Between light and darkness: Earthsea and the name of utopia

In Le Guin's Earthsea Quartet, knowledge of the name of a thing or person guarantees control over their destiny. In a world where light and darkness co-exist and where dragons are an extension of humans, a name is the means with which one can achieve one's vision of the world. If utopia is the individual projection of a supposedly collective ideal, then knowledge of names is the vehicle for the realization of one's own utopia, which may well come into conflict with the utopias of others. However, Earthsea is not simply a series of battles between individual utopists. Earthsea itself constitutes a precarious and non-traditional utopia, where antithetical sides co-exist and neither prevails forever. As its name denotes, “earth” and “sea,” darkness and light, tombs and open seas, tiny islands and eternal journeys operate together to produce the setting for the novels and enable the chase of an ever-elusive knowledge. For as the utopists in Earthsea find out, knowledge can only be complete if it also comprises its Jungian opposite, namely ignorance. In an attempt to explore the relation between utopia, knowledge, and ignorance, this article employs psychology and linguistics, and constructs a description of a “just” world which remains necessarily utopian.

Dans le Noir? Eating in the dark: sensation and conviviality in a lightless place

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with customers, this paper looks at the experience of dining at Dans le Noir?, a restaurant in London where eating is carried out in complete darkness. As an exemplary gastro-tourist site within the expanding leisure economy at which sensory alterity is sought, we argue that the transformation of the usual unreflexive habits of sensing while dining offer opportunities to encounter difference and reflect upon our culturally located ways of sensing the world. In focusing upon the altered experience of apprehending space, eating and socialising in the absence of light, we contend that this dining experience offers broader suggestions about how we might reconsider the qualities and potentialities of darkness, a condition which has been historically feared and reviled in the west.

Orizzonte Cina: le sfide dell’urbanizzazione al 2020

A metà marzo 2014 il governo cinese ha reso pubblico un documento di indirizzo per le politiche urbane che potrebbe determinare una correzione di rotta nell’attuale processo di rapida urbanizzazione che il paese attraversa ormai da qualche decennio. Si tratta del National New-Type Urbanization Plan – Guojia Xinxing Chengzhenhua Guihua 2014-2020 (SCPRC, 2014), ovvero il primo piano nazionale per un nuovo modello people-centred di urbanizzazione del paese. Compito di questo saggio breve è quello di riflettere sulle sfide future del processo di urbanizzazione cinese che tale documento lascia intravedere, alla luce di una serie di nodi irrisolti del processo non finito di opening-up della società cinese al modello capitalista occidentale.