In the text below, our fellow Leonie Unkel writes about the conference „Welcome to Retrotopia? Placing Visions of ‘Britishness’ in the Long Twentieth Century” that the KU Eichstätt hosted in July 2024. She also presented her own work in the course of the conference.
‘Retrotopia’ is a concept coined by the British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who, thereby, delineated visions of an “undead past” in contrast to future-oriented utopias. With the concept of ‘retrotopia’, we are able to capture the nostalgic longings that are prevalent in twentieth-century conceptions of ‘Britishness’ (or ‘Englishness’) and trace the placement of such yearning for the past in British literature and (pop) culture. Thus, our conference day focused on detailed investigations of various depictions of retrotopian visions, ranging from Stonehenge in early twentieth-century travel writing to the Henrician retro-dystopia in twenty first-century historical novels.
In my paper, I reflected on national identity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which is set in an imagined version of the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon Britain. I examined the different conceptions of Britishness through the narrative time in the novel, more specifically through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotopes. In this context I spoke about the fluidity of national identity on the one hand and exclusionary conceptions on the other hand. I addressed two chronotopes specifically, the chronotope of the road and the chronotope of the small Flaubertian town. These were, respectively, tied to the different notions of national identity in The Buried Giant. The characters who had a closed off idea of Britishness and kept Britons and Saxons separate were tied to specific places like, for example, a Saxon village, whereas the characters whose image of national identity was fluid were tied to places on the road.
After my talk I was able to reflect on the meaning of the road as spatial depiction of fluidity in general and engage in exciting discussions with other participants. It was very interesting for me to be able to learn about ways retrotopian visions were placed not only in literature but also in museums, photography books and lyrics of songs. Thus, the negotiations around place were twofold: on the one hand, retrotopian imaginations were mostly tied to places like, for example, Flanders Fields in the poetry of World War I. On the other hand, these visions are embedded in places like the afore-mentioned British museums. All in all, it was a day of discovering and getting to know not only retrotopian depictions but also the places where they can be found.