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Open Utopia

£16.00

Manufacturer: Black Rose Books

Product Information

"Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn’t dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we’re convinced there is no alternative.

We need to be able to imagine a radical alternative – a Utopia – yet we are haunted by the disasters of “actually existing” Utopias of the past century, from fascism to authoritarian socialism. In this re-issue of Thomas More’s generative volume, scholar and activist Stephen Duncombe re-imagines Utopia as an open text, one designed by More as an imaginal machine freeing us from the tyranny of the present while undermining master plans for the future.

Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it.

In this volume, and its accompanying websiteUtopia is re-imagined and brought into the digital age as a participatory technology for undermining authority and facilitating new imagination.

Sir Thomas More was an English author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was beheaded for treason in 1535.

Stephen Duncombe teaches media studies at New York University. He is the author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, and editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader. He lives in New York City.

Published by Minor Compositions. 2013.

 

 

 

 

Product Code: 9781570272455

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