| I here hypothesize a causal relationship between the conditions of oppression and expressions of utopia. Roughly: the more a people, culture, and/or ethnicity experience physical space as a site of political, cultural, and literal encroachment, the more that distinct cultures utopian ideas tend to appear in non-spatial---specifically, temporal and introspective---formulations. To support this hypothesis, I examine texts like Mircea Eliade's The Forbidden Forest, Sergiu Faˇrcaˇsan's A Love Story from the Year 41,042, Bujor Nedelcovici's The Second Messenger, Oana Orlea's Perimeter Zero, Costaˇche Olareanu's Fear; Ben Okri's Astonishing the Gods; Kajo Laing's Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars; Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery; and The Zohar: The Book of Splendor, and practices like the Sabbath in Classical Kabbalah and the Paˇltinis Paidetic school.;I select specific structural, linguistic, and narrative content elements of these works to capture particular moments in the large-scale move from space to time, while mapping this emigration of a particular people's utopian imagination onto the relevant historico-political contexts which shape it. My fieldwork strongly suggests that Romanian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Indian, and Jewish analogous utopian traditions deploy temporality, metaphysical speculation, introspection, irony, punning, and censor-avoiding subterfuge. I also examine readings like Theodor Herzl's Altneuland/Old New Land, which shows the occasional reversal of the temporalizing trend once historical conditions are once again propitious, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes, which, as intra-cultural cases of oppression, show how the same utopian impulse finds expression in an 'inner time' when they are not. Finally, having supported my thesis from the past, I examine present-day expressions of utopian aspirations (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy , communities like The EdenProject in England, The Damanhur Federation in Italy, Auroville in India, and cities like Masdar in United Arab Emirates and New Songdo in South Korea) and note that complex, dialogical accounts, addressing meta-concerns that have outgrown cultures and nations, now dominate the utopian field. |
