The fourth and final session of this Reading Group series will focus on the utopia–dystopia dyad and its multidimensionality. Utopian and dystopian imaginaries often arise in tension and in a dichotomous relationship, but they can also manifest themselves in a diffuse way or integrate a continuum of possibilities. It could perhaps be said that the construction of utopia requires an understanding of dystopia, and vice versa. It is from this plastic relationship that the ideas of utopia and dystopia are repeatedly incorporated into particular conceptions of history, memory and contemporaneity. It is therefore inevitable that our reading proposal should also be set in the present time, when utopias seem increasingly distant and scenarios once considered dystopian are becoming confused with reality.

This session aims to reflect on utopia and dystopia as axes that produce meaning, and we suggest reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed beforehand. This work has often been described as an allegory of the 20th century and the confrontation between utopias and dystopias that spanned the 1970s and 1980s. Reading a work of fiction such as this, which dialogues with the past, in light of the dystopian challenges of the present may open unexpected paths for its reinterpretation.

For discussion: The Dispossessed, An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin

Session proposed by: Ananda Carvalho and Joana Sousa

Activity within the scope of the research project ECO  - Animals and Plants in Cultural Productions about the Amazon Basin (ERC Consolidator Grant No. 101002359) and the ECOSOC/CES working group - Ecology and Society Lab