Kant on Utopia

This thesis examines the concept of Etherotopia (which literally translates to 'ethereal place'), by which I define the combination of utopian philosophy with certain ideas of individual perfection such as nirvana. The argument is made that the separation of utopian visions into social utopias and individual ones (states and states of mind) is a false dilemma, since a complete utopian theory should include both. In relation to my own utopian writing and as a transition from the critical to the creative part of this thesis, I examine the question of genre in utopian literature and, following from the view that literary genres are subjective and conventional, I argue that utopian literature doesn‘t need to be labelled as a literary genre but rather that it is utopian philosophy in literary form, and therefore philosophical writing. Having argued for the need of a contemporary Etherotopian theory and having discussed the relationship between utopian writing and genre, I proceed to introducing my portfolio of creative writing, a short story collection with the title Etherotopias, which is a series of diverse utopian/dystopian fictions that in some cases expand on the concept of Etherotopia either philosophically or aesthetically, while in other cases provide literary responses to conflicting utopian theories popular in contemporary society and its consumer culture. The collection is therefore a series of arguments and criticisms in the form of stories that range from political and satirical to religious and existential and address social issues as well as utopian and dystopian states of mind.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction. Published in 1974, it marked a revival of utopianism after decades of dystopian writing. According to this widely accepted view The Dispossessed represents a new kind of literary utopia, which Tom Moylan calls a "critical utopia." The present work challenges this reading of The Dispossessed and its place in the histories of utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction. It explores the difference between traditional literary utopia and novels and suggests that The Dispossessed is not a literary utopia but a novel about utopianism in politics. Le Guin's concerns have more to do with those of the novelists of the 19th century writing in the tradition of European Realism than they do with the science fiction or utopian literature. It also claims that her theory of the novel has an affinity with the ancient Greek tragedy. This implies that there is a conservatism in Le Guin's work as a creative writer, or as a novelist, which fits uneasily with her personal commitment to anarchism.

In response to Susan Watkins's call for a need to re-evaluate and re-examine Doris Lessing's work in the light of recent criticism, this essay explores the spectral traces of traumatized childhoods in The Sweetest Dream (2001), following the theoretical framework of haunting and spectrality. Lessing's novel addresses the coping strategies used by wounded characters in the face of traumatic events, be they childhood memories or war atrocities.

The great appeal of modern utopian and dystopian literature seems to be that it provides authors and readers with the liberty to engage in imaginative, playful reflection on the flow of time, and on where this flow might be taking us all. But appearances can be deceptive, we are told. Psycho- analysts rightly warn that authors' utopian imaginings most likely include projections of their own unique personal fears, hopes and other expectations upon the blank canvas of an unknown future. Social scientists and historians will tell us there is more to this determinism than individual projection. They rightly argue that people are always intricately interconnected, and that their personal outlook thus reflects the shared "social imaginary" of the culture, society and historical period in which they find themselves em- bedded. Therein lies the relevance of utopian writing for both the study of different cultures and historical epochs as well as their cultural and historical limitations. Together, psychological and social determinisms suggest that utopian literature is an interesting specimen for analysis, from which we may learn more about our specific psychological, cultural and historical conditioning but which fails to deliver us to a place beyond such conditioning. Indeed, such a perspective sheds doubt on our very capacity to fashion a future of our own design. I beg to differ. I argue that utopian writing contains an intrinsic element of creative insight which provides momentary glimpses of a future that is not anticipated but ours to create, and even more importantly (though perhaps also more rarely), a capacity for visionary experience that altogether escapes the limitations of psycho-social conditioning and the horizon of intellectual scrutiny. In order to illustrate this, I will be examining a special branch of utopianism which directly addresses the problem of conditioning and psycho-social determinism.

