Abstract
Beasley-Murray probes the relationship between ruins and utopia, discussing how a utopian program may have disappeared, but the impulse remains, reconfiguring social identities. He illustrates these claims with an account of a ruined Chilean hospital, a project of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity that has been left perpetually incomplete in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup and thus challenges the neoliberal discourse on market logic and a posttransition hegemony. From this perspective, the author analyzes how the hospital in ruins becomes a site of artistic interventions and a performance in itself.
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Works Cited
Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Beasley-Murray, J. (2017). Utopia in Ruins: The Ochagavía Hospital. In: Beauchesne, K., Santos, A. (eds) Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56873-1_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56873-1_16
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