Teaching Utopia During Dystopian Times

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if—in attempts to foster critical thinking and provide historical perspectives on the crises and hopes of 2020–21—professors focused their teaching on an era with similar problems and hopes and a genre from that era designed to address the hopes and crises? Considering the period focus of ALR and the title of this essay, you know where I’m headed. The parallel period is the late-nineteenth century, especially 1888 to 1900, but including a “long nineteenth century” extension into the early years of the twentieth century. The genre is utopian literature, including eutopias (the good place) and dystopias and mixtures of both.

The confluence of despair and hope cultivates the desire to imagine utopias. The expression of that utopian desire in the form of literature in the late-nineteenth century was enhanced by several factors. Utopian books didn’t have to compete with utopian expressions in film, TV, the Internet, and social media. Their accessibility and appeal were enhanced by increases in literacy, technological and transportation innovations that lowered the price of books, and a “symbolic community of the printed word” that gained much of its power from a “community of moral discourse.”¹ In the United States, the Golden Era of print culture helped make the Golden Era of utopian literature.

In Japan, Austria, and the United States, I have taught different types of utopian literature courses, but I have never focused only on the late-nineteenth century. This essay challenges me to consider how I would do that in the midst of our fears about COVID, rising white supremacy, staggering job losses, and severe economic inequality occurring simultaneously with the rising hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement and the hope that the COVID crisis’ exposure of inequalities will inspire new ways to build a better America.

My pedagogical imagining envisions a “flipped,” small-group discussion course in which students read the assigned texts and Internet materials before class. The materials, and others the students deem relevant, become resources for the discussions that take up the majority of the class time.² In an online course, the discussions will occur in break-out and chat groups. The discussions evolve through a series of interrelated questions: Why is historical contextualization valuable? How is contextualization enhanced by examining Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888)? What are the implications of this book’s insights and blind spots? What are the implications of the different approaches of other utopias from that era that offer alternative responses to the past/still present?

My primary goal for the first question is to invite students to realize that the crises and hopes of the present have historical roots in the late-nineteenth century. (Obviously the roots are much deeper, but this course’s chronology is limited to ALR-period roots.) Because there are thousands of possibilities, I will limit the historical comparing to manifestations of inequality and hopes for equality. To make the comparisons relevant to 2021, I will ask the groups to discover comparative examples of economic, gender, racial, and national origin inequalities and hopes. Each group will select one of these. There is also the possibility of introducing a fascinating epidemic/pandemic medical inequality comparison: COVID and the pellagra outbreak beginning in 1906 that was especially bad in the South because people tended to distrust scientific evidence about corn-based diets.³ But it wasn’t until after the ALR period that the influenza epidemic offers a more convincing national comparison to the devastation of COVID.

Assigning information about historical roots will not be difficult. Classic studies such as the 2005 edition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the 2014 edition of Robert H. Walker’s Reform in America offer numerous possibilities related to economic, gender, racial, and national origin inequalities and hopes for equality: for example, the outsized wealth of Rockefeller then and Jeff Bezos now, the hopes of Populist-Progressive movements then and calls for redistribution of wealth now; the disenfranchisement of women then and continuing gender salary gaps now, the hopes of Suffragettes then...