Abstracts Category : Other

Between the global and the national: Representations of space in contemporary latin american culture

by Camilo Malagn

This dissertation examines space in 21st century cultural artifacts from Latin America, including narrative and film. My contention is that cultural artifacts from Latin America oscillate between advocacy for cosmopolitan globality and contestation of globalizing forces, making space the theater of the political. I focus on the tension between the global and the national, and how space helps understand the way in which cultural products imagine globalization. The first chapter explains the concepts of place and non-place theorized by cultural anthropologist Marc Aug. Then, it uses Augs categories to examine the representation of the political tension between globalization and the nation-state in an analysis of the novel Zanahorias voladoras (2004) by the Colombian Antonio Ungar (1974-), by focusing on the relationship between trauma, nation and globalization.In the second chapter, I discuss the work of geographer Doreen Massey to explain the importance of understanding how globalization affects different subjectivities in different ways. Then, I analyze Passageiro do fim do dia (2010) by the Brazilian author Rubens Figueiredo (1956-), especially the space of a bus where most of the novel take place, as places of contestation to the globalizing processes that exclude certain subjectivities. Finally, I read the film El hombre de al lado (2009) by Argentine directors Mariano Cohn (1975-) and Gastn Duprat (1969-) as an allegory of the tension between the national and the global, highlighting spatiality and positionality as important categories to understand Latin American cultural production. The third chapter proposes an understanding of mobility using the category dislocated subjects, which I derive from work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In Hotel Pekn (2008) by Colombian author Santiago Gamboa (1965-), the protagonist Frank Michalski is a dislocated subject due to the complex relationship to his past as a former Colombian national and his current life as a global-trotting executive. In Azul-Corvo (2010) by Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa (1970-), the protagonist is a dislocated subject, as she moves from Brazil to the United States to look for her biological father. At the end, the novel proposes dislocation as a possible community of transnational, transcultural and multilingual identities. 1 Camilo A. MalagonAdvisors/Committee Members: (author), Gmez, Antonio (Thesis advisor), (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts Spanish and Portuguese (Degree granting institution).