Pathways to Utopia : Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn

ISBN 10: 025307374X / ISBN 13: 9780253073747

Edité par Indiana University Press Aug 2025, 2025

A propos de cet article

Neuware - Pathways to Utopia explores how Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), against all odds, has endured for forty years as one of the world's largest social movements - while transforming the way we understand the temporality of activism. Taking his cue from MST members and their generational struggle for land and justice, anthropologist Alex Ungprateeb Flynn reveals how the movement's longevity stems not only from its strong organization and collective vision but also from the productive tensions between established utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices. Perceived by some as a shortcoming, this friction has proven to be a generative force, sparking creative gestures that reimagine social relations and ensuring the MST's adaptability in an ever-changing political landscape.Flynn chronicles the everyday lives of families navigating an extraordinary political reality over a fifteen-year period. At the heart of Pathways to Utopia is the realization that activism is not a momentary act but an ongoing, relational practice - one where even the smallest community actions reverberate, reshaping the very structures through which people seek to change the world.Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, the book illuminates the dreams and sacrifices that characterize a life lived as struggle. Unfolding across multiple points of time, Pathways to Utopia tells a story of hope and resilience - one that promises a lasting influence on our twenty-first-century political imagination.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9780253073747

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Pathways to Utopia : Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil
• Éditeur: Indiana University Press Aug 2025
• Date de parution: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 025307374X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780253073747
• Reliure: Buch
• État de l'article: Neu
• Dimensions: 229 L x 152 H x 19 P (en millimètres) 229 millimètres de largeur par 152 millimètres de hauteur par 19 millimètres de profondeur
• Poids: 521 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Through collective occupation and unrelenting work for social justice, more than 450,000 Brazilian families in the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) have gained the security of a place to call home. MST members have endured years of painfully slow progress since settling on lands deemed unproductive by the federal government, where they lobby for legal autonomy, usage rights to the lands they occupy, and educational access for their children. Pathways to Utopia focuses on the MST's extraordinarily long-term struggle for land, dignity, and acknowledgement of what it means to be sem terra (landless), revealing that, contrary to the political understandings that have underpinned previous calls for change, it is the individual that empowers the collective. Where earlier theorists have positioned activist and utopian politics as processes defined by rupture, points of crisis, and a linear progression through time, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn argues that the MST's 40-plus years of endurance directly arise from its members' less spectacular but ultimately more resilient duration activism and counter-utopian practices. Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, Pathways to Utopia demonstrates how members of social movements can transform the world around them, and in doing so, demand transformation of the movements to which they belong.

À propos de l'auteur

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor of Art and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.