ABSTRACT Building upon the work of prison abolitionists, the author theorizes the speculative dimension of abolition by developing a concept of abolitionist speculation, which refers to the practice of imagining a world without prisons and the conditions that would make such a world possible. This article locates this concept in the history of utopian literature, and reads a tradition of prison abolition out of utopianism. At the same time, it sketches a tradition of utopianism within prison abolition, and weaves together histories of anarchist and communist politics. The article concludes with a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, in order to flesh out this concept in greater detail.

ABSTRACT This article asks how the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia, apply to the African colony—and then, how that colony relates to Afrodystopia. Afrodystopia is heterotopic because it refers to a real place: African states as the successors of colonies as the sites for the realization of utopian/dystopian dreams, the colonial dream of enlightened control and Africa, the heart of darkness, as the dystopic Other. The power of the dream to shape the real life in the African post-colonies is based on the violence of the imaginary conceptualized as dazzling apparatus that includes the “civilizing mission” driven by the European or specifically French spirit of enlightenment, but also by African imaginaries of healing and harming.

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of utopia through the lens of music, drawing on Ernst Bloch’s philosophical framework and extending it through Black and queer utopian thought. The author examines how Bloch’s metaphor of “forests dreaming” connects to Alice Coltrane’s musical explorations of consciousness, establishing music as a vehicle for utopian imagination. By engaging with the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Jayna Brown, the essay argues for a reclamation of utopian thinking as essential to contemporary anti-fascist resistance, particularly within Black and queer artistic practices. Rather than understanding utopia as an unreachable science fiction, the author positions it as inherent in ordinary life whenever it strives toward liberation. This approach challenges both assimilationist politics and nihilistic theoretical tendencies, offering instead a vision of utopia embedded in the “radical softness” and creative expressions of marginalized communities.

ABSTRACT Taking as point of departure the porousness (grammatically and otherwise) of cruising’s participants with the scene in which cruising takes place, this article thinks alongside aspects of Cruising Utopia’s investment, via Ernst Bloch, in landscape. It considers in particular the complex aliveness of atmosphere, the unpredictability of its relational hydraulic, as it plays out across some of the texts informing Muñoz’s account of queer collectivity. Putting the atmospheric effects and affects of Eileen Myles, Frank O’Hara, and Ray Johnson into conversation with Henry David Thoreau’s journal helps us identify a moving affinity between Muñoz’s and Leo Bersani’s overlapping investments in the queerness of landscape as ascesis, one that opens onto those aspects of quickening shimmer understood by Roland Barthes in terms of The Neutral.