This special half-issue is inspired by a passage by Indian writer, educator, and utopian experimenter Rabindranath Tagore in his The Religion of Man (1931), which Tagore first delivered in 1930 as the Hibbert Lectures at the University of Oxford:The set of four articles in this issue is particularly focused on transcultural utopian imagination with nodal point in South Asia, with the transnational space of Bengal (spanning the present-day sovereign nations of India and Bangladesh) as a further major focus, irradiating out to the past and future, and to many utopian places, both rural and urban, extending, notably, to the United Kingdom, South Africa, Indonesia, and the United States.Recent scholarship has made substantive analysis of modern South Asian utopian and dystopian imagination, alerting us, notably, to the importance of analyzing women’s utopian writing and practice from South Asia (Bagchi 2016, 2020), to the insights afforded by including bhasha or vernacular Indian literature and film in our canon of utopia and dystopia (Bagchi 2019, 2020; Banerjee 2019; Chatterjee 2019; Chaudhuri 2019; Mohan 2012), to the importance of religion in utopianism (Bagchi 2016), and to the recurring imagination of the rural and the urban as sites of social dreaming and nightmare (Mohan 2012; Banerjee 2019). This collection expands the current scholarly debates on these subjects.The present collection continues the line of argument begun by Bagchi (2016) in the context of South Asian and transcultural utopian imagination: religion plays a far more important role than is usually recognized in utopian writing and practice. The articles in this collection further explore the fruitful paradox expressed in the phrase “prospective memories of the future” as a means of crystallizing the social dreaming upon which utopia depends. How can memory be prospective, or anticipatory? How does one view such a paradoxical vision of temporality? A prospect is both a mental picture and an anticipated event. From what place, imagined how, does the social dreaming occur? How is the memory of the past deployed in utopian imagination? What processes of transcultural innovation occur in such imaginings?Bagchi examines transcultural utopian imagination of social futures in early twentieth-century India and Britain, with Rabindranath Tagore and his friend M. K. Gandhi at the center. The article looks at Tagore’s and Gandhi’s stays at and fellowship with Woodbrooke, a Quaker residential educational institution in England. Woodbrooke was also dear to Tagore and Gandhi’s British friend, the Christian anticolonial and social activist C. F. Andrews, a key influence on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire, a visit that the article also examines. The article argues that Tagore’s and Gandhi’s visits to England (specifically the Midlands and/ or the north of that country) in 1930 and 1931 illuminate Indo-British entanglements in utopianism, manifesting ideals of social futures in which values were shared with Christian, mainly Quaker utopians. One of the early British influences on Indian utopians was John Ruskin (1819–1900), whose thought valorizing social fellowship and religion and speaking against wage capitalism influenced Gandhi; Ruskin also influenced the settlement movement contributing to the foundation of the Quaker institution at Woodbrooke.Zooming in on Gandhi’s 1931 visit to Lancashire in northern England, the article argues that British and Indian utopians cooperated with and mutually influenced each other under difficult political conditions. The article excavates, with regard to Gandhi’s Lancashire visit, the work of the Quaker social dreamer Corder Catchpool (1883–1952) and his utopian experiments in Spring Vale Garden Village, where Gandhi stayed in 1931. The Indian and British utopian figures active in the 1930s examined here envisaged the future in ways that were often animated by aspects of the past, usually a renovated and reimagined past, in which religion is important.Sangeeta Datta explores Tagore’s vision of the future, in relation to Datta’s own creative practice, especially as theatre and film director, a practice that engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia and his future-making that continuously reinvent the past. Written at a time of pandemic crises exposing humankind’s vulnerability, Datta’s piece examines Tagore’s utopian vision that, when revalued and renewed, remains enormously fruitful for furthering social justice and creativity today.Datta examines the afterlives of Tagore’s utopia through three case studies. First, she examines the Dartington project where Tagore’s friend and associate Leonard Elmhirst was inspired to create an English utopian experiment on the model of Tagore’s utopian community in Santiniketan and Sriniketan. Second, she analyzes Tagore’s musical Tasher Desh (Land of Cards) in its original context and Datta’s recent stage production presented by the arts company Baithak UK in London in 2019. Finally, Datta examines the feature film Life Goes On, which she directed, analyzing it as a familial dystopia and a Tagorean vision revisited through lenses of family, race and gender.Samadrita Kuiti examines Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905), a short work originally written in English, offering a dream vision of a futuristic utopian society, with elements of science fiction, and Padmarag (1924), a short novel originally written in Bengali, which can be seen as complementary parts of a feminist utopian vision. These works show a desire for an egalitarian, decolonized nation, cutting through barriers of religion, gender, race, and class. Kuiti’s article shows how both fictions offer a vision of interreligious sisterhood, particularly by proposing Hindu-Muslim communal unity, against a backdrop of growing tensions between the Hindu and Muslim communities in fin-de-siècle British India. The article also shows how the Indigo Rebellion of 1859 in colonial Bengal is represented in Padmarag to create critiques of predatory colonial masculinity. Hossain’s utopian narratives play a major role in decolonizing utopian studies, the article argues overall.Banerjee examines the utopianism of the film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), directed by Satyajit Ray. The article interrogates the various ways in which Ray’s film signals the utopian, through an examination of the trope of wish-fulfillment, through an analysis of the way utopianism is articulated through irrealist aesthetics, particularly its figuration of ghosts, and through its violation of the narrative structure of the real. With the film in its utopianism making acute critiques of issues around class, caste, abusive power, and war, Banerjee sees some intransigent social contradictions playing out in the film, signaling the limits of textual utopianism. The three faces of utopianism that Sargent so foundationally explicated—literary utopia, utopian practice, and utopian social theory (Sargent 2010, 5–9)—play out in the analysis offered in the articles in this special issue, showing how utopian literature and practice fruitfully dialogued, and offering major insights into cultural and social crossings and hybridities in utopianism from cultures extending beyond Europe, extending the lines of enquiry that Dutton and Sargent (2013) so boldly articulated.

