Three-week course, first session

Buenos Aires is a city of contrasting images and changes: its history is hidden under the so-called ‘progress’ or dwells in its borders. La Gran Aldea (1882) by Lucio V Lopez depicts a city of contradictions that is reshaped through Cesar Aira’s lenses in La Villa (2001). As such, Buenos Aires stages ways of thinking Argentine nationhood and its struggles against external and internal threads (the countryside, the immigration, the progress, European trends, Latin American waves). Fictions on Buenos Aires explore myths, secrets, dreams, and frustrations in literature, films, comics, photography, music, and even graffiti art. These fictions portray unique characters, such as the dandy, the tanguero, the cuchillero, the first generation college graduate, the blue-collar worker, the poor, and the political activist; and all of them enable readers to challenge the boundaries of modernity. This seminar aims to reflect on the relationship between space and those marginal subjectivities that inhabit the borders of the city, in order to expand the reflection towards Latin American and its own conflictive borders. (.5 unit)