion of utopia as a driver of social change and as a source of inspiration for innovation in science and technology."² Utopia 500 benefited from the work of trainees who spent from two months to one year at the University of Porto doing an Erasmus+ internship. It included the creation and management of a variety of events, from the organization of the annual conference of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe (held in Lisbon in July 2016) and workshops at schools to the promotion of competitions and the administration of a calendar with all the events that were announced internationally to celebrate the idea of utopia. The first stage entailed the work of most of the trainees of the Utopia 500 program, who browsed the Internet on a daily basis to identify such events.

After the year 2016 ended, the second stage of the study began, and a small team was set up to gather information on the events that had been held: coordinated by Rita Amaral, two Spanish trainees—Ana Villanustre and Clara Mendéz Royo—and one Italian (Laura Ferrarini), the team confirmed all the information and inserted it (title of the events, dates, places, and URLs for the pertinent websites) in an Excel file created by Miguel Nogueira, who is in charge of the Infographics Office at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, and me. Six countries were then selected for the study: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. These countries were chosen as they were the ones, in Europe, where the most events had been held. Additionally, it was evident from the beginning that the profiles of the events in these countries were disparate in nature and objectives, which would allow grounds for reaching relevant conclusions on the way utopia is perceived and used by different European nations. The team hopes...