This thesis examines the extent to which vegetarianism has been a marker of utopianism throughout science fiction’s literary history, how the vegetarian theme has been altered to reflect changes in ethical and environmental thought and the extent to which the vegetarian ideals promoted within science fiction and utopian literature have had a real-world impact on the spread of vegetarianism and animal advocacy. It does so by examining the representation of vegetarianism in the works of the major science fiction authors Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood within their evolving social contexts, tracing the development of vegetarianism’s social and literary trends from the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Utopian literature is fascinating but impossible to summarize. Of course it is easy to see where its charm lies. We enjoy the “play” aspect of the Utopian convention, the common certainty— essential to both the author's intentions and the reader's pleasure—that we are dealing with a supposition described as a fact. In a Utopian text, we enjoy the power we have of imagining, and especially formulating, another overall framework for human experience—a framework which is specifically defined as being different and described as if it had concrete existence. This is the underlying attraction of a mode of expression which permits the author to talk of serious things in the protected and detached manner permitted by play. Why, then, are summaries of utopias so disappointing? Why does a re-transmitted utopia convey only the idea of an insipid world and an arbitrary creation? Why is it so hard to write about works of this type?

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Utopian narratives express a universal yearning for a better human society in response to each author’s perception of malfunction and malfeasance in his or her own society. The earliest one of which I am aware (other than the legendary folk tale of the Garden of Eden) is Plato’s Republic. I review and comment on selected utopian literature from Plato to the modern American dream and a humanist vision for a global social order. To its authors, utopian visions are not mere wishful thinking, but societal policy declarations that at least in principle can be implemented, if only in part.

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.

This article explores the historic role of dystopian and feminist utopian fiction in upholding or supplanting capitalist, patriarchal dominance hierarchies. Here, I will examine the following: the persistence and popularity of dystopias; the political and cultural trends that have influenced them; the reasons why feminist writers have typically excluded men from their utopian visions; the sexual objectification of women in dystopias; and the utopian/dystopian parallax. I will discuss the need for feminist writers to envision inclusive alternate futures that propose realistic, cooperative societies that counter prevailing dystopian models. This can be achieved by dismantling and reconstructing our present reality through the act of changing the stories that we tell ourselves.

This article describes the political philosophy of Ali Hasjmy in formulating the ideal Islamic state. Hasjmy is an intellectual who has produced many works in the topics of politics, literature, and culture that are very useful for the progress and welfare of the Acehnese people and the Indonesian nation in general. The main source of this research is the work and writings of Hasjmy which are directly oriented to politics and the concept of the state. By using analytical content, this article shows several premises on Hasjmy’s utopian visions, which are; First, Muslims should not be anti-politics due to its important in achieving the benefit of the people; Second, the existence of a Islamic state as mandatory; Third, an Islamic state does not have to exist constitutionally but what must exist as Islamic values in a state; Fourth, the importance of obeying the leader; Fifth, every official or government element is responsible for exercising power.

This research examines the portrayal of domestic violence in Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us, focusing on the experiences of the protagonist, Lily Bloom, who endures various forms of abuse both in her childhood and adulthood. The study identifies four major categories of domestic violence depicted in the narrative—physical, emotional, verbal, and sexual—by employing Tulangow’s theoretical framework on domestic violence. Conducted through a qualitative descriptive method as outlined by Creswell (2012), this study analyzes textual evidence drawn from the novel to understand the psychological, emotional, and social consequences of abuse on the main character. The findings reveal that domestic violence in the novel not only results in physical injuries but also generates long-lasting psychological trauma, fear, anxiety, and diminished self-worth. Furthermore, the narrative exposes the cyclical nature of abuse and its intergenerational impact, especially through Lily’s reflections on her childhood and her concerns about her unborn child. This study demonstrates how literary fiction can serve as a powerful vehicle for raising public awareness of gender-based violence, offering insight into the lived realities of survivors, and prompting critical reflection on emotional resilience, agency, and social intervention.

