polytopian

English

Etymology

From poly- + Ancient Greek τόπος (tópos, “place”) + -ian, apparently influenced by utopian.

Noun

polytopian (plural polytopians)

1. (rare) Someone who visits many places.

   Synonym: peregrinator

   • 1948, Michigan Living - Motor News, volume XXXI:

     Through which our polytopian and raconteur finds romance and the thrill of the highly unusual […]

   • 1985, Eric Overmyer, On the Verge; or, The Geography of Yearning (play), New York, N.Y.: Broadway Play Publishing Inc., published 1986, page 32:

     Alex: […] Despite outward appearances, I am an artist, not an intrepid polytopian. / Fanny: Oh, Alex, for goodness sakes, yes you are. You're one of the original polytopians, don't dissemble. / Alex: Well, yes, I am. High adventure and stupefying risk are my metier.

Adjective

polytopian (comparative more polytopian, superlative most polytopian)

1. (rare) Existing or occurring in many places.
   • 1995 Fall, Kenneth Surin, “On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture”, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 94, number 4, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 1196:

     But what we need just as desperately is a new and different politics, the politics of new spaces of liberty (to paraphrase Negri and Guattari), a politics capable of acknowledging that a true solidarity and an absolute singularity, far from being mutually exclusive, are in fact conditioned on each other in a polytopian world. A global culture would exist only if it permitted—"systemically," as it were — the coming into being of communities of such absolute singularities.

   • 1995, Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Ann Arbor, M.I.: The University of Michigan Press, published 1997, →ISBN, page 143:

     As the women discover their own polytopian tendencies to be the structuring principle of the new world of the future, their celebration of the language of faraway places turns out to have unexpected totalitarian powers: […]

   • 2012, Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, revised edition, London: Verso, unnumbered page:

     The suggestion that Despard's ideas were utopian (in the sense that utopia = no place) was, however, false. It would be more accurate to say that they arose from many places; they were polytopian.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:polytopian.

Related terms

• polytope