Call for papers
In the 20th century earlier utopian traditions were progressively displaced by supposedly more 'scientific' understandings of progress, whether liberal, Fabian or Marxist. But in the 1960s utopian politics re-emerged in and around the 'new social movements'. As with earlier utopianisms, these found significant aesthetic expression in literary science fiction, including the work of writers like Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Samuel R. Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson. Their most important philosophical expression came belatedly by way of the Deleuzian influence on Hardt and Negri's Empire. In a 1982 essay for Science Fiction Studies, Fredric Jameson famously defined the problem of 'Progress v. Utopia' through the question 'Can We Imagine the Future?'
Timed to coincide with the long-awaited publication of Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's full-length monograph on the subject, this conference will return to the question of whether and how we can imagine the future and whether or not such imaginings remain open to the unforeseeable.
The conference invites papers that will address these questions via the themes of utopia, dystopia and science fiction.
Conference Abstracts
Abstracts (approx. 100-150 words) should be sent by 30 September 2005 by e-mail to utopias@arts.monash.edu.au or by post to Utopias Conference, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, PO Box 11A, Melbourne, Victoria 3800, AUSTRALIA.
Conference Proceedings
Refereed proceedings of the conference will be published electronically in the on-line journal Colloquy and in hard copy in Arena Journal.