Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon

Utopianism in all of its manifestations often powerfully (re)surfaces during times of significant socio-ecological upheaval as a response to oppressive and exploitative realities. As such it is a fervent refusal against a given status quo and its purported inevitability. Utopianism and hope are rendered possible by, and draw their transformative potential from, the boundless terrain of potentiality surrounding any given reality.1 Indeed, without such conditions of radical uncertainty, hope and utopianism would not be possible. Often and understandably, the seminal works of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others come to mind when we think of utopian studies. Hence Kumar’s parochial observation that there is no discernible utopian tradition beyond the West because other cultures lack the foundational myth of the Golden Age—that is, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and Arcadia—that has been so formative to the development of utopia in the West.2 These traditional or “transcendental” utopian modalities often feature a dichotomous opposition to their present reality, depicting time and historical movement as linear successions of stages proceeding from an archaic past and toward a future wherein the utopian ideal is seen as occupying a “fixed space outside time and history.”3 Such temporally “transcendent” utopias marked the dawn of the modern phase of utopian thought, originating in the seventeenth century alongside new theories of social evolution that coalesced into modern Enlightenment notions of linear historical progress.4Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopianism,” which emerged during the “historic block” of political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, marks one important step within the utopian canon toward praxis and the essential “Nowness” of critique and imaginative projection.6 This “critical” strand of utopianism is fueled by a fervent opposition to the exploitation and domination of people and the natural world that is increasingly characteristic of Western-capitalist societies.7 This opposition is coupled with a utopian desire for mutual aid, ecological resilience, liberation, and peaceful living—in effect, a longing for community.8 The “critical” in Moylan’s formulation has a bivalency: first, in the sense of critique through the debunking and deconstruction of the utopian genre itself, which was “colonized” by capitalism toward the 1970s and infused with technocratic dreams of material abundance through boundless economic expansion; and second, in the sense of the critical mass required to effect fundamental societal transformations.9 If the better is the enemy of the good, then perfection serves as “a stick with which to beat the possible.”10 Utopias do not offer rigid blueprints of a fixed or perfect ideal world but rather head toward “the ideal” by offering “a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” predicated on a demand for radically new relations between social and natural systems.11 Ever critically self-reflective, critical utopias continually remind us of the limitations of the utopian impulse, particularly the dangers of pursuing rigid and transcendental visions of “the better.” Nevertheless, these are desperate times that demand some orientation toward a better; utopianism’s denunciative function is not enough. Thus, in his impassioned recent work Becoming Utopian, Moylan denotes the need for an intersectional, democratically unified leadership structure that can help sustain a political movement for counteracting the “global/neoliberal superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon.”12 With a focus more on process than a fixed ideal, the critical utopia explores and articulates vibrant post-capitalist futures that are simultaneously open-ended, and far more socio-ecologically resilient than the “now” of late capitalism.Akin in function and style to critical utopias are the grounded and transgressive utopias, which variedly call for a utopian transformation of the present from within.13 The grounded utopia, exemplified most starkly by historical grassroots movements for social transformation, emphasizes a greater “imaginative awareness” of—and steps toward instantiating—“neglected or suppressed possibilities for qualitatively better forms of life” within the “Now.”14 Exhibiting a Blochian emphasis on praxis, these utopian modalities “of the here and now” tend to root their utopian visions in the “concrete material contradictions of existing states of affairs.”15 Moreover, these “zones of otherness” tend to prioritize pluralism, diversity, and process over static blueprints.16 However, while all utopias harbor transgressive potential, not all can be categorized as truly “transgressive”; the transgressive utopia similarly arises from “profound discontent with the political present,” yet goes even further in rule-breaking, boundary deconstruction, challenging dominant paradigms and creating new conceptual and political spaces for shattering taken-for-granted discourses and representational systems.”17 Akin to visions espoused by anarchist and postanarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin, and Gustav Landauer, transgressive and grounded utopias assert that just as important as the need for critique and for the resistance to further colonization of life by the state and corporate capitalism is the creation of counterspaces within it wherein the “better” can be enacted.18 Thus, grounded utopias, as exemplified by the alternate traditions of anarchic, anti-authoritarian, and anti-perfectionist utopias, feature complex spatiotemporal forms wherein living, breathing beings engage in prefigurative modes of direct-action politics in order to realize alternative visions from the past, present, and future in the “here and now.”19 Grounded utopias resolutely challenge the purported inescapability of capitalist oppression and exploitation, and the perceived impossibility of eradicating capitalist exploitation within current generations, maintaining instead that already now one can, and must, work toward its abolition.These more recent developments gesture toward two important shifts needed within utopian theory and praxis. The first