Fragmented Utopia and the Brazilian Counterculture

• In Event: The Re-emergence of Utopias

Abstract

My contribution to this panel will consider what historian Maria Paula Nascimento Araújo has called the “fragmented utopia” of New Left movements that emerged in Brazil after 1968, during the most repressive phase of military rule. With the crisis and collapse of traditional Marxist categories, such as universality and totality, occasioned the rise of what Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik called “molecular revolution” in which social change took place in the contingent and quotidian movement of new subjectivities. As elsewhere, this “fragmented utopia” emerged in Brazil with the youth counterculture, which prioritized personal liberation over collective transformation. Some forty years later, it is worth reflecting on how the fragmented utopia of counterculture continues to resonate in Brazil during a time of renewed mass protest against the state.

Author

• Christopher J Dunn, Tulane University