The imaginary of a moderncity: Post-politics and Myanmar’s urban development

Theories of ‘post-politics’ provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this ‘age of post-politics’ are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the future of the project uncertain, our research conducted in 2019 revealed similar dynamics at play to those described more broadly in the literature on post-politics. We highlight familiar processes of delegation of decision-making, a proliferation of governance actors and an individualisation of policy issues. What is distinctive in Myanmar is the way a coalition of elite decision-makers have diluted and defused policy disagreements through the construction of a utopian vision of a modern international city. We see this imaginary of the modern city as a tactic to support the broader efforts of depoliticisation. This diverges from arguments that the imagination of social change is curtailed through the pragmatic post-political notion that ‘there is no alternative’. Instead, in the context of New Yangon City, utopian vision is integral to depoliticisation and limiting dissent. We conclude that attention to processes of depoliticisation is crucial in relation to mega project planning in Asia, and that a productive way forward for studies of urban development is not wholesale acceptance or dismissal of the notion of post-politics, but robust engagement with its critiques and promise.

Between the utopian imaginaries of literature and international law: The question of the insurgent child in international legal discourse and Kris Montañez’s Youth

This article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

The Islamist version of utopia: The politics of redesigning space

This article examines utopian novels by two Islamist Turkish writers: Ali Nar’s The Space Farmers (Uzay Çiftçileri, 1988) and Ayşe Şasa’s The Novel of the Monkeys (Şebek Romanı, 2004), which were celebrated among Islamist circles upon their publication. In these two novels, the corruption and pollution of place/space is blamed upon the “Christian” Western civilization. They depict how the desired regime change will begin in Turkey and expand towards Europe and then to the rest of the world, through the portrayal of oppositional places as utopian/dystopian spaces. The article discusses the ways in which space/place is ideologically redesigned in the Islamist imagination as a political symbol and analyze how these popular Islamist writers present the world and the space for their utopian vision of Islamist supremacy.

George Eliot’s Provincial Novels

The formal innovations in George Eliot’s late work Daniel Deronda transform the style and shape of the provincial novel, the genre she perfected in earlier works. These changes reflect a new way of thinking about mobility and space which derives from the conditions of late nineteenth-century imperialism and the ideology of ‘Greater Britain’. Emigration is central to this. The population of Britons settled in overseas colonies over the century by now constitutes a significant world-wide economic and political force. Concerted political and cultural efforts to consolidate this dispersed group were part of imperialist efforts to exert British domination across the globe. In the novel, white settler emigration is evident in the background, but the spotlight falls instead on Daniel’s Jewish emigration to Palestine. Developing a comparative method borrowed from contemporary historian Henry Maine, Eliot compares different styles of emigration, and in this strikingly anti-semitic work exposes the racism and oppressive power dynamics implicit in white settler ideology. Daniel Deronda’s complex engagement with Jewish theology transforms emigration into a reparative and utopian vision of world renewal. In the novel, Eliot revises formal components of her earlier provincial novels that relied on an underlying rhythm of movement and stasis, by introducing a new kinetic imaginary that emphasizes movement, exile, and dispersal. Eliot’s utopian vision, however, is short lived, and under pressure of the contradictions of a critique of imperialism that repeats many of its own structures, in her final work her formal innovations collapse into a series of mere character studies, and her political ideals slump into cynicism.

CULTURAL ECOFEMINISM IN CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S FEMINIST UTOPIAN VISION AND ITS LIMITATIONS

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American feminist author of fiction and non-fiction, lecturer and sociologist of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. She integrates her sociological commentary into her ecofeminist vision for an alternative community consisting merely of women in her utopian fiction Herland published in 1915. The community she envisioned can best be read through the lens of cultural ecofeminism with her essentialist view of women’s innate tendency to uphold the sanctity of the environment opting for a peaceful coexistence rather than patriarchal domination. Since men are considered to be impediments to such a coexistence, they are absent from the utopian vision based on sisterhood of all women where they breed through parthenogenesis and raise their daughters as a community rather than in individual family units. Familial relations are not entirely eliminated, rather, as all Herlanders descend from a common maternal ancestor, are biologically as well as culturally connected.

Transhumanisme et effondrement entre utopie et idéologie

This paper compares the utopian dimension of the transhumanist movements, which advocate for a technological transformation of the human condition, with the utopian vision of those perspectives – recently popularized in France – that imagine an alternative society starting from the risk of a widespread collapse of our ways of life and production. Through the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur on social imaginaries, this paper looks at these two linked movements, their ideological dimension and their relationship with utopia. The main hypothesis is that the perspectives focusing on collapse could be effective in overcoming some contemporary ecological and social issues, whilst the transhumanist utopia could strengthen some of the present ideological contradictions. The transhumanist imaginary contributes in fact to preserve the dominant socio-economic balance and it lacks the critical approach that is key to utopia. On the contrary, the effort to imagine the collapse of our society could be the first step of a real utopian project, of the development of an alternative society, starting today.

“God Made the Country, Man Made the Town”

Victorian utopian visionaries were deeply indebted to biblical, classical, and Renaissance concepts of ideal life and prophecies for the future. This chapter analyzes the key ideas about urbanism imbedded within venerable and influential texts, such as those by Plato, Thomas More, and Francis Bacon, all while making regular references to Victorian understandings and representations of them. This chapter also accounts for the rise of several habits of mind that proved influential to Victorian utopian visionaries: the development of the theory of scientific and technological progress, and the belief that the rapidly growing city of London was a chaotic Babel and a foul Babylon worthy of scorn. These notions were brought together in the most influential utopian vision of the 1700s, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, which offered a prophecy of urban redemption while drawing a vociferous expression of contempt for cities from the mouth of a hypothetical progressive Englishman.