All Tomorrow's Cultures

    The   Statue   of   Liberty   National Monument consists   of   two islands:   Liberty   Island (which hosts the State   of   Liberty ) and Ellis Island, the site   of   the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex.   Liberty   Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol   of   immigration in the United States. The   Statue   of   Liberty   plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse   of   your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lam...

  ( The Somerset onion , from the Pitt Rivers Museum) In his lyrical essay, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernism broadly, as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6).   By that he includes art, poetry, but also political economy and philosophy; as an urban people, we are a moderns engaged in this daily struggle of sense-making and homeliness.   How we live in the world is a question that exercises artists, revolutionaries, cosplayers: in short, all of us suspended in a world not of our own choosing.   But that modernist impulse is not without its push-back.   “Making ourselves at home” means finding the reality distinctly “un-homely,” or, as Freud defined it in his 1919 essay, as “uncanny” (unheimlich): that is, the hidden, mysterious and unexplained that invades the feeling of familiar, expected comfort.   The two ideas, as Freud explained, are related: “homeliness”...

Congrats to Samuel Gerald Collins for winning the 2014 Battisti Award for best article in 'Utopian Studies' (2013, 24:1)! #susmtl14 — SUS (@utopianstudies) October 25, 2014 Goes to an article I published in Utopian Studies: Train to Pyongyang: Imagination, Utopia, and Korean Unification Samuel Gerald Collins From:  Utopian Studies Volume 24, Number 1, 2013 pp. 119-143 | 10.1353/utp.2013.0013 Abstract Abstract: This essay is motivated by the seeming contradiction that Korean unification is sought after by most Koreans yet speculations about the social and cultural changes it might bring are almost absent. This may be because Korean unification denotes a series of differences contrasted to the present—because it is a potent “master symbol” with one foot in utopian speculation and the other in policy studies. In this essay, I outline some of the complexities, starting with an examination of illustrations of unification in textbooks for the tensions and co...