is its thorough decolonization and (re)orientation as an undertaking grounded in terra for the liberation of all terrestrials. That utopian imaginaries and strivings are far from exclusively Western phenomena can hardly be overemphasized. Second, we can further cultivate this understanding by exploring “intercultural imaginaries of ideal societies” and more concertedly engaging with groups traditionally consigned to the margins of modernity, whose unique histories, origin stories, and ways of knowing and being in the world often yield rather different ways of imagining “the better.” In doing so, it is important to remain critically aware of, and strive to avoid, the tendency to project Western definitions of utopia onto “non-Western” representations of the desire for alternative worlds that “does not challenge the epistemological foundations of utopia as a Western way of imagining the ideal society.”20 For instance, many Indigenous cultures like the Anishinaabe have “intergenerational” conceptions of time, a “spiralling temporality” wherein the self is seen as walking through life alongside past, present and future relatives simultaneously.21 This does not preclude conceptions of futurity, but it does add considerable complexity to the linear conceptions of historical and temporal progression that often underlie traditional utopias. Excellent examples of spiraling temporalities marked by myriad more-than-human agencies can be seen in Indigenous-inspired ecotopian texts such as Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing, and in Joshua Whitehead’s Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction.22Moreover, as a result of the destructive legacies of European colonial expansion across, and appropriation of, the Americas, many Indigenous cultures have already lived through the “end,” and continue to do so in the wake of contemporary climate and biodiversity breakdown. Thus, “Indigenous literature [and utopian imaginaries] . . . tends to narrate a sense of ongoing crisis rather than an upcoming one.”23 This narrative also tends to be rooted firmly in the land and terra more broadly, which are conceived as dynamic meshworks of human and other-than-human agencies, linking past, present, and future generations across particular spatial-temporalities.24 Thus, their contemporary utopian mobilizations in the form of the #NoDAPL occupation camps and the like are rooted in terra and are not merely designed to refute colonial capitalism’s ongoing assault on “proper” or “right” relations with terrestrial life, but also to prefigure a better world and reassert the boundlessness of terrestrial potentiality. Far from appearing as a mute backdrop, other terrestrials are viewed and treated as kin- purposive entities and key protagonists alongside humans who matter in their own right and deserve respect.25 This points to the second urgent shift within utopian studies. When imagining and conceptualizing “the good life,” the tradition on the whole, even in many of its ecotopian or “green utopian” modalities, has been far too anthropocentric, asking how oppressive systems might be dismantled so as to ensure human flourishing. Rather, a utopianism fit for the exigencies of the present, and more worthy of the name, must continually ask: how do we radically reconfigure the deficient present so as to enable a multispecies flourishing, and in so doing avoid the propagation of sacrificial people and places? Whose voices—human and otherwise—might be excluded in our imaginings and strivings for better worlds?In her timely monograph Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature, green utopian scholar Lisa Garforth urges that the socio-ecological perturbations of the present require a new “green utopianism,” one predicated on radically new way of being and inhabiting the world and “attuned to the complex ways in which we are simultaneously matter and culture . . . we need new ontologies, new ethics and new ways of thinking about better greener worlds.”26 In this section I will tentatively sketch and advocate for a new green utopianism which is explicitly decolonial and postanthropocentric. Such a modality would be especially fit for actively resisting the multiple and intersecting deficiencies of the Capitalocene and, crucially, finding ways in which to live well together in the damaged and uncertain terrain ahead.27 I refer to it as terrestrial ecotopianism, traces and glimmers of which can be seen in Indigenous ethics, politics, onto-epistemological systems and speculative fiction, as well as in contemporary radical ecotopian movements and literary texts such as those alluded to above.28 Terrestrial ecotopias build on critical and grounded utopian modalities that emphasize the “Nowness” of the utopian impulse (focusing on the here below instead of beaming into the beyond). There are worlds of difference between them and, for instance, techno-capitalist “post-terrestrial” utopian modalities that seek to abandon terra, earth kin, and our responsibilities to them in search of new colonial frontiers on other planets.29 Goodman et al.’s notable article, “Mars Can Wait: Facing the Challenges of Our Civilisation,” is about the criminal waste of resources in pursuing cosmic fantasies, resources that should instead be used to ameliorate a litany of human ills and pathologies here on Earth.30 This argument applies to the human-Earth interface amid climate and ecological breakdown. Terrestrial ecotopias further exhibit a degree of open-endedness and critical self-reflection, particularly around boundaries and their exclusions (i.e., self/other, Nature/culture, ecotopian collectives). Relatedly, ecotopias tend to emphasize the process of utopian resistance and transformation, and on critical engagement with and transgression of limits of the present, rather than fixed end-states. Yet they maintain a tentative gaze toward the ever-unfolding Not-Yet.Terrestrial ecotopias are thus firmly rooted in terra and in dynamic and inextricable entanglement with agentic earth others, who precede, constitute, always exceed, and often surprise us.31 They reiterate that there is never a time or place where “we humans” are and other terrestrials are not. Of course, a focus on terrestrial groundedness and relationality does not preclude any