Presentation

This year we celebrate the 500th anniversary of Thomas Mores’ celebrated work Utopia. Promise, prophylactic simulator, mirror of our desires and dreams, utopia has a common grounding in a lucid criticism of the present social, political and cultural condition. However, sweet utopia and terrifying dystopia are two sides of the same coin, like dream and nightmare. Literature and cinema have provided ideas and images, often foreseeing new realities. In the 20th century, reason manipulated utopia, making it serve as justification for atrocities – modern warfare and genocide being extreme examples. What perished was the belief in History with a teleological sense, the only common feature shared by libertarian and authoritarian utopias. Nowadays, utopian desire as well as thoughts about utopia are rarely heard. Art and literature are not only creators of utopia and dystopia, but are in themselves heterotopias, that is, other spaces. There is still faith in their capacity to transcend or even transform reality, going beyond escapism into virtual realities when confronted with the heterotopias of crisis and deviation that proliferate around us all.

With the foregoing and other possible lines of thought in mind, the 18th Autumn Colloquium will focus on approaches to the common thematic from the perspectives of Philosophy, Cultural and Literary Studies and Linguistics. Questions such as the following will be considered:

1. The ambivalence of utopia: critique of the present by the negativity of dialectics or colonization of the future through the teleology of progress or redemption.

2. Totalitarian regimes and their appropriation of utopia. History as decay and not as progress. The post-colonial condition between libertarianism and authoritarianism.

3. The discreditization of utopia in the light of contemporary dystopias and heterotopias of crisis and deviation. The urban space between utopia, dystopia and heterotopias.

4. Physical and non-physical homelessness. Utopian and dystopian configurations of virtual and hybrid realities.

Invited speakers confirmed:

Eduardo Subirats (New York University), El no-lugar de la teoría literaria
Fátima Vieira (Universidade do Porto), Utopian thinking in times of crisis: From the political to the philosophical Utopia
Ángel Rivero (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), The Welfare State as reality and as utopia?
Peter Hanenberg (Universidade Católica, Lisboa), Why Utopia is possible - and why not. Observations from Cognitive Culture Studies
Christina Märzhäuser (Universität München / CELGA), Linguistic encoding of urban heterotopias in Lisbon hip hop speech style - rap de Lisboa revisited