Ciudad y escritura

How does the future community search for its significance in precarious times in terms of affinity and identity? This question is explored in fourteen essays on the cultural output of the contemporary Latin American city: chaotic cities where the ideal of order has become fragmented, and where the walls of the literary city has become porous. The new and multiple urban routes - which superpose and cross each other - create the image of the postmodern city.

Written culture shows different forms of intervention in the city, and the urban imagery nourishes itself from the perished city as well as from the first contours of the cities of the future. Recreated cartographies in novels, performances in São Paulo and Santiago de Chile, performance poetry in Mexico D.F., testimonies of violence and of migration in Medellín and Lima, blogs from virtual communities of Havanna and San Juan, are just some of these kinds of chronicles analyzed in this perceptive study.

- Nanne Timmer is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Analysis at Leiden University.