“Othering” cities: The search for an urban order in Spanish American narrative, 1973–1983

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" “Othering” cities: The search for an urban order in Spanish American narrative, 1973–1983 "
Chris T. Schulenburg R. Medina

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	54502
Doc. No	:	TL24456
Call number	:	‭3234538‬
Main Entry	:	Chris T. Schulenburg
Title & Author	:	“Othering” cities: The search for an urban order in Spanish American narrative, 1973–1983\ Chris T. Schulenburg
College	:	The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Date	:	2006
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2006
Page No	:	177
Abstract	:	The literary treatment of Spanish America's cities from the end of Salvador Allende's Chilean socialist government in 1973 and the culmination of Argentina's "Dirty War" in 1983 demands its own critical enterprise. In a decade characterized by dictatorships, novels of Spanish America frequently resisted this imposed political order through their treatment of city space as a heterogeneous battlefield on which an urban Other left a mark. In The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) by Manuel Pug, the space of Buenos Aires is explored before the era of its government-inspired disappearances. Despite the watchful qualities of Michel Foucault's panopticon model adopted in Puig's novel, this book eludes all attempts at spatial ordering by questioning who is actually observing whom. Spatial considerations are extended to ones of language and culture in Luis Rafael Sanchez's La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976). Through my theoretical interrogation with Homi Bhabha, the daily interactions between San Juan's elites and urban Other become a metaphor for the site of cultural "translation" where an imperial language is modified in contact with its subjugated populations. Bodies and cities cannot help but be compared. Elizabeth Grosz theorizes this relationship as an overlapping "interface"; metropolitan and corporeal areas inevitably blur into one another. In the case of Luis Zapata's El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979), the confusion of Mexico City with the homosexual body of its protagonist produces a subjective bodily urban map that resists phallocentric attempts to order it. M. M. Bakhtin's chronotopes, or the meeting points of time and place in literature, is dramatized by the square, whose status as a "threshold" freezes time much as that which is found in his famous example of carnival. This immobilization of time in the plaza chronotope enlightens the subversion of urban spacial hierarchies found in Diamela Eitit's Lumpérica (1983), possibly leading to a more permanent public re-opening. Various novels appearing in the aforementioned decade promise that their cities' heterogeneity makes any containment of the Other impossible. In fact, they reveal new openings heterogeneity through which "marginal" characters enter and stay in the most visible of Spanish America's city spaces.
Subject	:	Language, literature and linguistics; Argentina; Chile; Diamela Eltit; Eltit, Diamela; Luis Rafael Sanchez; Luis Zapata; Manuel Puig; Mexico; Narrative; Puerto Rico; Puig, Manuel; Sanchez, Luis Rafael; Spanish American; Urban order; Zapata, Luis; Latin American literature; Literature; 0298:Literature; 0312:Latin American literature
Added Entry	:	R. Medina
Added Entry	:	The University of Wisconsin - Madison