Meaning of retrotopia | Babel Free

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

CEFR level