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-firstcentury 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...