User:Nmshin/Utopia (book)

Lead
I intend to contribute to the section on Interpretation. I will summarize Burlinson's Humans and Animals in Thomas More's Utopia, as well as Susan Bruce's Utopian Justifications. I will attempt to sketch out Burlinson's interest in More as an early analyst of human-animal relationships, as well as Bruce's anachronistic approach in their juxtaposition of Zionist settler colonialism and Utopian settler logic.

Interpretation
In Humans and Animals in Thomas More’s Utopia, Christopher Burlinson argues that More intended to produce a fictional space in which ethical concerns of humanity and bestial inhumanity could be explored. Burlinson regards the Utopian criticisms of finding pleasure in the spectacle of bloodshed as reflective of More's own anxieties about the fragility of humanity and the ease in which humans fall to beast-like ways. According to Burlinson, More interprets this decadent expression of animal cruelty as a causal antecedent for the cruel intercourse present within the world of Utopia and More’s own. Burlinson does not argue that More explicitly equates animal and human subjectivities, but is interested in More’s treatment of human-animal relations as significant ethical concerns intertwined with religious ideas of salvation and the divine qualities of souls.

In Utopian Justifications: More’s Utopia, Settler Colonialism, and Contemporary Ecocritical Concerns, Susan Bruce juxtaposes Utopian justifications for the violent dispossession of idle peoples unwilling to surrender lands that are underutilized with Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise, a 2011 television drama centered around Zionist settler colonialism in modern-day Palestine. Bruce’s treatment of Utopian foreign policy, which mirrored European concerns in More’s day, situates More’s text as an articulation of settler colonialism. Bruce identifies an isomorphic relationship between Utopian settler logic and the account provided by The Promise’s Paul, who recalls his father’s criticism of Palestinians as undeserving, indolent, and animalistic occupants of the land. Bruce interprets the Utopian fixation with material surplus as foundational for exploitative gift economies which ensnare Utopia’s bordering neighbors into a subservient relationship of dependence, in which they remain in constant fear of being subsumed by the superficially generous Utopians.