Abstract
This chapter lays out the theoretical framework for the analyses. It explains how this book draws on urban cultural studies in order to make sense of current literary approaches to the city. It explores the existing bibliography on cultural imaginaries of the city, of verticality and of the underground, and confronts it with the critical interrogation of modernity that has been propelled by Latin American thinkers. The work of some of the main urban and cultural theorists of the twentieth century—Henri Lefebvre, José Luis Romero, Ángel Rama and Néstor García Canclini—is discussed, as well as the crucial insights of scholars such as Stephen Graham, David Pike, Rosalind Williams and José Maurício Domingues.
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Notes
- 1.
Lefebvre also designates these levels as, respectively, “spatial practices,” “representational space” and “representations of space.”
- 2.
For other approaches to the underground as a space of resistance, see Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey’s volume Paris–Amsterdam Underground (2014).
- 3.
In Technics and Civilization, Mumford explores technics as a quintessential product of the human imagination. He warns against its all too abstract application, which becomes particularly oppressive and disconnected from the natural environment between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. His concerns about the complicity between orderly abstraction and repression are also present in his The City in History (1961).
- 4.
Several authors all over the world have studied cultural representations of the subway in connection with urban modernization and mostly modernist writing. For an overview, see Zunino Singh (2013).
- 5.
With regard to Lefebvre , for instance, Pike criticizes his association of the underground with “lived space” as “an unacknowledged modernist trace in his theory” (2007: 14) and argues that subterranean spaces are best understood in their specific combination of the three dimensions of the triad. However, the above/below viewpoint adopted by Pike as a central methodology transports the conceived/lived dichotomy into the realm of enunciation instead of spatial experience: conceived and lived become perspectives on, instead of dimensions of, the underground.
- 6.
For an overview of the multiple other approaches and debates on this topic, see Vivian Schelling’s Through the Kaleidoscope (2000) and Emil Volek’s Latin America Writes Back (2013). As Graciela Montaldo (2016) notes, approaches differ in terms of the moment of modernization they select for proposing an interpretation of the concept. A considerable part of the discussion is dedicated to negotiating Latin American specificity within the modern paradigm (Joaquín Brünner, Beatriz Sarlo , Mariano Siskind) or to modernity as a colonialist, oppressive project with, in many cases, especially cruel inflections in Latin America (Ángel Rama, Walter Mignolo , Jean Franco).
- 7.
The notion of hybridity is often understood to imply just two elements, but this is not necessarily true. For my argument, I adhere to its broader meaning.
- 8.
One of the major criticisms of García Canclini’s concept of hybridity—as well as of other concepts that draw on notions of mestizaje or transculturation—has been precisely that the term does not adequately reflect these power struggles or the notion of social precariousness. See, for instance, Cornejo Polar (1997).
- 9.
As Pike (2005: 14; 2007: 66–157) shows , the Devil also emerges in nineteenth-century Paris and London as a figure closely associated with the development of capitalism . Unlike in Taussig’s examples, however, he appeared mostly in a metaphorical form and with a different function, which consisted of absorbing the fear of novelty and the contradictions brought about by the rapid transformations in society.
- 10.
Vervaeck elaborates a typology of journeys to the underworld that can be divided into “prototypical,” “modern” and “postmodern.” He explicitly identifies the underworlds he analyses as subterranean environments, which constitute the basic delimitation of the topic but also offer the possibility of charting deviations with respect to this model (2006: 17).
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François, L. (2021). Theorizing the Urban Underground in Latin America. In: Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature. Hispanic Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69456-2_2
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