| In addition to providing a theoretical and historical overview of the concept of utopia from antiquity through postmodernity, this work discusses the diverse manners in which “good places” and “no places” are registered in Latin American poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The primary chapters examine different paradigms of utopia in post-revolution Cuban poetry, Sandinista revolutionary and reconstruction poetry and Nuyorican poetry of the 1980s. The poetry included in these chapters is heterodox in its refusal of the impossibility inscribed in the word, “utopia,” projecting model societies that are “possible” in the historical contexts to which they refer.; One of the fundamental characteristics of literary utopias is their distinct lack of homogeneity. Among the poetic constructions of post-revolution Cuban and Sandinista utopian projects, one finds heterogeneity and contradictions regarding the content of an ideal national community. The ideal of the Revolutionary Intellectual, the ideal citizen (“New Man”), and the creation of a new democratic culture in Cuba define the model society constructed in the poetry of Roberto Fernández Retamar. Heberto Padilla's literary dystopia, Fuera del juego, appropriates the official themes of the Revolution, underscoring the lack of individual freedom within the Cuban socialist project and offering a revised example of the ideal citizen in the critical “New Man.” Similar to Nancy Morejón who writes within the Revolution to address the issue of race and the agency of the Afro-Cuban woman, the works of Gioconda Belli and Daisy Zamora affirm the role of women within the Sandinista utopian project. The poetic constructions of Morejón, Belli, and Zamora as well as the Nuyorican poet, Sandra María Esteves, offer distinct examples of feminotopias. Liberation theology and Marxism define Ernesto Cardenal's ideal community. The Nuyorican “critical utopias,” provided by Esteves and Tato Laviera, are distinct from the model societies found in the works of the Cuban and Nicaraguan poets as there is no “final end” to the process of creating an ideal society within the United States and beyond. |
