TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

This essay explores one possible interpretation on how Latin American intellectuals and activists use the concept of utopia.  The first part of the essay provides a sketch of how European and US scholars, particularly those following Ernst Bloch, have articulated utopia.  The section ends with a pessimistic reading of utopia due to the institutional power of settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.  In the second section of the essay, the author begins by using some of the work of Jose Boaventura de Sousa Santos to explore Quijano’s coloniality of power.  In the process the author demonstrates how much of European thought around utopia assumes knowledge as an un-positioned, un-located, neutral, and universalistic position.  So utopia, as articulated by European thinkers, becomes part of the violent history and epistemology that invented America and can be said to be tainted with this original sin.  In response, Latin American scholars and activists turn to concepts that emerge from struggles of resistance against Eurocentric thought and practices, like sumac kaway, pachamama, or the Zapatista struggles to restore utopia as part of the struggle for el buen vivir.  This approach helps disentangle ourselves from the projects of modernity and permits a collective mode of thinking that is produced and thought from difference, towards liberation.  So Latin American activists and scholars, like others from the Global South, are endeavoring to reevaluate utopia by going beyond European thought and restoring value to the struggles of communities whose heritage have been erased, especially native communities that have resisted coloniality.