The essays in this special issue explore transnational influence on American comic practices, forms, and themes in response to “American Humor and Matters of Empire: A Proposal and Invitation.”1 There, addressing long-standing concerns about the splintering of humor studies in the US cultural context into multiple silos, I proposed “matters of empire” as a way for humor scholars to think more broadly across media, genres, and subject positions by considering how, and with what ideological significance, American comic practices rely on conventions—for example, stock characters, jokes, and plots, traditional genres, rhetorical forms, and tropes—born of unequal political relationships between the US and other nations.2 That is, I suggested that the matter and manner of American humor reflect the influences not only of former British and other colonizers of North America but also of US colonization, literal and metaphorical, of native and immigrant populations on this continent and beyond. American theatrical and film comedies acquired many of their plots and characters from the British stage, for instance, and other genres in every medium likewise bear the marks of other imperial relations. This conception implies three broad relationships shaping comic form and content: colonial continuity that sustains inherited imperial practices in the local context; postcolonial resistance that reverses (or otherwise amends) imperial traditions, embracing the anti-aristocratic and populist ideologies of the post-Revolutionary United States; and neocolonial hybridization that marks the domestic absorption of international cultures by the American imperium. The latter category recognizes that distinct ethnic comic traditions morph in response to US social and political contexts, yet also constitute the multicultural historical whole.The eleven presentations at the 2020 Quarry Farm Symposium dramatically expanded the scope and significance of my conception, addressing comic examples of imperial influence across more than two centuries of North American cultural history.3 Including John Wharton Lowe's keynote address, five studies—nearly half the program—probed Native American and African American comic expression, exploring examples from fine art painting, newspaper cartoons, literary fiction, memoir, and stand-up comedy. I mention these five partly to highlight participants’ interest in considering these areas as hybrid traditions of (neo)colonization, but also to explain their absence here. Two grew out of their authors’ articles in the recent StAH issue on Native American humor; those on African American literary and stand-up comedy may yet appear in the upcoming “Black Laughs Matter” special issue to be edited by Darryl Dickson-Carr, whose stunning analysis of Afro-pessimism in US literary satire closed the event.4The four articles that follow, nonetheless, cover a range of media, themes, and matters of empire in examples from the 1840s to the present, and I'm especially pleased that the issue includes a contribution received through regular editorial channels along with three revised and expanded presentations from the symposium. The authors marshal theoretical insights from, among others, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Kenneth Burke, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins to supplement their own arguments, the relevant scholarly literature, and my framework, grounded in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Individually and as a group, the authors also show how a more broadly constituted canon of comic materials reflects distinct moments in US cultural and political history and illuminates their significance. Thus, each article conducts specialized investigations into particular comic creations, creators, genres, media, politics, and periods while also tying the comic matters-of-empire project to larger theoretical, historical, and cultural concerns. Together, this set of analyses demonstrates the potential of matters of empire for reframing American humor studies in a transnational context. The StAH editorial team joins me in encouraging further exploration of these ideas as scholars see fit to explore, apply, or refine them.Opening the issue, “Gendered Comic Traditions: How Fanny Fern's Satire Subverts Nineteenth-Century Colonial Continuity and Enables Twenty-First Century Neocolonial Hybridity” by James Caron traces ties between early nineteenth-century British satirical writing and antebellum American periodical satire, a much-overlooked tradition that he calls “comic belles lettres.” Caron's earlier work on this material was instrumental in my formulation of the colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial taxonomy of American comic rhetoric, as it showed me how Walter Blair's binary between “native” and British comic practices had marginalized a wide swath of popular and influential humor in favor of the noisy innovations of the Down East and Old Southwestern traditions.5Caron's contribution in this issue goes much further, tracing previously unrecognized lines of descent from the antebellum period into our own time. After he demonstrates the breadth—and limits—of Anglo-American continuity in antebellum periodical satire, Caron demonstrates how its neocolonial offshoot endures as a legacy into the present. Caron argues that Lewis Gaylord Clark based his performance