EDITORS’ MESSAGE

Abstract

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 Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), fleshing out Hennum’s concept of abolitionist speculation.Alexander Rienerth’s “Reading Trans Excess into Toni Morrison’s Beloved” similarly places the reading of a classic American novel at the center of an analysis of the emancipatory urges of utopian speculation. Rienerth proposes that we understand Morrison’s early masterpiece as a “narrative act of transition” that models an alternate, intersubjective Black female subjectivity as a trans-feminine subjectivity. This new model is shaped in the relationship of characters Sethe and Beloved, thus “lay[ing] a foundation contrary to normative literary modes [that] contain and condemn Black trans women.” Instead, Beloved “open[s] an affective space [for theorizing] how queer utopia and the Black trans-feminine body may be constructed in tandem with one another.”The next two articles lead us to very different historical moments. “Soviet Urban Planning’s ‘Great Debate’ (1929–31): Modernity, Utopia, and the ‘Ideal Socialist City,’” by Dimitris Margaritis Moschos, contends that the debates between the so-called Urbanists and Disurbanists over the design of “the ideal socialist city” reflected a problematic inherent to the country’s shifting notions of modernity: namely, the conflict between the priorities of the individual and of a socialist mass society. The article proposes that the Urbanist-Disurbanist discussion regarding socialist modernization and society reflects divergent utopian responses to the political and economic challenges of the USSR. Furthermore, the debate was more than just an argument between technical specialists, argues Moschos, as these city planners worked consciously within (and sometimes against) the context of a broader, European reconceptualization of modernity following World War I.“Keys to Paradise: Imāmate and the Utopian Longings of the Shiʿi Devotional Text of Mafātīḥ al-jinān,” by Babak Rahimi and Mohammad Nasravi, takes us to debates among Islamic religious scholars regarding the utopian content of the Shiʿi doctrine of the Imāmate manifested in devotional practices. The article offers a Blochian understanding of such religious devotional practices as performative expressions of utopian longing. Rahimi and Nasravi understand Shiʿi devotional performances to be intimate, everyday longings as forms of Blochian “daydream.” These dreams present the absent, divine-like figure of Imām, whose authority lies in concealed transcendence, while being experienced concretely through textual performances of devotion and prayer at dedicated shrines.We return to more or less contemporary times in Ryan R. Kerr’s reading of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange. Kerr contextualizes this unsettling novel in the decline of British hegemony following World War II, and in the rise of what we now call capitalist realism. The novel, Kerr argues, confirms the hypotheses of Fredric Jameson on postmodernism and of Mark Fisher on canceled futures: namely, that alternatives to the dominant social order are reincorporated into the logic of late capitalism. Kerr interprets the novel’s linguistic pastiche, as well as its referencing of a postwar “mugging crisis” and other forms of criminality, as an ironical commentary on Britain’s (vain) insistence on its continued dominance in contemporary global politics—despite its evident post-imperial decline. Burgess’s novel suggests, says Kerr, that (re)imagining the country’s future means “abandoning the hopeless nostalgia that is easily co-opted by nationalist supremacy”—an abandoning which the novel’s protagonists embrace with, well, considerable abandon.This issue features an important REVIEW ESSAY by one of the long-time members of the Society for Utopian Studies, Kenneth M. Roemer. As a longtime friend and correspondent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Roemer’s review of The Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems (2023) is a welcome introduction. Roemer admits he is not a poetry critic, but he is a career-long scholar of utopian fiction who also possesses decades worth of personal letters and emails between Le Guin and himself. Considering that many readers of this journal will know Le Guin’s novels backward and forward but may have never read a single one of her stand-alone poems, Roemer offers a rich introduction to the lesser-known work of an otherwise legendary fantasy and SF writer. Roemer’s intention is simply this: to “offer an overview of the astonishing variety and scope of Le Guin’s poetry and because I believe that, for readers unfamiliar with her poetry or even those who know some of the poetry, this collection will reinforce, expand, and even change perceptions of Le Guin the writer and the person.”The issue concludes with the BOOK REVIEW section, featuring ten recent publications, including three new handbooks from Oxford and Routledge, as well as a stimulating variety of scholarly monographs.We close this issue with the news that a longtime Advisory Board member, Artur Blaim, Professor of English at the University of Gdańsk, died on April 25, 2025. Blaim was the author of numerous monographs, including Utopian Visions and Revisions or the Uses of Ideal Worlds (2017), Gazing in Useless Wonder: English Utopian Fiction 1516–1800 (2013) and Robinson Crusoe and His Doubles (2016). He coedited several volumes on utopian/dystopian fiction and cinema, such as Spectres of Utopia: Theory, Practice, Conventions (2012) and Mediated Utopias (2015). In addition to his prolific career of publication, Blaim served as an officer and Executive Committee member of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe) and was a regular contributor to this journal.