The Urban Enigma: Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America

198 Pages·2020·1.935 MB·English

by  Simone Vegliò

The Urban Enigma
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
New Politics of Autonomy
Series Editors:
Saul Newman and Martina Tazzioli
In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented emergence of new
forms of radical politics—from Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, and the global
Occupy movement, to WikiLeaks and hacktivism. What is striking about
such movements is their rejection of leadership structures and the absence of
political demands and agendas. Instead, their originality lies in the autonomous
forms of political life they engender.
The New Politics of Autonomy book series is an attempt to make sense
of this new terrain of anti-political politics, and to develop an alternative
conceptual and theoretical arsenal for thinking the politics of autonomy.
The series investigates political, economic, and ethical questions raised by
this new paradigm of autonomy. It brings together authors and researchers
who are engaged, in various ways, with understanding contemporary
radical political movements and who approach the theme of autonomy from
different perspectives: political theory, philosophy, ethics, literature and art,
psychoanalytic theory, political economy, and political history.
Titles in the Series
Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings
Martina Tazzioli
The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural
Labour after the Avant-Garde
.d Stevphen Shukaitis
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silb Italian Critical Thought: Genealogies and Categories
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& Sandro Mezzadra
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
The Urban Enigma
Time, Autonomy, and
Postcolonial Transformations
in Latin America
Simone Vegliò
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iryp Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA
With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Copyright © Simone Vegliò, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
.d without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
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ir llA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
.sreh ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-388-2
silbu PB 978-1-78661-389-9
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oR ISBN: 978-1-78661-390-5 (electronic)
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
Contents
About the Author vii
Introduction 1
1 Time, Space, Hierarchies: The Production of Latin America 15
2 The City as an Archive 35
3 Latin America’s Urban Geographies: The Apogee of the
Twentieth Century’s Urban Enigma 54
4 Buenos Aires, a European Door in the Americas: The “Argentine
Pavilion” and the Making of the Nation (1880–1946) 75
5 Post-Revolutionary Mexico City: The Palace of Public
.d Education and the Perfect Race (1920–1960) 102
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r sth Modernist Democracy (1956–1964) 128
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
About the Author
Dr Simone Vegliò is based in the Department of Geography at King’s Col-
lege London. His work analyzes socio-spatial transformations of the urban
environment in relation to global economic processes as well as to transfor-
mations at the level of the nation state, both historically and at present. He has
also worked on the figures of José Martí and Antonio Gramsci.
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield
Introduction
THE URBAN ENIGMA
Cities, from the start of the colonial period and ever since, have been crucial
for articulating power relations in Latin America. Representing in their first
stage the peripheral bastions of the imperial domains and, at the same time,
central locations for the organization of the colonial space, the postindepen-
dence period transformed cities into the core sites through which the nation
state—that is, each country’s socio-spatial, political, economic, and cultural
hierarchies—was shaped. This book reconsiders the process whereby the
nation state consolidated and naturalized its dominion by identifying urban-
ization as the main “place” where power relations might be examined in the
best way, and where it is possible to highlight such modern configurations
and deep cultural hybridizations, which define, and have in the past defined,
.de the global space known as “Latin America.” As the title of this book suggests,
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r sth transformations, a definition that aims to indicate the quality of this sociopo-
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.sre ally characterized the diffusion of manifold systems of thought and practices
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lttiL & beyond the common use of colonialism (Blunt and Wills 2000: 169). The
na complex relationship with past and history is therefore immediately at stake.
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thg ism. Accordingly, this work traces a historical geography that highlights the
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Vegliò, Simone. The Urban Enigma : Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield