Subaltern Utopia in the Wasteocene: Diamela Eltit’s Sumar
Abstract
This paper aims to explore the intertwining of utopia, reality, and politics in the construction of a more socially just, free, and inclusive world through 21st-century Chilean working-class literature. Utopia understood as a means of expressing desires and hopes, finds its generative core in thorough reflections on the problems of the present. Diamela Eltit’s novel Sumar, which explores the pressing issues of the Chilean working world and the utopian collective reorganization of marginal, dissident, and liminal subjectivities, is an example of this dialogical relationship between the factual and the fictional. Sociosemiotic analysis will provide the methodological and speculative basis for presenting, on the one hand, the wasting relationships that shape the world of the neo-working class; on the other, Gramscian political action of the subaltern classes, understood as class alliances for mobilization against capitalism and the bourgeois state.
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