retrotopia

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word retrotopia. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word retrotopia, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say retrotopia in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word retrotopia you have here. The definition of the word retrotopia will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofretrotopia, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

Etymology

From retro- +‎ -topia. A nonce word until its use by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Retrotopia (2017).

Noun

retrotopia (countable and uncountable, plural retrotopias)

  1. (neologism) This term needs a definition. Please help out and add a definition, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.
    • 2017, Zygmunt Bauman, “Introduction: The Age of Nostalgia”, in Retrotopia, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire; Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, →ISBN:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.