Contenu du sommaire : Villes américaines du XXIème siècle : réalités et représentations sociales, culturelles et linguistiques

During the last years segregation and gentrification have been increasing in many capitals. In my contribution I will focus on the aesthetic configuration of Buenos Aires in the new millennium in literary narrative texts of Carlos Gamerro, Daniel Guebel, Sergio Olguín, Pola Oloixarac, Claudia Piñeiro and Guillermo Saccomanno and on the film « El hombre de al lado ». In this overview of the metropolis there will stick out some recurrent topografical places, like Puerto Madero and the countries that are, in terms of Foucault, heterotopies of compensation, i.e. here are new sophisticated places, obviously perfect ones, all well structured and opposed in each aspect to the lacks of the big city. Literature destroys this heterotopic idyll without pity and stresses violence, the urban paradoxes and ambiguities, inverting the topical relations of « civilization and savagery ».

« The expectation : to be waiting for something. Living on the edge [ ... ] And then the descent » - this is the sad balance of Jonathan's life. Jonathan is the protagonist of the novel La expectativa of the Argentine Damián Tabarovsky (*1967). In the years of hyperinflation in the late '80s, Jonathan, from Buenos Aires middle class, achieves a fortune by monetary market speculation until the economic crisis makes him lose all, his material goods and his social prestige in the quarter of Villa del Parque. The reader accompanies him in this uprooting situation wandering aimlessly through the streets of Buenos Aires. Another downfall is told in the autofictional novel Autobiografía médica, whose protagonist Dami is a sociologist in a consulting firm specialized in media. The article analyses the relationship between the city and its two protagonists, one of them is gradually losing his ability to perceive himself as part of his environment and the other must recognize that his life is « trapped by the binary and radical principle of repetition and banality » and « escaped [ ... ] all expectations ». For the two stories Tabarovsky chose very specific narrative situations.

The article deals with the sociocomplex processes of identity construction based on the novel “Quinceañera” by Armando Ramírez which is situated in the barrio bravo de Tepito in the heart of Mexico City.

In recent decades, the commodification of privacy has led to new models of socialization. Analyzing three contemporary Argentine films that take the gated communities as location to their stories (Cara de queso, Una semana solos and Las viudas de los jueves) this essay will focus in some of the problems that this type of micro-societies brings. Thus, these films before posing as denouncements, at the same time they expose certain features of contemporary society they warn us about some of the effects (or defects) of this type of socialization.

This paper analyzes a dominant in the argentine literature of the 00's which stresses the importance of the neighborhood recreated in fiction as place of subjective empowerment.

The article analyzes the de-realization of the city in Sergio Chejfec's El aire, the virtualization of Buenos Aires in Carlos Gamerro's Las Islas, and the inversion of the traditional dichotomy of center and periphery in Sergio Olguín's Lanús.

Angosta is interpreted as a utopian and/or dystopian colombian urban novel with an allegoric dimension. This counterfactual fiction plays with intertextuality and with references to the globalized neo-liberalism and to politics of exclusion.

This text discusses how the gated communities of the upper class spatial logic makes sense approaching their styles of life through the voices of women who reside in them. It addresses the implications for gender relations and being a woman, the social meeting is taking place in these spaces and how the distinctions and boundaries are negotiated between the metropolitan elite sectors and thus, the type of society that is being built and the political implications it has.

The articles deals with a series of Argentinian novels published after 2001 that all revolve around the same theme of the gated community. In my reading, I will relate the different texts to actual criminal cases and discuss them in the context of curreng trends in criminal fiction.

Los Angeles is known to be the archetypal city of postmodernity, which means, as theorized by the Los Angeles School, a city both socially and spatially fragmented. It is also the city of cinema and, as cinema becomes a research topic in its own right, in the field of cultural as well as urban geography, it seemed relevant to study Los Angeles through the lens of a film masterpiece. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) is particularly interesting on this point because, as it calls up a set of spatial and film references to the Hollywood dream, it shows in a postmodern way this city of postmodernity : throughout the subjectivities of his characters, the director deconstructs the myth and leads us behind-the-scenes. Constantly playing on places and the loss of landmarks, D. Lynch brings to light another Los Angeles : far from the idyllic but artificial surroundings of the studios, the city appears elusive and uninhabitable, echoing the dying city of postmodern theories. However, thanks to the dynamic tension produced by the protagonists' moving identities - a tightness inherent to the city's spatial disarray, yet unifying -, the city of Los Angeles still seems to hold together.

