LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

“A Truly Global Voz Obrero: Anticipatory Nostalgia and China-Curious Uruguayan Progressives, 1960s”

• In Event: Transpacific Specters of Comparisons: The Workings of Nostalgia and Authoritarianism in Latin America and Asia

Abstract

In Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard intimated that “[w]hen the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity.” But what of an anticipatory nostalgia and its role in envisioning a high societal water mark yet to be realized? This paper argues that during the global sixties, and decades before Montevideo formalized recognition of the People’s Republic of China, several Uruguayan progressives visited Maoist China out of curiosity to witness an alternative “Third World” vision of modernity and a socialist future. Luminaries such as Eduardo Galeano met with senior CCP leaders Mao and Zhou Enlai, and several other prominent Uruguayan figures followed suit. Yet their attraction to China was not solely because of an imitable model of socialist development; rather, they were drawn toward Mao’s China because of the ideological system that had uplifted millions of farmers from abject poverty and set the nation’s course on an alternative path to capitalist exploitative development. This paper explores the workings of anticipatory nostalgia—a longing for a future yet to be realized—in the travelogues and memoirs of such Uruguayan visitors to China during the global sixties and long seventies.

Author

• Matthew D Galway, Australian National University