Desterritorialization, utopia and dystopia. Emigration and exile of Chilean poets in Canada

Abstract

From the concepts of Utopia of Tomás Moro (1516), Tomasso Campanella (1600), John Stuart Mill (1868) y Karl Mannheim (1941); the panopticon (and eventually the dystopia or eutopia) of Jeremy Bentham (1791) to the most current references to deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Néstor García Canclini (1990), a
series of concepts have reaffirmed certain precepts of modern reason in the very act of its crisis and questioning in the face of representations of permanent progress and its transcendence focused on its technological aura. With the history and development of these concepts in mind, the literary texts of three poets exiled in Canada by the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990) are analyzed: Jorge Etcheverry (1944), Gonzalo Millán (1947-2006) and Naín Nómez (1942), whose writing accounts for the processes of loss and destruction of the territory they inhabited, that is, its deterritorialization, as well as the assimilation and partial recovery of the new space (its reterritorialization). Along with this, the representation of the destruction is intensified as a fall of utopia,
which at first glimpsed as orphanhood, present emptiness and lack of projection within an alien and strange society, i.e. a dystopia.