retrotopia

plural retrotopias

1. countableneologismuncountableAn ideal society inspired by a premodern one.First known use 1990s

   Essentially, a retrotopia can be regarded as an ideological attempt to replace the mortality of profane time (i.e. history) with the immortality of nationalized, sacred time (i.e. the eternal glory of the Roman Empire) (Brass 1997).

   2025, Luuk Winkelmolen, Paschalina T. Garidou & Henk van Houtum, “Waiting for Today’s Barbarians: How the Fall of the Roman Empire Is Anachronistically Exploited to Serve a Contemporary Discriminatory B/Ordering and Othering Agenda”, in Journal of Borderlands Studies, volume 40, number 2, →DOI, page 428

   4 more examples

   True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the hope of reconciling, at long last, security with freedom: the feat that both the original vision and its first negation didn’t try – or, having attempted, failed – to attain.

   2017, Zygmunt Bauman, “Introduction: The Age of Nostalgia”, in Retrotopia, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire; Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, →ISBN

   There exists a theoretical consensus that the artistic utopias and retrotopias of the 1980s and 1990s have little in common with the utopian projects of the beginning of the century, or those that marked the beginning of the space age, and even less with the ones that succeeded them.

   2021, Natalija Majsova, “After Utopia, Can There Be Happiness? Chetvertaia planeta”, in Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age: Memorable Futures, Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, →ISBN, chapter 2 (Aelita’s Mark and the Many Faces of Utopia), page 46

   Whoever wants to keep the traditional subject of Western culture’s emancipatory stories (humanity inhabiting the Earth) is doomed to tell children’s fairy tales in a nostalgic retro style. Given such boundary conditions, we will always create something along the lines of a feast in the Shire or Bruegel’s peasant wedding. Retrotopias.

   2023, Bartosz Kuźniarz, “Lyotard and the Inhuman Mode of Production”, in Kiff Bamford, Margret Grebowicz, editors, Lyotard and Critical Practice, London: Bloomsbury Academic, →ISBN, part 2 (Long Views and Distances), page 115

   Vintage, retro, and other aesthetic trends, as well as all kinds of ‘retrotopias’, do not simply revere the past, but often revere a past that is inscribed in the temporal ideology of an anterior future. In other words, a vintage aficionado does not adhere to the same temporal ideology as, for instance, a retrograde nationalist.

   2024, Massimo Leone, “The Past of the Future and the Future of the Past”, in Semiotic Ideologies: Patterns of Meaning-Making in Language and Society (Semiotics: Signs of the Times; 1), Leiden; Boston, Mass.: Brill, →ISBN, part 2 (The Coordinates of Meaning-Making), chapter 4 (Semiotic Ideologies of Time), section 6 (Ideologies of the Future), page 82