| Sumario: | In thinking through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, with a particular focus on the sailing vessel as the heterotopic spacepar excellence, this article develops an idea of ‘the choreographic’ in order to illuminate the spacetime dialectics which mobilize certain strands of utopian thought. The choreographic is defined incipiently as a place in process and theorized as the making of a situation in which space and time negate one another. The article presents a three-part inquiry through which this idea of the choreographic is used to assess propositions about utopia come-to-earth. The first part of the discussion excavates the choreographic properties of David Harvey’s model for utopian thought and practice (2000). The second part extends that excavation to questions about the spatiotemporal nature of Foucault’s sailing vessel (1986). Finally, the discussion of spacetime oscillationat seais used to evaluate the utopian character of a lived example: the Middle Passage slave ship. Here the materialist underpinnings of Harvey’s argument are used to extend Foucault’s ideas to (or locate them in) the context of a ship that carries utopia and dystopia entwined. Ultimately, a dialectics of negation is found to be innate in choreography and is uncovered in the concept of utopia itself.
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