TRANSNATIONAL UTOPIAS LATIN AMERICAN ANARCHISMS
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TRANSNATIONAL UTOPIAS
LATIN AMERICAN ANARCHISMS
virtual social study center
What is Anarchism?
Anarchism is a political theory and movement that emerged in the nineteenth century. Because it lacks a literary and political canon, anarchism can manifest itself in infinite ways but there are guiding principles that determine the movement. These guiding principles include solidarity, mutual aid, and horizontalism.
Solidarity is a recognition of universal human struggle--a kinship of all humankind. It is the idea that we should express sympathy and solidarity with all classes.
Mutual aid is deeply tied to solidarity but is a material idea of the collective use of resources for the purpose of advancing the movement--a communal pooling of goods.
Horizontalism is an opposition to vertical hierarchies and is controlling and redistributing the means of production.
Ultimately, anarchism is a form of libertarian socialism based on prefigurative politics. That is, a politics that imagines the future now.
Solidarity is a recognition of universal human struggle--a kinship of all humankind. It is the idea that we should express sympathy and solidarity with all classes.
Mutual aid is deeply tied to solidarity but is a material idea of the collective use of resources for the purpose of advancing the movement--a communal pooling of goods.
Horizontalism is an opposition to vertical hierarchies and is controlling and redistributing the means of production.
Ultimately, anarchism is a form of libertarian socialism based on prefigurative politics. That is, a politics that imagines the future now.
What is a Social Study Center?
An interactive space for people to discuss ideas and collectively produce knowledges. Social study centers stem from nineteenth-century practices and were rooted in the believe of education's power. These centers included makeshift libraries, night schools, and spaces for workers to socialize. They operated in an-other temporality as its participants created spaces of the future in the present.
Who Created This Virtual Social Study Center?
This virtual social center was created by the students of Profe Jorell Meléndez-Badillo's course Transnational Utopias: Latin American Anarchisms. The class took place in Fall 2021 at Dartmouth College, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Why a class on anarchism?
The purpose of a liberal arts education is to be exposed to big ideas, and to explore how studying them allows us to understand the world differently. And what bigger idea than one whose early-twentieth-century adherents believed that we were going to live in a world without wars or borders by the year 2000? Influenced by positivism and the notion of scientific reason, these anarchists imagined alternative futures that they sought to live in their present.
Course Description:
The first heyday of anarchism took place at the turn of the twentieth century. While anarchists never accomplished their desired social revolution, they succeeded in setting the cultural, intellectual, and material foundations for a global counter republic of letters. That is, they created a vibrant transnational intellectual community with nodes across the world. In this course, we will unearth how those interactions took place in Latin America and how they shaped anarchists’ worldviews, conceptions of self, and political discourses.
In a world that seemed to be coming together through the invention of the telegraph, the proliferation of steamships, and massive migrations across oceans, the workers, anarchists, and intellectuals we will study in this course sustained transnational radical networks through friendships, the circulation of information, and social events. But who were the people that dedicated their nights to writing articles, stained their hands in print shops, and oftentimes risked imprisonment for circulating what authorities considered to be subversive ideas? And, perhaps more importantly, why did they do it? Throughout this course, students we will explore how a ragtag group of working-class intellectuals across Latin America profoundly shaped local labor movements, sustained far-flung regional activist networks, and collaborated transnationally.
While anarchism was a global phenomenon, we will focus in how it developed in Latin America and the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century. The course begins with a brief historical and historiographical introduction to the idea of anarchism and its beginnings in Latin America. Using the city of Buenos Aires as a case study, the course moves to study the role of culture in the creation of working-class intellectual communities. We will then explore the materiality of the transnational networks that operated in the Caribbean region. The course will then move to explore how workers in Puerto Rico formed working-class intellectual communities in the margins of the country’s cultural and intellectual elite. The class ends by posing the question, what are the legacies of anarchism in contemporary Latin America?
Learning Outcomes
Why a class on anarchism?
The purpose of a liberal arts education is to be exposed to big ideas, and to explore how studying them allows us to understand the world differently. And what bigger idea than one whose early-twentieth-century adherents believed that we were going to live in a world without wars or borders by the year 2000? Influenced by positivism and the notion of scientific reason, these anarchists imagined alternative futures that they sought to live in their present.
Course Description:
The first heyday of anarchism took place at the turn of the twentieth century. While anarchists never accomplished their desired social revolution, they succeeded in setting the cultural, intellectual, and material foundations for a global counter republic of letters. That is, they created a vibrant transnational intellectual community with nodes across the world. In this course, we will unearth how those interactions took place in Latin America and how they shaped anarchists’ worldviews, conceptions of self, and political discourses.
In a world that seemed to be coming together through the invention of the telegraph, the proliferation of steamships, and massive migrations across oceans, the workers, anarchists, and intellectuals we will study in this course sustained transnational radical networks through friendships, the circulation of information, and social events. But who were the people that dedicated their nights to writing articles, stained their hands in print shops, and oftentimes risked imprisonment for circulating what authorities considered to be subversive ideas? And, perhaps more importantly, why did they do it? Throughout this course, students we will explore how a ragtag group of working-class intellectuals across Latin America profoundly shaped local labor movements, sustained far-flung regional activist networks, and collaborated transnationally.
While anarchism was a global phenomenon, we will focus in how it developed in Latin America and the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century. The course begins with a brief historical and historiographical introduction to the idea of anarchism and its beginnings in Latin America. Using the city of Buenos Aires as a case study, the course moves to study the role of culture in the creation of working-class intellectual communities. We will then explore the materiality of the transnational networks that operated in the Caribbean region. The course will then move to explore how workers in Puerto Rico formed working-class intellectual communities in the margins of the country’s cultural and intellectual elite. The class ends by posing the question, what are the legacies of anarchism in contemporary Latin America?
Learning Outcomes
- Identify major trends and debates in the historical studies of Latin American anarchism
- Explain how workers, anarchists, and intellectuals created and sustained transnational networks
- Analyze the Eurocentric and colonial dimensions of some anarchist practices and discourses
- Compare and contrast the development of anarchist’s development in rural and urban centers, or in Andean regions and Caribbean contexts
- Develop an understanding of the lives of working people that were not affiliated to any labor organization
