The Anthropocene is gaining recognition as an epoch in Earth’s history in which mankind is changing the environment and the biosphere (Steffen et.al. 2011). Hotel Pro Forma’s visual opera NeoArctic ...(2016) and Yggdrasil Dance’s dance meditation Siku Aapoq/ Melting Ice (2015) explore how to aesthetically shape the ecological impact on human existence. The article discusses the performances’ impact on potential responses to the climate crisis.
In NeoArctic, human activities have caused “overflow feedback”: a constant flow of digital vistas of pollution, raging weather, temperature rises alternate with the planet’s eternal processes, while underscored by ambience and operatic electro-pop. The images are front-projected onto the stage backdrop to create a literal overflow of the steadfast choir-performers, in which they almost disappear or become ghostly shadows, implying their imminent demise or insignificance on a planetary scale.
Siku Aapoq engages with Greenland’s melting icecap: two dancers, Norwegian and Inuit, interact with a fabric understood as the melting ice, while enveloped in evocative lights, the crackling of glaciers, Inuit chants, ambience, and jazz. The Norwegian and the Inuit take turns enacting the ice, suggesting the interconnectedness with nature of both cultures.
Both performances seem to invite acceptance of inevitable disaster. Yet, human prevalence is implied in the stagings by convergence of past and future in the present, which suggests that the future is still undecided, and survival depends on an ability to respond to the materiality of the environment that we are already entangled in through a profound sense of beauty.
Theoretically, the analyses mainly draw on agential realism (Karen Barad) in order to outline a “para-Anthropo(s)cene aesthetics” that may reach beyond the human and engage spectators in realizing their ethical entanglement and the call for climate action. Considering intentions and reception, and the dystopian nature of the performances, the responses to climate change that the aesthetics may instigate are discussed.
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an intense period of international feminist organising and campaigning. Organisations such as the International Alliance of Women (1904), the ...Socialist Women's International (1907), and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement. This was also a time in which women's writing moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. This article examines two literary feminist utopias from the early twentieth century: Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902-3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream (1905). While US writer Hopkins's Of One Blood offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that reflects women's struggles, Hossain presents a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world. Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, demonstrating the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century.
Within academic disciplines, the category of Global South is highly contested with no agreements on the definition of the term. One cannot deny the amorphous nature of the term, yet its gravitational ...pull can be potentially effective in connecting the different forms of ongoing exploitation – both of humans and more-than-humans. This special issue aims to focus on how to think of the episteme of the Global South in ways that could be enabling, liberating, capacious enough to sharpen our imaginative and performative utopian lens.
Este artigo apresenta alguns pressupostos para fundamentar uma perspectiva crítica no campo da Educação Ambiental, considerando a formação de educadores no contexto da crise socioambiental ...contemporânea. Tendo em vista a existência de uma hegemonia pragmática no referido campo, traduzindo de forma conservadora a noção de sustentabilidade, o artigo discute a natureza da crise e a impossibilidade de construção de sociedades sustentáveis com a manutenção dos atuais padrões de produção, consumo e distribuição de riquezas. Defende uma aproximação entre o marxismo e as correntes mais críticas do ambientalismo, de modo a garantir um trabalho pedagógico comprometido com a formação de sujeitos sociais capazes de elaborarem estratégias educativas orientadas para a construção de uma outra possibilidade civilizatória.
Researchers have recently shown a growing interest for studies of anti-utopian fictions in Chinese, highlighting their critical value in history, society, and ideology. However the persistence of the ...utopian spirit beyond these dystopian representations has often been neglected. The present paper aims to explore this underlying utopianism by focusing on Ge Fei’s
(2004–2011), as it forms a significant paradigm on the issue, through an appeal for displacement, pointing out the importance in our reflections of moving from topography into the human dimension. This paper seeks to examine how human utopia is featured both in a literary and contextualized way, by arguing that utopianism is humanism, inherent to the awareness of social and historical crises, as opposed to the myths of Nation, Progress or Prosperity.
Public health interventions during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic aim to ensure that the lessons learned of the crises can prevent historical recurrences. Such interventions can mean vanishing ...mediators that must cater to a post-pandemic structure. Learning from large-scale political and scientific histories or advances-emancipatory projects, pandemic histories and vaccine developments-as well as individual agencies-physical activity and exercise-at the moment become crucial in rethinking and enacting utopian possibilities.
The article explores historical and literary aspects of Kareem Ketafa’s novel
The Spider’s Siege
. It provides a plot summary and situates the novel within its historical context of Anfal 8 campaign ...in the Bahdinan region of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the communist partisans joined thousands of fugitive villagers who climbed Mount Gara for refuge from the army and its use of chemical weapons. The article discusses the novelist’s literary techniques and his use of literary devices. The structure of the novel, the article tries to demonstrate, is that of a web with parallel threads. The article also discusses the tension between narration and documentation which characterizes the novel.
In contemporary Britain, the working-class subject is often portrayed as abject, deficient, and undeserving. In this article, I survey how mainstream theatre has often been complicit in replicating ...and authenticating these representations of the working class without offering an alternative. I argue that queer performance forms are a way of altering and undermining this narrative of working classness as a deficit. The queer working-class subject is defined by a sense of not fitting in to either the queer or working-class community and is therefore in a unique position to challenge a unifying representation of the working class. In particular, the queer aesthetics identified in José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of utopian performance and the dialectic of hope and disappointment offers both a critique of the present and a look to the future beyond the inevitability of capitalism and heteronormativity. I analyse Scottee’s solo autobiographical performances
(2017) and
(2019) through the lens of utopia and hope and how the performer’s status as a queer and working-class artist allows him to offer alternatives to the here and now.
In December 1967 Oswald Mathias Ungers convened an international congress on "Architectural Theory" at the TU Berlin. The proceedings of this event were published in German one year later. Here, two ...excerpts from those proceedings are published in English for the first time: the opening address given by Ungers, and a lecture by Colin Rowe. Ungers' welcoming remarks emphasise the importance of discussing architecture's theoretical foundations in a time of mounting protests, major technological innovations and an intense phase of building activity in the city of Berlin. He openly questions whether historical insights remain relevant, or whether they burden contemporary practice. Rowe responds by dissecting architecture's engagement with history. Rather than analysing the present situation, Rowe delves into modernism's historical subconscious and demonstrates how the threat of crisis has been used to fuel two enduring myths: architects as saviours of society; and their buildings as an index of the times.
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