Os Retornos da Utopia: Histórias, Imagens, Experiências ed. by Alfredo Cordiviola and Ildney Cavalcanti (review)

In 2000 “Literatura e Utopia” (Literature and Utopia), a research group led by Ildney Cavalcanti, started working at the Federal University of Alagoas, including members from three other institutions (Federal University of Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro State University, and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation). Despite its namesake, the group focuses extensively on cultural as well as literary aspects of utopian thinking, with special regard for the colonial and postcolonial viewpoints of Latin America. The group has been responsible for two issues of the university’s language and literature journal Leitura (issues 32, in 2003, and 41, in 2008). They also penned the 2006 volume Fábulas da Iminência. Ensaios sobre literatura e utopia (Recife: PPGLL/UFPE, 2006), edited by Ildney Cavalcanti, Alfredo Cordiviola, and Derivaldo dos Santos, mostly focused on the discourses of utopia and the connection among utopia, ideology, and history.

This year the group published a new collection of multidisciplinary essays, edited by Alfredo Cordiviola and Ildney Cavalcanti and titled Os Retornos da Utopia: Histórias, Imagens, Experiências. The title itself is of great complexity for any translingual interpretation: The Returns of Utopia: Histories?/Stories?, Images, and Experiences?/Experiments?¹ In fact, the book includes historical as well as narrative reflections and readings of experiences as well as of social experiments. The use of returns also brings forth multiple interpretations in Portuguese: Comebacks? Repetitions? Restitutions? Compensations? In a kaleidoscopic way, and regardless of the editors’ strict initial intentions, the multiple essays account for all interpretations possible. Primary topics include the resonance of utopia in other literary genres, the relationship between utopian and national imagery and imagination, and the role of utopian thinking in modernity and its reading reconfigured by historical knowledge and by a contemporary setting that is debated as being either creator of or witness to a possible demise of utopian thinking. But the seventeen essays compiled also offer several direct readings of film, graphic, and literary creations, never completely abandoning the Latin American point of departure—despite other points of reference such as Cape Verde—and the intent of a release of utopia from “Eurocentric colonial webs” (11), as explained by the editors.

Brenda Carlos de Andrade, who also contributed to the 2006 volume with a study on nation and the global world and the standing of utopia and ideology in the postmodern world, presents a relevant study titled “Descobrindo e fundando nações: Estratégias para transitar entre imagens de modernidade/colonialidade” (Discovering and founding nations: Strategies to transition to/from images of modernity/colonialism). Modernity is perceived as Alice’s mirror, reflecting art on the one side and history and society on the other, while photography takes the role of narrative of both reality and longing in an extensive and detailed study of various photographers and their combined and unavoidable utopia.²

Biagio D’Angelo’s “América Eutópica. Escrever, reescrever, retornar” (Eutopic America. Writing, rewriting, returning) is a fascinating analysis of Haroldo de Campos’s use of Utopia as a model for literary and cultural reinventing and of Latin America as a hybrid of Latin roots and American context in a contemporary context of rewritings, following Octavio Paz’s notion of an “architecture of bridges.” The in-betweenness of Latin America extends also to its role in the East-West/Europe dialogue, as an intended fecund triple tropic.

Ricardo Soares da Silva carries on from his 2006 study on the Latin American epos to the new “Por uma utopia realista: Liminaridade latino-americana e imaginário instituinte” (For a realist utopia: Latin American liminarity and instituting imaginary), a riveting study of the search for originality through language as a core factor in liberation from the Iberian past of Latin America, in balance with the thirst for distancing from folklore as an identity trait. The imaginary institutes an identity that extends beyond both colonial and pre-Columbian heritage...