Full Description
Becoming Utopia centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it "Utopia on the Prairie," home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the contradictory impulses of twenty-first-century place-making. At first glance, Bishop Hill is simply a small heritage tourism destination in Midwestern flyover country, but further inspection reveals it to be a complex place that mixes a deep nostalgia for the past undercut by complex origin stories of displacement and colonialism, an active historic preservation movement amid futuristic green energy technologies built by multinational corporations, and a commitment to localism in the context of omnipresent globalization.
Based on fifteen years of fieldwork, Becoming Utopia is an interdisciplinary contribution to conversations about the importance and meaning of place-making, heritage-making, and sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) in the twenty-first century.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Arriving: Utopia on the Prairie
Chapter 2: Discovering: Bishop Hill as American Identity Story
Chapter 3: Forgetting: Bishop Hill as Imperialist Amnesia
Chapter 4: Remembering: Commemoration, Preservation, and Heritage
Chapter 5: Creating: Fluid Swedish Heritages in the 21st Century
Chapter 6: Sustaining: Clean Energy Economies and Social Change
Chapter 7: Departing: Utopia Revisited and Revised
Notes
Bibliography
Index
