Remembering a Socialist Future in Postdictatorship Chile: Utopian Anticipation and Anti-utopian Critique in Jorge Baradit's Synco
Remembering a Socialist Future in Postdictatorship Chile: Utopian Anticipation and Anti-utopian Critique in Jorge Baradit's Synco
Authors
Saldías Rossel, Gabriel
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Date
Datos de publicación:
UTOPIAN STUDIES,Vol.29,398-415,2018
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Abstract
The objective of the article is to describe and problematize the concept of socialist utopianism in the Chilean context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through an analysis of Jorge Baradit's alternate history novel, Synco. Published in 2008 but chronologically situated in the 1980s, Baradit's novel imagines socialist Chile as a dystopia disguised as a technologically advanced eutopia. This brings into the foreground many utopian contents of the past socialist experience in the country that are eventually dismantled by the anti-utopian anti-ideological postdictatorship perspective of the author, which constitutes both a critique and a testament of the weakened state of current political trust and militancy in the country.