Faced with the compounded urgencies of the climate crisis, the recurrence of multi-sited pursuits of fascism, and continued colonial power grabs, one might think that the allure, much less the ability, to think collectively and towards shared futures has disappeared. However, there is a growing set of political theorists, artists, and activists urging us to reorient ourselves towards the future and to re-engage with the histories of these cross-cultural and cross-temporal dreams for the betterment of societies.

This course will provide students with the opportunity to revisit the historiography of these impulses over the modern period, and with an opportunity to think comparatively across sites in the global south, former nonaligned nations, and the Eastern bloc (China, India, Indigenous NZ/Australia/Canada, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East). Through the study of visual arts, architecture, film, and literature, we will approach Utopia as an imagined entity, a critical concept, method, or orientation.

Over time and in particular historical configurations, visual artists, filmmakers, architects, urban planners, revolutionaries, nationalists, industrialists, and imperialists have all invested in notions of Utopia (and future horizons) and its potential to bring forth escape, deliver fantasy, or anticipate societal transformation. Utopia is always imagined but never reached; as such, it opens debates about its opposites or cognates: misplaced notions of optimism, idealism, fatalism, melancholy and nostalgia, the dystopian, the sublime.

Some of the configurations we will discuss include: political revolutions and utopias, empire and Romanticism, arts and crafts, manifestos and vanguardia, postwar solidarities and Fanon's "New Man," socialist realisms, the purity of abstraction, built form, urban design, and development discourse, space age retrofuturisms, Afro futurisms, and Indigenous futurities.