New Urban Cartographies: Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Latin American Culture

The dissertation explores cultural representations of the new Latin American city that has emerged since the waning of national-popular development and the advent of neoliberal globalization. The discussion focuses on Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City in the 1980s and 1990s. The main argument is that, with the withering of the modern city and its narratives, new (post-civil and post-national) subjectivities have emerged, and that cultural cartographies of the city can help us to better grasp these new configurations. The first chapter, "A Totality Made of Fragments," examines the construction of the image of the city in Modernist culture as an allegory for the totalizing and integrating impulse of the nation in the work of Fuentes, Sábato, and Vargas Llosa. The second chapter, "Walking in the City," explores the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city in Rubem Fonseca's and Clarice Lispector's texts on Rio de Janeiro, focusing on these texts' critique of literature and literacy. The third chapter, "Public Spaces and Urban Geographies of Civility," enages uses and figurations of public spaces as sites for the expression of civil society. By reference to Poniatowska's chronicle-testimonio about the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 and Eltit's novel about Santiago de Chile under dictatorship in the 1980s, this chapter offers a critique of the normative ideologies of civil society and public space. The fourth chapter, "Homosexual Desire and Urban Territories," examines a novel by Zapata (1979) and an ethnographic study by Perlongher (1987) in order to map out how cartographies of queer desire in Mexico City and São Paulo disrupt public space's drive towards closure and universality. The fifth and final chapter, "Deterritorialization and the Limits of the City," concentrates on neoliberal globalization in the 1990s in Buenos Aires. It combines analyses of cultural theory, fiction, and film in order to show the emergence emergence of new, post-national subjectivities that are reshaping the city in ways that depart radically from Modernism's drive towards integration, citizenship, and national culture