Towards A New Society. Transnational Imaginations of Alternative and Utopian Communities in Romance Cultures Around 1900 (Vienne)

Around 1900, the question of how to shape social coexistence is renegotiated on several levels, triggered by the crisis of liberal modernity and the tectonic shifts brought about by industrial capitalism, urbanization, and transoceanic migration. In the political sphere, many Romance-speaking countries see repeated oscillations between monarchical, republican, and fascist systems (Backes 2007, 187; Béaud 2014, 136); ideas of socialist and anarchist transformations bundle discursive energies at national and transnational levels (Dugast 2001, 182), that are also temporarily realized, for example in the Paris Commune (Julliard 2012, 309). Civil society organizations increasingly emerge (Klein 2001, 269) and, where they encounter restrictions on freedom of assembly, manifest themselves in the founding of secret societies such as the Masonic lodges, which are established in many Romanic countries, or the Carbonari in Italy (Smith Allen 2022,171; Isabella 2003, 398). These clandestine groups are not only an expression of a new form of sociability, but also live communal values such as freedom and solidarity or national unity in their gath-erings, thus acting as engines of political change.

In the social sphere, questions about a more equitable distribution of power are being raised (Salessi 2023). Within the labor movement, demands for social visibility and political participation are being voiced (Noiriel 2002, 22), the women's rights movement is campaigning for a reassessment of traditional gender relations (Rochefort 2004, 53-77) and anti-bourgeois discourses are calling established hierarchies into question (Hiergeist/ Loy 2022, 4). In Buenos Aires, for example, the explosive growth of medical and criminological discourses produced hybrid imaginaries in which sexual dissidence, urban marginality, became vehicles for imagining forms of coexistence beyond bourgeois respectability. Related to this is the desire for religious transformation: in the second half of the 19th century, the search for an alternative to Catholicism led to an increased interest in mostly non-European religious and mystical traditions, which provided impetus for re-thinking coexistence (Versluis 2004, 3). Spiritualist and theosophical groups prioritized social and gender equality and launched ideals of a metaphysically based ‘world community’ (Louzao Villar 2008, 528; Olmos/ Scherer García 2009). The flourishing of occultism, spiritualism, and scientific fantasy opened literary and journalistic spaces where evolutionary speculation and theosophical cosmopolitanism enabled reflections on collective transformation that were explicitly global in scope (Querreilhac 2016; Gasparini 2012).

In private life, established forms of couple relationships are being put to the test. According to some, love marriages are set to replace traditional marriages for economic and social reasons, and the legitimacy of the institution of marriage is being questioned overall (Arni 2004). Within this framework, ideas of free love, collage, polyamory, single life, and divorce are being extensively discussed and tested (Hiergeist/ Wieder 2023, 14-21). Homosexual partnerships make a life beyond heteronormative boundaries (Tamagne 2000, 309) conceivable and thus criticize the societal centrality of the nuclear family as the dominant form of cohabitation. In metropolitan areas queer communities are emerging in and through salons, cabarets, bars, theaters, and other public places, introducing sexual diversity and fluidity as cultural values (Halaburda 2023). Last but not least, the trends of naturism and vegetarianism are calling into question the relationship between humans and animals (Roselló 2003, 28-29).

Even though alternative and utopian ideas of social coexistence are in most cases stigmatized as dissident, pathological, or heterodox in the official discourse around 1900 and are subject to widespread repression, they function as alternative laboratories of modernity. Moreover, the period’s fantastic and ambiguous fiction offered narrative structures in which unstable realities, spectral encounters, and indeterminate subjectivities worked as allegories for new, precarious modes of social belonging emerging in rapidly modernizing urban centers (Castro 2002). In this context, it is important to note that the global fin de siècle was not only a period of political upheaval and aesthetic experimentation in Europe, but also a moment in which the Americas forged their own speculative, dissident, and utopian visions of social coexistence, thereby amplifying the transnational dynamics.

The international conference “Towards A New Society” explores the role of fiction in this struggle for alternative and utopian forms of political, social, religious, and individual community-building in modern societies that are becoming increasingly functionally differentiated. It asks how these forms correlate with discourses on alternative or utopian societies or communities and how they contribute to them. After all, the period around 1900 brings with it a wealth of literary innovations. Media such as photography, film, and radio open up additional, new possibilities for staging and negotiating socially significant issues. With their experiments in language and form, the avant-garde pursues the declared goal of de-automating habits of perception and representational traditions in such a way as to pave the way for a new human way of being and/or a new society (van den Berg 1998, 487). In this context the question of the extent to which the growing autonomy of the literary and artistic fields, characteristic of modernity (Asholt/ Siepe 2007, 10), predestine fiction to create counterworlds and contribute to the testing and establishment of alternative forms of community and society, also plays a role. Special attention will be paid to the transnational component of the imagination of alternative and utopian sociability, since transnational move-ments of writers, artists, intellectuals and entertainers profoundly shaped the period’s cultural archives. By foregrounding these migratory dynamics, the conference reconsiders the fin de siècle as a global moment of displacement, transformation and translation, when marginal actors forged alternative networks of sociability, kinship, and artistic creation.

Contributions may be proposed on the following topics, among others:

•How can the imaginations of alternative and utopian communities around 1900 be typified? What is the relationship between the political, social, cultural, and literary/ performative/ cinematic dimensions of alternative/ utopian sociability? What role does transnationality play in this context?
•How are the characters and chronotopes of alternative or utopian communities and societies portrayed in literature/ performance/film?
•What literary/ performative/ filmic strategies are used to model alternative/utopian communities/ societies?
•What rhetorical and stylistic characteristics can be identified in imaginations of alternative/ utopian societies?
•Which genres are predestined for the representation of modern alternative society (utopias, science fiction etc.)? How are genre traditions handled?
•What role do romantic, modernist, avant-garde, etc. aesthetics play in the imagination of alternative/ utopian communities and societies?
•How are literary/ performative/ cinematic imaginations of alternative/ utopian societies related to the emergence of actual projects that sought to realize such global communities?

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