The article discusses a linguistic survey taken in the Rio de la Plata to examine the representations of linguistic identity. The paper analizes how the immigration and languages-circulation in the metropolis contribute to built that identity.

Gated communities are an idealized housing model that has spread throughout contemporary capitalist cities. They have been the subject of a large number of social studies and some artistic representations. In his study Liquid Times Zygmunt Bauman, one oft he world's leading sociologists analyses the negative consequences of globalisation. The increasing fear of crime on a global scale can be seen as a response to social inequalities, social polarisation, the undermining of national and local institution and the fragmentation of cities, which has to a large extent been caused by neoliberalism. Strategies are developed by the gobal elite to counter the unstable, risky and dangerous world : they are putting up barriers like cameras, fences, walls and gates, to separate themselves from ‘dangerous others'. There are a few artistic representations that are taking the residential model of the gated community - created as a response to the (assumed) dangers of city living - as a background for their stories. This article analises how the image of the ‘dangerous other' and the ‘mixophobia', described by Zygmunt Bauman and the argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa, is represented in novels like Claudia Piñeiro's Las viudas de los jueves and in films like Una semana solos (Celina Murga) and shows also the way the culture of difference and separatism is critized in these artistic representations.

La Paz is the most populous city in Bolivia according to the 2012 census. It currently has 2,706,351 inhabitants, almost half of them living in El Alto. This old neighborhood became a city in 1985, thanks to the huge wave migration of redundant miners. The composition of its population, mostly miners and Aymara natives, makes of this neighborhood the most deprived area. That is why the city of El Alto, despite its legal independence, remains attached to the capital. The detective novel of Adolfo Cárdenas Franco was inspired by the Periférica Avenue that joins El Alto to Villa Fátima, north east neighborhood. Both ends of the Periférica Avenue are "villas miseria" where there are the most grotesque, hideous, degraded and pitiful people. These are also areas where the mixture of cultures is more intense because of the origins of the migrants. It is in this meeting of cultures and languages ​​that the writer draws its creativity trying to transcribe the language and narrative reality of the periphery.

Based on the Argentine novel El oido absoluto (Marcelo Cohen 1989) and the film Buenos Aires viceversa (Alejandro Agresti, 1996) this study analyzes in Buenos Aires a pivotal historical turning point for the understanding of the new urban geographies of globalization from the ‘90s. It examines how, in the social dimension of space, their mono-funtionality coexists with the complex dynamics (gestalts) of the organic/grotesque city and its diverse and poli-centered subject. It also analyzes the social praxis generated by both urban typologies as well as the identitary models induced by them.

Tradition demonstrates that the representation of death is constant in History : the Fayum portraits, the use of mortuary masks or the representation of the deceased in his mortuary bed. The occidental tradition of Ars Moriendi, the art of good death is proof of our concern about afterlife. However, in the case of children, death is more dramatic and surrounded by a complex weave of emotions, feelings and attitudes established around the loss. Different categories of representation demonstrate three points of view to represent the experience of child death. The first tentative is to take a picture of the child like an angel. Simbolic and metaforical images are constructed to certify the salvation and destiny of this little soul in Afterlife. The second form is the sanctification of the wake, and specially the place where it takes place. This new place, constructed to share and ritualise the veneration of this representation. Finally, the third possibility revolves around the transformation of this angel-child and the altar-child to the card-child where the representation of the child becomes a new religious picture like a fetish visual objet for the family.

This article is an invitation to read "Desapariencia no engaña", work by the Argentinian poet Nestor Ponce. The reading of Ponce's poems leads the reader through a path which explores the Argentinian recent political memory, registered in the form of a type of diary, where memories arise in a non-chronologial way. Desapariencia no engaña presents the delicate “fictional poetry” of the writer, essayist and poet Néstor Ponce.

This article, in particular, discusses the contact points between the first collection of poems –La ecuación y la gracia (1971)- by Inés Aráoz, contemporary argentine lady poet, and the last one entitled Notas , bocetos y fotogramas (2011). It deals with the formal aspects, the syntactic singularity, the relationship between the form and the autobiographic marks. As a result, it hypothesizes about a poetry that joins together tradition and vanguard like the way Octavio Paz proposes when he makes use of the concept "the breaking tradition".

The aim of this paper is to analyze identity crisis in Juan Jose Saer's La Ocasión. The paper will mainly focus on the intertextual relations between this novel and, on the one hand, the nineteenth-century realism and the genre of historical novel and, on the other hand, Proust' s The Prisoner and its major theme, jealousy. We'll examine the fragility of identities and selves for those characters who represent the very beginning of Argentinean national identity, in order to show how Saer disrupts the conventions of realist tradition. In addition, we will compare the ironical view of History in La ocasión whit other myths of homeland in Argentinian literature, specifically in Borges.

