Unruly Utopia: Divergent Spatialities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Abstract

<p>Italo Calvino’s novel <em>Invisible Cities</em> (1972) contains fifty-five descriptions of cities recounted by Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Khan. The complex urban space that arises from these descriptions can be understood as a utopian <em>topos</em>. The focus of the chapter is on the internal operations of this spatiality: its kaleidoscopic movement of combination and recombination of elements and its eutopian and dystopian horizons that are present in the cities not as endpoints of their historical development but rather as two vectors of change that underlie their endless transformations. Through a comparison with Thomas More’s <em>Utopia</em> (1516), the chapter suggests a reading of Calvino’s novel as an experimental reworking of the literary genre of utopia and particularly of the status of the city within it. The novel replaces the static and closed spaces of traditional utopias with a fragmented spatiality of inexhaustible potential. Accordingly, the cities form a locus of utopian resistance against the uniform imperial order of the Khan. The chapter foregrounds this resistant strand in Calvino’s novel with the help of the spatial terminology of María Lugones’ radical thought. The politics that emerges from this encounter is grounded in a multiple spatiality and reliant on a perspectivist epistemology.</p>