The models that are elevated to the category

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The case we have been talking about, this "forgetting" of Latin America in the general histories of utopianism that are written from outside the region, is not an exception, but one more example of a general phenomenon in the social sciences and humanities.  of universals and that guide theoretical debates are based on European or North American experiences, it does not matter whether they are in political science or economics, sociology or history. Latin America, if it appears, is as an exception, as a deviation from the global story that is built with European or North American materials.  to this day, and utopian studies are no exception.

By demanding not only that Latin America be included in theudy Romania WhatsApp Number List itcomes to giving general visions, but also that it be granted a central position, due to the region's prominence in the history of utopias, a turn that has its risks. We cannot hide from us that the insistence on talking about America as the continent of utopia often entails a certain essentialism: something like a complacency with a supposed Latin American "singularity", more idealistic than pragmatic, always radical and inaccessible to demoralization. . Celebrating this stereotype from Latin America is demobilizing and unproductive: it does not encourage us to wonder about the reasons for specific utopian approaches or to use them as useful precedents to think about the present, so as not to fall back into the same errors and generate, instead, horizons of future capable of uniting wills for effective collective action.


               
               
If overcoming this search for essential identities, we historically situate utopian experiences and understand them from their context, utopianism will appear to us as what it has been: a great engine of accelerated historical change in the centuries of modernity. Whether it is reflected in written texts, in artistic avant-gardes, in urban projects, in constitutions or political programs, in social movements or in alternative communities, the mechanism is always the same: identify the key problems of the real world in which we live; devise a different way of living together in which these problems are overcome; convince and excite people with the possibility of a better future; and launch concrete collective actions to advance in the direction of that objective.