Minor Utopias and the Left

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Off the main highways of revolutionary history in Latin America, one might listen to other voices of the previously voiceless, with similar messages, largely uncodified in written texts. In those spaces where horizontal and cross-class communication flowered, the concept of Jay Winter seems appropriate. He calls “minor utopias”: “… imaginings of liberation usually on a smaller scale, without the grandiose pretensions or the almost unimaginable hubris and cruelties of the “major” utopian projects.”\ In Latin America these “visions of partial transformation, of pathways out of the ravages of war, or away from the indignities of the abuse of human rights” were often embedded within a “major” revolutionary utopian discourse. As a result, the organized left typically ignored or misunderstood these experiences in part I believe due to their challenge to all forms of hierarchy.
This panel will examine and compare minor utopian social experiments and their encounters with the Left across the continent during the latter half of the twentieth century. Often, Liberation Theology inspired such social experiments. In other cases, peasant struggles for land inspired them. At times, the contact between workers and students during common mobilizations created the conditions for minor utopias of cross-class horizontal solidarities. In this panel, Marchesi will present work on anarchist communes in Uruguay, Gould on the Iglesia Popular in El Salvador, Jashari on similar Christian-inspired experiences in Chile and Hylton on similar experiments in Bolivia.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Jeffrey L Gould, Indiana University

Chair

• Jeffrey L Gould, Indiana University

Discussant

• Charles R Hale, University of California, Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Space of Utopia: Convergence between Marxism and Christianity in Allende´s Chile - Denisa Jashari, Indiana University

• The Chayanta Rebellion: A Minor Utopian Moment? - Forrest T Hylton, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

• Experiencias comunitarias en la izquierda uruguaya de los sesentas a los ochentas - Alberto Aldo Marchesi, Universidad de la República

• The CEBs as Minor Utopia: a Salvadoran Case - Jeffrey L Gould, Indiana University