Utopianism / Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: a Comparative Perspective

With respect to the vast bibliography on utopia, this dictionary is characterised by a comparative approach. Just as the utopian texts analysed belong to a variety of European and non-European nations, the 97 contributors come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, from France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Russia, the United States, Brazil, Canada and Australia. Although their different languages posed complex translation problems, they also represented an interesting challenge, as comparisons between the various cultural traditions became inevitable. This variety of utopian traditions enables the reader to understand the peculiarities of the utopian paradigm in each nation: as a matter of fact, each utopian tradition has developed characteristics which are deeply embedded within the history of a specific country and are thus strictly connected with the formation of the national cultural identity. At a first glance, it seems paradoxical to couple history and utopia: the latter, as its double meaning shows (ou-topos = non place and eu-topos = land of good), is in fact characterised by a suspension of time and space, by a still, mono-dimensional space. According to Ruyer, future is for utopians a sort of blocked image: utopia would indeed be a way to free man from the chains of time; utopia is in fact perfection, and perfection inevitably entails stillness, the end of history. The emblematic cut of the island made by king Utopo – More’s act of foundation – stands for the cut with historic time, a radical will for rupture. Utopias have no historic past and for their inhabitants history always starts again from point zero. Utopias are presented as if they had been following the flow of an independent history, protected from harm and decay: a history parallel to ours. Similarly, the two concepts of utopia and nation seem remote from each other and difficult to relate, first of all for chronological reasons. The concept of nation, in fact, is relatively recent: it was affirmed at the end of the 18th century and, with Romanticism, was related with the re-evaluation of tradition. As for the modern utopia, instead, its date of birth coincides, as we know, with 1516, when Thomas More's Utopia appeared. There are, however, points of convergence between the two concepts. Both utopia and the nation are constructions, artefacts which exemplify the ideological ambivalence of modern societies. This ambivalence can be detected both on a linguistic and rhetorical level and on an ideological and historical plane. The mythical roots are common to both concepts. Actually, one of the paradoxes inherent in the two concepts is the tendency towards universalism, understood as universal myth of origins shared by all, and, on the other hand, a tension towards specificity, conceived as rooting or location within specific histories. Therefore, both utopia and the nation need a myth of origins: a myth which gets lost in the mist of time but which has named and founded both utopia and the nation; at the same time, the myth of the nation-state reveals the need which every nation, like every utopia, has to root itself in the political and historical life of its own land. Once again, there is a duplicity here: on one hand, the mythical discourse of origins is related to the imaginary construction aspect common to both utopia and the nation and, on the other hand, the concept of nation-state like that of utopia in the single areas, obliges the scholar to go back over historical and cultural events. Another aspect common to both utopia and the nation is that both present themselves as rhetorical constructions, as discursive strategies: they are two forms of textuality constructed over the course of history. Homi Bhabha (Nation and Narration, 1990) and Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983) have clearly highlighted how studying the nation as a product of writing means paying attention to their language and rhetoric and, therefore, revealing the mystification at the service of an imperialistic and colonial regime. Similarly, in utopia, the rhetorical strategies used for the construction of the model for the utopian city or state not only use rhetoric to persuade the readers but, at the same time, reveal that the model is born from a mixing of fictional and imaginary elements. Anderson himself states that the utopias of the 17th century made very wide use of the great geographical discoveries in order to criticise the contemporary society; this required the utopian writers to create a fictional and imaginary device. Both utopia and nation need the construction of territorial limits. Ontologically, both require the construction of borders and frontiers. Over the centuries these boundaries have been subject to continuous changes and shifts, as the geographical maps reveal. Similarly, the utopian non-place requires a clearly delimited space as their iconographical representation shows. Still, through the term frontier, ambiguity returns as a hermeneutic key for the interpretation of the two phenomena utopia and nation. The concept of frontier contains the idea of opening and closing. The distinctions between outside and inside and between centre and margin have become blurred in a post-structuralist and deconstructionist perspective, while what emerges is in-between areas, dominated by the processes of hybridisation and contamination; this is what Bhabha defines as the “third space”, hybridisation. From all these considerations it is evident that a concept of utopia which is related to the cultural history of the various countries cannot be ‘enclosed’, ‘framed’, but needs to consider multiple processes of cross-fertilization. Similarly, several different methods were used to analyse the utopian text, which is in its essence a polysemous subject matter, that links both ideological and literary aspects: utopia is indeed an interdisciplinary subject that calls for the application of diverse methodological approaches in order to be adequately understood in its full complexity. This is why our dictionary is characterised by a double tension: on one hand the attempt to restrict our field of investigation to utopia as a literary genre, on the other the endeavour to confront various and different utopian critical perspectives. Such features mainly emerged when we had to write down the list of the thematic entries: once we decided for the themes to which a single entry was to be devoted, we started a challenging enterprise in order to create possible links mutually interrelated. One of our aims has been to help the reader trace his/her own map of reading, as well as to stimulate other possible paths. The comparative and interdisciplinary perspective offered to the reader by this dictionary goes beyond the monolithic nature of the various utopian studies, usually concentrated on a single tradition. While considerable space has been dedicated to the canonical texts, we have tried to deal with as many minor utopias as possible, because it is these minor utopias which not only validate the hypothesis of utopia as a literary genre but also reveal the persistence of certain themes and structures and their variants in the diachronic evolution of the genre. It is precisely this point which makes us aware of the fact that our task cannot be exhaustive: the dictionary is a work in progress. The open-ended nature of this dictionary is consistent with the very essence of the concept of utopia, which has been attached various meanings over the centuries. A dictionary written at the end of the millennium cannot avoid asking itself disturbing questions about the future of utopia and of its literary form in the twenty-first century. This is all the more so when the utopian writers of today are themselves aware that there are traditions of thought other than the Western ones, with which comparison not only becomes inevitable but imperative, in a world that must face the difficult and urgent problems of multiculturalism on a daily basis. Recent historical events, new technologies and, above all, phenomena of immigration have reopened the debate about the concept of nation and utopia and have detonated all the intrinsic semantic ambiguities and condensations. If the idea of a nation is no longer a monolithic concept, a place of a unitary culture whose boundaries are stable, it appears rather as a space which is intimately marked by cultural differences and by the heterogeneous histories of peoples who struggle, antagonist authorities and cultural settlements in continuous tension. In fact, post-colonial writers and scholars often ask themselves what the nation has now become at a time of major Diasporas and considerable immigration of peoples. The painful search for one’s roots by post-colonial peoples and, above all, the violent clashes between different ethnic groups in order to affirm their own national identity, has emphasised the dilemma for our civilisation at the beginning of the new millennium. In fact, in our field of investigation we have included areas like Canada, New Zealand and Australia, where the weight of the European tradition has delayed the emergence of an aboriginal utopian tradition. Such countries demonstrate how a massive phenomenon of immigration involves problems of fusion and assimilation of the various ethnic groups. Something very interesting, from the historical point of view, has occurred: if, in the past, America and Canada were considered utopian lands by Europeans, now these nations have not been able to ignore the fact that Europe is the land of their origins. We have started by emphasising the fact that there exists a diachronic clash between the birth of utopia and the concept of nation. Both these artefacts respond to a deeper need, an archetypal motive which animates every individual belonging to any kind of group: the search of one's own anthropological identity.