Project MUSE®: Utopian Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Utopian Studies.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 21 (2010) through current issueLatest Articles: Utopian StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Utopian Studies2154-96481045-991XLatest articles in Utopian Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Abolitionist Speculation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977508
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In her 1973 parable, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin famously describes a seemingly perfect city whose foundation is laid on the back of a scapegoat: a child, an “it,” which “could be a boy or a girl” that “looks about six, but actually is nearly ten.”1 “It is feeble-minded,” Le Guin writes. “Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.” It lives on, half-starved, naked, caked in its own excrement, “[its buttocks and thighs] . . . a mass of festered sores.”2 Picking its nose, fumbling to groom or stimulate itself, it sits hunched in the corner waiting for its only contact with the outside world, the intermittent stares of fear
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallAbolitionist Speculation2025-12-11text/htmlen-USAbolitionist Speculation2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®898122026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Reading Trans Excess into Toni Morrison’s Beloved
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977509
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Often they are mistook for insects—but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for a moment it is easy to believe each one has one—will become all of what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that; longer, perhaps, than the spore itself.1Trans bodies are a dramatic disturbance of time and space—of what was, is, and will be. To put it another way, to be trans is a radical acceptance of one’s own unending transition and transgression; it reimagines the past and present to construct a more livable future in one’s ever-changing body and world. If, as José Esteban Muñoz suggests, the “utopian function is enacted
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallReading Trans Excess into Toni Morrison’s Beloved2025-12-11text/htmlen-USReading Trans Excess into Toni Morrison’s Beloved2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®612532026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Soviet Urban Planning’s “Great Debate” (1929–1931): Modernity, Utopia, and the “Ideal Socialist City”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977510
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When the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 the Communist Party aspired to a rapid modernization of society. Following the end of the Russian Civil War (1917–22) between the Bolsheviks and the remaining supporters of the tsarist regime, Soviet authorities launched a social reconstruction program to stabilize the economy and to establish a socialist society. Early Soviet intellectuals debated the foundations for the future of a massive socialist society, in which the roles of the educational system, industrialization, infrastructure, and urbanization would be critical. The 1920s saw widespread experimentation in theoretical and practical knowledges, particularly those designed to influence the behavior of the new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallSoviet Urban Planning’s “Great Debate” (1929–1931): Modernity, Utopia, and the “Ideal Socialist City”2025-12-11text/htmlen-USSoviet Urban Planning’s “Great Debate” (1929–1931): Modernity, Utopia, and the “Ideal Socialist City”2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®769142026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Keys to Paradise: Imāmate and the Utopian Longings of the Shiʿi Devotional Text of Mafātīḥ al-jinān
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977511
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To conceptualize Islam as a historical phenomenon, with complex devotional, liturgical, performative, and theological discourses across vast regions of the globe, is to consider the human longing for a better life despite the vicissitudes of lived existence. As an Abrahamic tradition with beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula during the early seventh century, Islam’s diverse utopian aspirations have, in varying degrees over the centuries, involved a praxis orienting the individual toward transformation in an unfolding future. To evoke Shahab Ahmed’s seminal work, Muslim utopianism lies in the abundance of “the historical phenomenon of Islam” in its hermeneutical engagement with the world, through these configurations
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallKeys to Paradise: Imāmate and the Utopian Longings of the Shiʿi Devotional Text of Mafātīḥ al-jinān2025-12-11text/htmlen-USKeys to Paradise: Imāmate and the Utopian Longings of the Shiʿi Devotional Text of Mafātīḥ al-jinān2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®895252026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Canceled Futures “and all that cal” in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977512
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In a study of post-1945 British fiction, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (2012), Jed Esty argues that imperialist politics led to a literary tradition of unevenly developed British bildungsroman novels. Esty observes in his conclusion that post-1945 British novels continue “plots of moody, frozen adolescence,” and he specifically identifies “darkly satirical and youth-centric novels [such] as . . . Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1966) [sic].”1 If Esty is correct that the 1960s British bildungsroman portrays a stifled disaffected youth culture resulting from “the struggle between adult authority and youthful rebellion,”2 then Burgess’s novel would be ripe for an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallCanceled Futures “and all that cal” in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange2025-12-11text/htmlen-USCanceled Futures “and all that cal” in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®651432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Meet the “More Immediate and Intense” Ursula K. Le Guin: Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems ed. by Harold Bloom
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977513
