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The essays address the cultural politics of our global present. They offer a contribution towards keeping the spirit of utopia alive by practicing it, promoting that the struggle for liberation may continue in an era whose landscape is not inhabited by the presence of great utopian constructs. The collection adapts the idea of utopia to the intercultural present using it as a metanarrative projected towards the future and rooted in local experiences and actions. The book presents an interdisciplinary and anti-canonical perspective, and methodological frames from Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Imagining social and cultural change outside hegemonic articulations of power is a practice of freedom opposed to the protective drive that raises borders and walls around potential islands to claim the right of keeping them isolated and self-sufficient

" This collection of short essays on texts in the history of democracy shows the diversity of ideas that contributed to the making of our present democratic moment. The selection of texts goes beyond the standard, Western-centric canonical history of democracy, with its beginnings in Ancient Athens and its climax in the French and American revolutions, recovering some of the significant body of democratic and anti-democratic thought in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. It includes discussions of well-known philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, but also of a variety of thinkers much less well known in English as writers on democracy: Al Farabi, Bolívar, Gandhi, Radishchev, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and many others. The essays thus de-center our understanding of the moments where the idea of democracy was articulated, rejected, and appropriated. Spanning antiquity to the present and global in scope, with contributions by key scholars of democracy from around the world, Democratic Moments is the ideal text for all students wishing to expand their understanding of the ways in which this contested concept has been understood. "--