Grounded Utopia

The concept of utopia is from the moment of its inception umbilically tied to modern conceptions of progress that have legitimized settler colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent subordination of women and racial and sexual “others,” ecocide, and a “grow or die” form of civilization that is now threatening the very existence of all life on the planet. Drawing on the critical socialist insights of Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin, and the “non-Euclidean” utopianism of Ursula K. Le Guin, this article challenges the common association between utopia and culturally dominant ideas of progress and outlines a temporally and spatially grounded alternative approach to the study of utopias suitable to a post-anthropocentric world. The aims of the analysis are at once scholarly and practical: Scholarly, inasmuch as it develops conceptual tools conducive to fresh interpretations of utopian texts and practices; and practical, insofar as it vitalizes utopian thought and action by illuminating hitherto obscure aspects of utopianism’s transformative potential.