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Caveat Lector: (1) This review essay assumes a reader who has little knowledge of Le Guin’s expansive canon of poetry. I was one of those readers; (2) I make no pretense of knowing the scholarship on the poems. Because my source of information, Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems, is excellent, I do, however, hope some of my comments will be useful to the poetry-knowledgeable readers; (3) I am not an “objective” Le Guin reader. My admiration for her writing and decades of correspondence with her make me a sympathetic reader.Readers of Utopian Studies who know Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) know that she writes poetry. Emersion into the Kesh culture includes reading the four “POEMS” sections and reading and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallMeet the “More Immediate and Intense” Ursula K. Le Guin: Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems ed. by Harold Bloom2025-12-11text/htmlen-USMeet the “More Immediate and Intense” Ursula K. Le Guin: Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems ed. by Harold Bloom2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®661292026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria A. Wolcott (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977514
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At the very end of the 2023 biopic Rustin, immediately after triumph at the 1963 March on Washington, the leaders of the Big Five civil rights organizations are invited to the White House to clinch the connection between the march and civil rights legislation pending in Congress. It is a movie about professional reformers organizing, then arguing among themselves, then organizing some more. As the representatives of the SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, NUL, and CORE turn toward the White House, Bayard Rustin, the real organizer, uninvited, turns the other way to join volunteers picking up litter on the National Mall.Victoria W. Wolcott introduces Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by remarking
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallLiving in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria A. Wolcott (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USLiving in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria A. Wolcott (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®137672026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977515
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Sustainability rhetoric in the US is haunted by Thomas Jefferson’s ghost. This is a guiding idea in Abby L. Goode’s Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability, a nuanced and well-developed analysis of literature from the long nineteenth century that traces the literary formation of US sustainability rhetoric. Recovering the historical origins of this ubiquitous (and notoriously slippery) concept, Goode’s study is framed through the cultural and ideological stickiness of Jeffersonian agrarianism and engages a range of artifacts spanning fiction, poetry, newspaper editorials, and political tracts. Goode demonstrates how an early form of American sustainability rhetoric coalesced through the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallAgrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USAgrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®135702026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice by Douglas Mao (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977516
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I was reading Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) simultaneous to reading Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation and Justice by Douglas Mao, which does not mention Young. Unsurprisingly, given Mao’s interesting inclusion of theorists of justice in his analysis of utopian literature, there are clear connections between Young’s understanding of what it means to think about justice and the reasons why Mao looks to the idea of justice in his book. Young notes, “Since Plato ‘justice’ has evoked the well-ordered society, and it continues to carry those resonances in contemporary political discussion. Appeals to justice still have the power to awaken a moral imagination and motivate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallInventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice by Douglas Mao (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USInventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice by Douglas Mao (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®165222026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia. ed. by Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977517
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The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia, edited by Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington, is a delight to read. It is a page turner for anyone interested in learning a great deal about one of the most important books in the Western tradition. I have been a student of utopianism for almost forty years, and it managed to tell me things I didn’t know or had forgotten about More’s masterwork.It does, however, have some peculiarities. It isn’t really a handbook but, rather, it owes its origins—as the editors acknowledge—to “two workshops on translating and appropriating Utopia,” which “became the core of the present handbook” (vii). “This Handbook has therefore been developed to allow readers to consider in one place
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallThe Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia. ed. by Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia. ed. by Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®198642026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Rethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches ed. by Ebru Deniz Ozan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977518
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Anthologies are particularly difficult to review. They offer diverse perspectives on the issues inherent in utopian thought but at the same time often struggle to present a coherent set of arguments. Rethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches suffers from several of the problems inherent in anthologies. This is not to say that this collection does not provide useful insights into questions of utopian thought and practice. In the introduction, the editor of Rethinking Utopia, Ebru Deniz Ozan, points to the necessity of utopia in these times. She quite wisely suggests that we must overcome the “learned helplessness of the present day” (2). I would agree that this is one of the most critical questions facing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallRethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches ed. by Ebru Deniz Ozan (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USRethinking Utopia: Interdisciplinary Approaches ed. by Ebru Deniz Ozan (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®127432026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms ed. by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977520
