No. 18 (2021): Honduras: The Land of Dreams and Utopias

This special issue pays homage to a geographical area which, despite being the second largest country in Central America, remains rather marginal in the international context due to the great problems it has had to face because of the Spanish colonialization and the Anglo-French and US interference. Honduras is, nonetheless, a fertile breeding ground for utopia and the implicit belief in perfectibility and human progress. The issue comprises a number of critical-literary studies on Honduran traditions and cultural values which analyze the dreams, utopias and dystopias that have contributed to revitalizing obsolete cultural systems. The significance of these utopias/dystopias is obvious, since they express the dis-ease of a society oppressed by individual and collective frustrations and are an attempt to go beyond the suffering of the present by broadening the gaze onto the future. For this reason, they abound in times of crisis and act as catalyzers of hope by projecting the possibility of a happy life and of an ideal order that can be enthusiastically reached in the future. In particular this is testified by the contributions of poets and writers present in the second section, who offer their own personal interpretations of landscapes and subjectivities.