orientation to the beyond in the form of distant times and places. Rather, this ethico-political imperative reminds us of our responsibilities to our kin and the relations that sustain us, who matter and without whom we could not be. Terrestrial ecotopias variedly draw on critical-posthuman tributaries, and on a rich tradition of Indigenous cosmologies in which co-terrestrials are not merely peripheral, nor are they a resource for ensuring human continuity (as in some more traditional strands of ecotopianism).32 Rather, our terrestrial kin, in all of their singular and irrecuperable lifeways, occupy the foreground of earthly happenings alongside humans and emerge as central concerns within these manifestations. Moreover, terrestrial utopias not only widen but critically reflect on and deconstruct spheres delineating who matters and who should be considered when deliberating on the nature of ideal ecotopian collectives. Their utopian “ought” and conceptualizations of the good life actively foreground the needs and concerns of other terrestrials through a palpable striving for multispecies justice rather than the still all-too-human emphases of climate justice narratives. Complex though it may be to understand and approximate the unique needs, interests, and vulnerabilities of our co-terrestrials, we might make a start by cultivating a hypersensitivity and awareness to the multifarious narrative agencies that continually surround us and make us “us.” We would also do well, following Derrida, to declare all creatures our fellows, as sacred entities who are beyond price and thus “cannot be bought or sold.”33 Recalling Huxley’s Island, education programs designed to “curb the contemporary disconnect from nature,” particularly from early childhood, offer one of many helpful mechanisms for developing the humility, care, and respect that are essential foundations for doing better in our dealings with earth others.34Terrestrial ecotopias value diversity and the others’ irreducible singularity while emphasizing the fundamental “being-in-common” that characterizes terrestrial life.35 Their utopian impulse draws on and mobilizes an ethics of care and politics of love as a transformative political concept that doesn’t limit itself to the self-same but rather opens itself towards a love of the “different,” of the “stranger,” thereby providing a basis for the collective construction of a new society.36 Such an orientation encourages one to not just look at “but really see the warblers, waters and walnuts around us.”37 This requires being radically attentive or attuned to the agencies around us, being present and alive to their habits and movements, needs, vulnerabilities, and desires. Moreover, terrestrial ecotopias enjoin us to hold everything dear in our dealings with other terrestrials, particularly amid times of systematic and widespread loss; every singular moment, every individual, every species is precious and cannot be replicated or recouped. Each is a constellation of memories, experiences, aptitudes, fears, joys. So, John Berger urges us to cherish every wingbeat, every song, maintaining a radical awareness of the lives of our co-terrestrials with whom we share a finite earthly mortality.38 Through careful attentiveness and care for the unique lifeways of our co-terrestrials, we can begin to work toward a more respectful conviviality conducive to a mutual flourishing. As we become more attuned to local ecological cycles and patterns, we can come to know what resources and spaces are important to other species, as well as what adversely affects their well-being. We can come to understand, for instance, the harmful ways in which noise pollution affects cetaceans and other marine kin, and therefore reduce or knowingly eliminate its sources. Rather than opting for perfectly manicured landscaping in service of human aesthetic preferences, we would preserve and promote hedgerow heterogeneity since it provides vital sources of food, shelter, and breeding sites for countless species in otherwise denuded landscapes across the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and elsewhere. As we develop renewable energy technologies for powering low-carbon and carbon-neutral lifeways, for instance, we would paint the rotor blades of wind turbines black in order to reduce collision fatalities amongst our avian kin, and/or adjust their height and location so that they don’t intrude as much on busy flight paths.39Through a terrestrial utopianism we can build beyond the mounting socio-ecological perturbations of the Capitalocene and toward what philosopher Glen Albrecht refer to as the “Symbiocene.”40 Rooted in insights from microbiology which underscore the entangled nature of terrestrial life and whose key term literally denotes “living together,” the Symbiocene would entail a shift away from the dysbiosis (its Greek etymological roots denoting “life in distress”) that characterizes the “Anthropocene syndrome” by offering a “vision of a desirable future state toward which social change can be directed.”41 Crucially, this vision is predicated on the “possibility of the complete re-integration of the human body, psyche and culture with the rest of life”42 Albrecht’s emphasis on mutuality is a laudable and important one, and one that terrestrial ecotopian manifestations are already gesturing toward in a variety of ways. There is no “us” without our co-terrestrial kin; thus, to exclude them, whether implicitly or explicitly, from utopian theory and praxis constitutes a grave ethical, philosophical, and existential failing. In the anti-anthropocentric sensibilities of many Indigenous peoples, contemporary radical environmental activists, and ecotopian texts lies radical terrestrial ecotopian potential for rectifying some of the canon’s traditional exclusions and blind and as an to the Capitalocene and its assault on terrestrial

Absurdity · Aesthetics · Arcadia · Art · Art history · Counterculture · Dystopia · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Politics · Sociology · Status quo · Utopia · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• ‘The land where turmeric turned to gold’

  Open Access•Korrakot Kumhaeng, Duangkamon Chansiri•Cogent Arts and Humanities•2026

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