NEW URBAN CARTOGRAPHIES: SPACE AND SUBJECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE by Ignacio López-Vicuña B.A. English Literature, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1997 M.A. Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Ignacio López-Vicuña It was defended on May 11, 2005 and approved by Gerald Martin Joshua Lund Eric Clarke John Beverley Dissertation Director ii © by Ignacio López-Vicuña 2005 iii NEW URBAN CARTOGRAPHIES: SPACE AND SUBJECTIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE Ignacio López-Vicuña, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 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. iv 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. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE..................................................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 1. A TOTALITY MADE OF FRAGMENTS: THE CITY IN MODERN LATIN AMERICAN FICTION....................................................................................................................................... 21 2. WALKING IN THE CITY: WRITING AND THE WITHERING OF THE LETTERED CITY ............................................................................................................................................. 63 3. PUBLIC SPACES AND URBAN GEOGRAPHIES OF CIVILITY................................. 102 4. HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE AND URBAN TERRITORIES .............................................. 133 5. DETERRITORIALIZATION AND THE LIMITS OF THE CITY: BUENOS AIRES IN LITERATURE AND FILM........................................................................................................ 171 CONCLUSION........................................................................................................................... 213 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................... 219 vi PREFACE I wish to thank my dissertation director, John Beverley, who has been an intellectual mentor as well as a friend, and to whose faith and support this project owes so much. It has also been a privilege to work with Gerald Martin, whose work on Joyce and the Latin American novel inspired me even before I came to Pittsburgh, and whom I thank for his many rigorous critiques of my work. I would also like to thank Joshua Lund, Eric Clarke, Tatjana Gajić, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Paul Bové, whose generous comments and friendly advice at different stages of the project have given me the privilege of an invaluable intellectual dialogue. I especially want to acknowledge my debt to Ronald A. T. Judy, who more than once has taken the time to listen, offer advice, and open paths for thinking. I would like to express my gratitude to my friends and fellow graduate students at the Department of Hispanic Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Jaime Donoso, Rodrigo Naranjo, Juan Antonio Hernández, Teresa Peña-Jordán, Erick Blandón, and Therese Tardio. They are the best group of colleagues any graduate student could have. I have been extremely fortunate in having so many friends whose affection has sustained me during the difficult period of writing my dissertation. I want to thank especially Kirsten Strayer, who showed me how to look at film as well as teaching me new ways of seeing and thinking. I also want to thank Brian Robick, Luis Tobar, and Carl Bergamini, Anustup and Manisha Basu, Richard Purcell, and Jennifer Whatley, whose friendship has made life in Pittsburgh so fulfilling. I have had the privilege, during the years of graduate school, of a continued friendship with Anita Mannur and Neil Hartlen, former fellow graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst. I owe to Anita whatever vii familiarity I have with South Asian literatures, and to Neil nearly everything I know about queer theory. I thank both of them for providing affection and support when they were needed. I also wish to thank Natalia Jacovkis, Juan Carlos Galdo, Christian Gundermann, and Luis Martín- Cabrera, whom I met during the summer seminar at Boston University, and whose continued frienship has been a source of joy during the last few years. I owe a debt of gratitude to Susan Polansky at Carnegie Mellon University, who helped to make my semester as Spanish instructor at CMU extremely rewarding. I am greatly indebted to Nicolás Baldi, for his friendship and hospitality in Buenos Aires. In São Paulo, the help and generosity of many people were vital in providing me with the opportunity to explore the city. I want to acknowledge my gratitude to Cláudio Couto, Laerte Oliveira, Solange Munhoz, and Sergio Naranjo, whose hospitality proved invaluable. I want to thank Nicolau Sevcenko, who generously took the time to talk to me, and especially to thank Jeff Lesser and Ryan Lynch, who helped to guide me through the maze of São Paulo. Finally, I want to thank my dear friend Marina Kaplan, for always pointing me in the right direction. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Celso López Saavedra and Ana María Vicuña, whose love of literature and philosophy has proved a source of life-long inspiration for me. viii INTRODUCTION This dissertation is primarily concerned with urban trajectories or “recorridos urbanos” in Latin American fiction and other cultural texts. My contention is that by examining the ways in which texts construct specific trajectories across space, it is possible to understand how they discursively produce urban space and distribute bodies and populations in that space. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau distinguishes between two ways of experiencing and apprehending the city. One is from above, as an urban planner; this he calls the “concept-city.” But there is also the apprehension of the city at the level of the street, constituted by the multiple trajectories the users of the city trace during their everyday transit across urban space. These trajectories draw an urban map that, de Certeau argues, is not apprehensible in its totality, nor does it conform to the abstraction of the concept-city. Understanding these trajectories, de Certeau suggests, can help to critique and demystify the urbanistic ideologies that understand the city as a unified concept, as a legible, ordered totality, and as an apparatus of control; ideologies that, for de Certeau, suppress the city’s dynamic social heterogeneity. In the dissertation I often shift back and forth, attempting to facilitate a dialogue between these two modes of apprehending the city. In fact, urban trajectories only make sense by reference to a larger concept we may designate as “urban space” or “the city,” even if this concept remains inapprehensible as a legible totality. While a good part of the dissertation engages in an effort to criticize and dismantle literature’s attempts to represent Latin American cities as legible and unified totalities, my intention is not to celebrate the radical fragmentation of the social by suggesting that urban space can only be apprehended