Andrew M. Ward

August 2026

When we think of utopia, (hopefully) few of us would immediately think of colonialism. Yet the histories, and philosophies of utopianism are deeply intertwined. The dream of building a new society often involves a clean slate, a tabula rasa, an empty land*.* Utopias often depict empty lands on which to project their ideal society. The obvious problem is that the very few uninhabited places in the world are uninhabited for a reason. Science fiction also often depicts utopia as elsewhere; it is interestingly rare to see the Earth depicted in Utopia, but far more common as a dystopia. The great shock (spoiler alert) of Planet of the Apes is that the dystopia depicted is after all Earth, and the ill-faring travelers have moved in time, not space.

The very word utopia means ‘no place’. Yet, Thomas More, who coined the word, located this utopia not only in the New World, but explicitly constructed it as a settler-colony. The Romantic Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, better known for his poem ‘Kubla Khan’, was also the originator of Pantisocracy, both a utopian philosophy and the model for a failed, imagined community that was planned by the Susquehanna River. Another example of the Romantic ideal of the American wilderness as insulated from the corruption of European politics, they believed that by removing ourselves from society and its influences a new humanity would emerge. Many real utopian communities also looked to America as a place of refuge too, from the religious and utopian socialist communities of the 19th century, and whilst they were not all directly invested in the dispossession of Native Americans the idea that America was an open land in need of settlers is inextricable with colonialism. One thinks of the phrase, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, the rallying cry of the 19th century Zionist movement.

The experimental spiritual community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa as a ‘universal town where men and women of all countries will be able to live in peace and progressive harmony’. Designed by Roger Anger, its striking architecture blended elements of (Western) High Modernism - separation of the city into industrial, residential, governmental zones etc - and Eastern Mysticism. Its adherents insisted that they moved towards a future free from the past - promotional materials encouraged aspiring residents to ‘leave the prison of the past behind’. But their movement mirrored colonial projects to settle supposedly empty lands; they saw ‘a moonscape: vacant, panoramic’, as Krishnan Kumar’s book Utopianism suggests, a ‘fitting tabula rasa for the new world’.

Is our society so far from utopia that we cannot imagine its transition to such a state, and instead we must imagine it as elsewhere?

Still from Planet of the Apes (1968)

Still from Planet of the Apes (1968)