This essay aims at developing an account on the short-story « El gaucho insufrible », by Roberto Bolaño, focusing on the dialogue between such literary text and the processes of cultural and historical construction relating to the image of the so-called gaucho. The study discusses the disjunctions verified between the factual gaucho – the individual that can be found at the concrete level of existence – and its supposed textual correspondents, whose legitimacy or verisimilitude is founded on the historical narrative, on the literary narrative, and on other means that participate in the processes of fostering traditions and of constituting identity references. In order to analyse the path of « El gaucho insufrible »'s protagonist, who leaves Buenos Aires and settles in a village of the pampas due to a serious socioeconomic and political crisis that takes place in Argentina, this essay adopts the reflections presented by Adolfo Bioy Casares in Memoria sobre las pampas y los gauchos as a starting point.

The market-oriented reforms carried out in Latin America from the 1980s diminished public spending and human resources of the national cultural heritage organizations. To meet the demand for resources has emerged in the political stage the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This article, part of the experience of two countries, Brazil and Ecuador, to analyze the extent to which national bodies are deprive performing public policies, suffering interference by the financial institution. It is used as an object of study two organizations - the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage in Brazil, and the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, Ecuador. Thus, the process of weakening the institutions it appears and how it helped him to withdraw gradually from the State the power to decide, implement and evaluate public policies for cultural heritage preservation. And the transfer of decisions to the private sector bodies, public institutions seeking to make mere chanceladoras decisions taken out of them. It was found also that the process of dismantling the Brazilian and Ecuadorian heritage institutions are reversed from the first years of the XXI century with the governments of Lula and Correa, reflecting in implementing policies financed by the IDB in Latin America.

In How Tasty was my little Frenchman, film released in 1970, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, from a colonial historical vision, uses as the basis for the screenplay the report of Hans Staden, but recreates it in a satirical narrative between documentary and fictional. What interests us in this paper is to identify how the film through images and narrative itself, proposes different ways of thinking about indigenous customs, considering not only the practice of Tupinambás'cannibalism, but also the capability of interaction and coexistence of groups indigenous to the "foreign", French and Portuguese. In this sense, we will resort, panoramic way, the literary and pictorial texts to analyze the developments of the theme indianist to check how they are present in the film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman and reduce the analytical focus to evidence in a specific scene, the playful, metaphorical and theater to present mutual assimilation of indigenous and European culture and how the idea of ​​savagery and citizenship are (re) constructed features.

The allegory if the city provides enough elements to consider various theoretical questions in the humanities. From anthropological view, through historical constitutions of cities and urban agglomerations, even proposals of thinking urban structures through fiction. In this paper, we read a few of the correspondences between the literary cities of Recife and Olinda in João Cabral, Havana in Antônio José Ponte and Clarisse in Ítalo Calvino with one proposal of thinking the archive's study through the survival strategies presented by the authors.

This article aims to disseminate some linked to the lifestyles of the pioneers who settled in the southern Argentine Chaco during the first three decades of the twentieth century issues. In this period, when the Chaco was a Homeland, this space was important receptor immigration quotas were attracted by the prosperity of their business cycles, which resulted in a rapid process of settlement that led to a multi-ethnic society. The coexistence and inter-relationship of these heterogeneous social spaces and representative bodies in inland villages Territory theme we are interested in general, but in this case we deal particularly those activities that served to channel the recreation and leisure.

This article suggests an analysis of the relation between the main character of La sombra del jardín, written by Cristina Siscar, and space. This question is pertinent because exile plays an important part in the novel. As such, the loss of spatial markers carries a 'reappropriation' of the new space in which the exiled person has to live. Therefore, we suggest observing the narrative strategies employed by the Argentinean writer to represent the reality of the forced remoteness.

Mexican writer Rosa Nissán launched her literary career with two autobiographical novels, Novia que te vea and Hisho que te nazca. Her texts foreground the search for identity and belonging of the protagonist Oshinica, the daughter of Jewish immigrants in Mexico City. This study is the first of four that, together, make up the book Being Mexican : Identity, Location, and Rosa Nissán. Over the course of these four instalments questions about notions of being, hybrid identity, marginalization, narrative (visual and written), and changing spaces are considered from the vantage point of Nissán's novels. Just as this publishing method (in instalments) for this book-length narrative is an innovation rescued from the past which has been put to use to affront new challenges, Nissán's narratives attempt to bridge past and present to negotiate a viable vision of the future.