Imagine…

“All power to the Imagination” and “Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking” were among the slogans of the May ’68 revolt in Paris, a huge outpouring of protest expressing the desire for a better world. Started by students, spreading to wildcat strikes of millions of workers, it was as much a reaction against the old forms of communist politics, as it was the capitalist state: “Worker: You are 25, but your union is from another century.”

The utopian tradition in the Western world has its roots in the imagination. Sir Thomas More who coined the phrase Utopia, meaning both the good place and nowhere, created an imaginary island where the perfect commonwealth state had been achieved. This product of his imagination held a mirror up to the society of his times back in 1516. Before then and since, there have been countless feats of the human imagination, describing heavens and hells, cities, islands, planets – alternative realties and speculative fictions that assist us in seeing more clearly the limitations of life as it is, and the possibilities for life as it could be – for better or for worse.

The Utopia Reading Group in Ryde has been meeting fortnightly since the end of March. We have covered lots of themes and issues, including human nature, class, justice, population, work, environment, identity politics, sexuality, technology and so on.

All these big themes run through the major fictional and artistic visions of utopia. For the coming months, we will look at these creative visions of utopia and dystopia and their relevance to today’s problems and hopes.

We will use this session to sketch out a plan for the coming months’ sessions, based on what people are most interested in and what resources we have collectively. Here are some outline ideas/examples to look up and spark your imagination:

Plato’s Republic & More’s Utopia: early blueprints
Herlands: Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Rebecca Gilman
Science Fiction – the Old Brave New Worlds
The American Dream – Final Frontiers
Architect or Bee: The Utopian City
Apocalypse Now – Millenarian and End Times writings
Fairy Tales and Magic Realism: Angela Carter
Imagined Communities – Nationalist mythology
French utopians: Cabet and Fourier
Russia: Utopia to Dystopia
Ecotopias
Dreams, Symbols and Myth: Jung and Hesse
Bellamy’s Looking Backward vs. Morris’ News From Nowhere

Please feel free to contact the co-ordinator Robin on [email protected] or 07974 331053.

Hope to start a Utopia Reading group in another town, at a different time depending on people expressing an interest / preference.

Image: Mararie under CC BY 2.0