as an American gentleman humorist in the Knickerbocker magazine of the 1840s and '50s on the British model of Addison and Steele's periodical satire of amiability and that the American critic George William Curtis, similarly, developed a theory of the more caustic satire of William Makepeace Thackeray's novels to fit within the gentlemanly paradigm of comic belles lettres. But the inability of that paradigm to absorb Fanny Fern, the not-so-genteel comic persona of Sara Willis Parton's satire, exposes both the gender limits of Anglo-American amiability and the threat of her persona to that colonial mode. She bursts the masculine, aristocratic satiric mold and inaugurates feminist satire in a mode that Caron identifies with Hélène Cixous's laugh of the Medusa. As he explains, “To resist the patriarchal system is to appear to be monstrous, to apparently threaten symbolic death, but that fear misunderstands how the Medusa figures a woman's power to mock and ridicule.” In identifying her satire as manifesting the divergence of characteristics of British descent (and their reception) into gentleman and Medusa branches, with their own trajectories, Caron lays out two phases of comic belles lettres as a distinct matter of empire in the transatlantic context, and the implications of Anglo-American continuity are still unfolding today in stand-up and film comedy as well as in comic writing in print.Next, in “The Cuban Question and the Ignorant American: Empire's Tropes and Jokes in Yankee Notions,” Sarah Sillin documents how postcolonial and neocolonial joking jointly advanced US imperial ambitions during the magazine's 1852-75 run. As she demonstrates, soon after the Mexican War and nearly half a century before the Spanish-American War, editor Thomas L. Strong's Yankee Notions; or Whittlings from Jonathan's Jack-Knife framed Cuba as a viable acquisition, economically tempting if vexatiously foreign. Traditions of Down East humor, especially the rustic naïf, Sillin observes, merged “resistance to the British Empire with neocolonial jokes.” Sillin's analysis bears out my speculation about vernacular humor as a postcolonial screen obscuring US colonization of Native peoples and enslaved Africans with evidence that “the ebbs and flows in allusions to Cuba” in cartoons, anecdotes, and sketches in this influential magazine “indicate the extent to which the colony was viewed as unimportant by US Americans, even as they relied on it to define US identity.” These representations of Cuba linked potential acquisition of the island to concerns over whiteness, paternalism, English-language use, and (lack of) Americanness. Mocking Americans’ and Cubans’ ignorance underscored Yankees’ sense of postcolonial innocence, Sillin observes: “The humor in Yankee Notions often entwines regional, national, and transnational humor in ways that emphasize the formative role transnational encounters played in shaping local and national identities.” She therefore not only enhances our understanding of humor's importance in nineteenth-century periodical culture but also provides key insights into the nation's early flirtations with territorial expansion beyond North American shores and into the association between comic pleasure and (inter)national expansion. The persistence of these themes and tropes across genres highlights the value of mining periodicals for how varied contents mirror each other. In this context, her work more broadly also affirms humor's role in the avant-garde: the low stakes of comic rhetoric belie its power as a highly social mode that inspires circulation and acceptance of controversial ideas as readers seek to share a laugh.Stanley Orr brings our attention to the twentieth-century American imperium in “‘I wonder which of you is real’: The Indigenous Confidence Man in John Kneubuhl's ‘The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo,’” which explores postcolonial and neocolonial humor in a perhaps unexpected context: the television comic drama. Orr details Samoan American playwright John Kneubuhl's “lifelong engagement with postcolonial thematics as well as Indigenous Polynesian and metropolitan comic traditions” manifest in scripts for Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, and The Wild Wild West, as well as in works for mainland and Pacific stages. (I greatly appreciate Orr's use of “metropolitan” to denote the cultural force of empire.) In particular, Kneubuhl grafts the Samoan clowning tradition of fale aitu—a carnivalesque genre of satire, caricature, and antiauthoritarian ridicule featuring an Indigenous conman-trickster—onto TV's Anglo-American neocolonial celebrations of white expansion. Orr's examination of archival scripts and their reliance on models such as Kneubuhl's friend Sam Amalu, an authentic Hawaiian trickster, shows how thoroughly the playwright's Indigenous background informed his genre-stretching westerns. A rich set of conflicts between colonizer and colonized results as Kneubuhl's genre-bursting teledramas juggle white and Native responses to US imperial expansion, mainland and Pacific, present and past. Farcical costumes, slapstick antics, and feigned identities produce hilarious comedy in the Wild Wild West episode “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo,” even as the corruption, theft, and political threats driving its plot create tragic irony. In concluding that “Kneubuhl's stage and screen aesthetics… refuse simple adaptation to and absorption into the neocolonial culture industries of the metropolis,” Orr articulates how the hybrid rhetoric of postcolonial and neocolonial humor constitutes the polyphonic US imperium. The colonized subject, exiled from Native cultural practices and distanced from metropolitan counterparts, channels his doubled sensibility into a contrapuntal line whose harmonies and dissonance enrich and challenge hegemonic themes.Closing the issue is Christopher J. Gilbert's “Caricature and the Colonization Machine: The Nib's ‘Empire’ Issue as a Comic Stretch of the Imagination.” Gilbert treats matters of empire in three ways: as a theme in the Nib's cartoons about literal and metaphorical imperial theft; as a set of tropes in the visual distortions of caricature, a satiric mode that circulated via European imperialism; and as a rhetorical machine that produces and reproduces political and cultural practices of domination and theft. Here transgressions by the US imperium stand among many examples of international colonization as instances of the “aesthetic pretensions” and nationalism of empires—reflected, for example, in Britain's theft of the Elgin Marbles and acquisition of the Easter Island Hoa Hakananai'a and in Donald Trump's efforts to add himself to Tunkasila Sakpe Paha (Six Grandfathers Mountain), renamed by settler culture as Mount Rushmore. However, Gilbert's most important contributions come from his insights into caricature as a distorting mirror of “rhetorical struggles over the images and ideas that a society has of itself” and of imperialism itself as a rigid, repetitive Bergsonian “rhetorical machine, operating on singular impressions of political, cultural, and other forms of dominion.” Framing the colonization machine as a rhetorical instantiation of the notion that imperialism sows its own destruction, Gilbert presents imperialism as already at least implicitly self-parodic.Gilbert's conclusion, thus, makes a fitting coda for the special issue. Matters of empire—decidedly plural as themes, rhetorical modes, and intercultural relations—imbue American humor with the ideological incongruities of dual, even dueling, visions. Exile/colonial, portrait/caricature, reality/parody, metropolis/colony: matters of empire and the rhetorical standpoints that they inform ensure that comic expression in the United States not only bears the stamp of local people, ideas, and places but also bears witness to US roles in the world then and now. Humor charts and resists those roles because comic expression creates meaning from incongruity, and evolution has disposed us to find such complexities engaging, pleasurable, and memorable both individually and in communion with others.Together the four analyses in this issue of StAH suggest the wealth of materials and insights that await scholars who explore matters of empire in American comic genres, media, and eras not represented here. Like Kate Morris and Linda Morris and other authors exploring Native American humor in the special issue of fall 2020 as well as the Quarry Farm Symposium speakers on stand-up comedy and film, Caron, Sillin, Orr, and Gilbert point to the value of an expanded, contrapuntally inflected archive of American comic expression in which examples retain their distinctiveness even as they reveal shared tropes and preoccupations. New analytical tools, theoretical frameworks, interpretations, and taxonomies—such as those suggested here and in my matters-of-empire proposal—invite new and revised analyses of American comic expression that consider its ideological implications and cultural significance. Internationally circulated performance and visual media such as film, television, and comics promise further knowledge about the comic power of anti-imperialist standpoints, as Orr and Gilbert demonstrate, yet Caron and Sillin prove that recovering previously marginalized and regional materials can reveal startling, significant political facts and lines of influence. All enrich American humor studies as a field of historical and cultural scholarship. In treating comic practices as vehicles for social and political values, we build on the work of earlier generations of humor scholars even as we shift from nationalist models of American exceptionalism to transnational hybrid frameworks that underscore imperial ties, postcolonial resistance, and neocolonial accommodation. I look forward to seeing further efforts at understanding matters of empire in American humor as they bear more fruit in StAH's pages and elsewhere.

In their chapter, Teräs, Teräs, and Suoranta critique the current dominant narrative of the digitalization of higher education. They argue that reports and vision papers by powerful international and national organizations such as the OECD not only predict but also build a certain kind of digital future. They call these reports “official document utopias,” and reflect on their discursive truth with past utopian literature. The authors argue that we should use collective utopian methods to imagine genuinely alternative “postdigital” futures, and to this end, they introduce the Method of Empathy-Based Stories. While discussing its history, they also reflect on its potential and limitations through a study with Finnish teacher students, imagining the digitalization of higher education in 2050.