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Futuristic imaginaries have long been disputed on account of hegemonic Western perspectives and the legacies of colonial complicity of speculative genres such as science fiction and fantasy. A more complex history of these genres and the continuous diversification of futurisms that writers, artists, and scholars of color have demanded for decades, has been achieved not least due to a range of anthologies and magazines, often including program-matic statements or manifestos. Some key interventions in the field include Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, edited by Sheree R. Thomas (2000); So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallThe Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms ed. by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms ed. by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®252122026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias by David S. Dalton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977521
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David S. Dalton’s Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias examines Mexican and Chicanx dystopias since the inception of NAFTA and proposes technological domination and markets of death as prerequisites to neoliberalism. Dalton offers “robo sacer” as a “technologically bare existence,” a cyborg articulation of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, centering “the role of technology in perpetuating an oppressive social order” (6). Dalton suggests that this lens makes it possible to reconcile Donna Haraway’s and Achilles Mbembe’s theories discussing the deconstruction of the human (14). Dalton grounds his monograph in “necroliberalism,” a term he defines as “a transnational state of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallRobo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias by David S. Dalton (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USRobo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias by David S. Dalton (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®151152026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas ed. by J. P. Telotte (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977522
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The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas, edited by J. P. Telotte, offers an impressive breadth of texts, theoretical approaches, and rhetorical styles for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars at all levels. The book is a collection of essays extending across twenty chapters, each providing a unique discussion about different examples of both “old” and “new” science fiction (SF) films within well-known and less familiar theoretical approaches, including biopunk and steampunk, kaiju films, superhero fiction, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and utopian studies. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) provides a touchstone for chapters by De Witt Douglas Kilgore (“Afrofuturist Cinema”), Susan A.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallThe Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas ed. by J. P. Telotte (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas ed. by J. P. Telotte (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®216532026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977523
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The Metabolists, a loose-knit group of Japanese architects and designers active from 1960 to the early 1970s, conceived of cities having the qualities of a living creature—the city as a body made up of constituent small parts with different roles in circulating and using resources, in the same way that individual cells build organs that do the work of metabolizing food or oxygen for the whole organism. These cells live, decay, and die over time, as does, eventually, the larger body that contains them. The Metabolist vision includes an expansive idea of both scale and duration, as well as an embrace of “natural” cycles of growth, transformation, and decay, somewhat in opposition to the then-dominant European
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallThe Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®119552026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11Editors’ Message
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977525
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This final issue of Utopian Studies 36 (2025) offers topics ranging from early Islamic utopianism to Soviet-era urban design, and from prison abolition to “trans excess.” Shea Hennum’s “Abolitionist Speculation” opens the Articles section, theorizing the practice of imagining a world without prisons and the conditions that would make such a world possible. Hennum locates this concept in the history of utopian and dystopian literature’s attention to carceral logics and some texts’ proposals for alternatives to imprisonment. Conversely, the author also recovers a tradition of utopianism within abolitionist thought, interweaving histories of anarchist and communist politics. The article concludes with a reading of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallEditors’ Message2025-12-11text/htmlen-USEditors’ Message2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®91952026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11The Principle of Political Hope: Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought by Loren Goldman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977526
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The Principle of Political Hope: Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought by Loren Goldman is a work of political philosophy that offers a close reading of five “modern” thinkers: Immanuel Kant, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Ernst Bloch. I found the selection intriguing. As someone who’s written a fair amount on the subject of “hope” over the years, I’ve never engaged in any meaningful way with the first four of these figures. Bloch is a different matter, though my initial impression here was that he was in unusual company. I delved into the book with a mixture of curiosity (eager to learn what Kant and the early American pragmatists can teach me) and a tinge of guilty unease (that I’d
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/507/image/coversmallThe Principle of Political Hope: Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought by Loren Goldman (review)2025-12-11text/htmlen-USThe Principle of Political Hope: Progress, Action, and Democracy in Modern Thought by Loren Goldman (review)2025-12-112025TWOProject MUSE®154502026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-11