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

Vegliņ, Simone

ISBN 10: 1786613891 / ISBN 13: 9781786613899

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc, 2020

About this Item

189 pages. 8.75x6.00x0.50 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # x-1786613891

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Urban Enigma: Time, Autonomy, and Postcolonial Transformations in Latin America
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786613891
• ISBN 13: 9781786613899
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.3 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

This book explores how Latin America indicated an autonomous form of postcolonialism that was marked by the production of multiple conceptualisations of time. The analysis particularly focuses on iconic urban transformations in capital cities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Brasilia, diachronically, and investigates each case’s specific representations of past, present, and future. By exploring these three episodes, the book shows how Latin America’s postcolonialism involved specific spatial dynamics that were inherently working over global socio-political geographies resulting from the legacy of a “long” colonial imagination. The text is divided into two parts.

The first part discusses some theoretical questions concerning the very conceptualization of Latin American space and the importance of exploring a genealogy of its urban geographies. The second part analyses the themes proposed through the discussion of the “materiality” of specific historical examples. The section delves into urban transformations in the aforementioned capital cities and focuses on how iconic material forms are able to encapsulate the main socio-political features defining each country’s post-colonial project.

The book aims to depict a historical geography capable of describing how controversial relations between power and knowledge had materialised in the shapes of the urban environment and had iconically contributed to the multifaceted production of the global area known as Latin America. Without any pretension to offer an all-embracing perspective, the book discusses the Latin America experience within the broader question concerning the genealogy of global socio-political geographies.

About the Author

Simone Vegliņ is a PhD Researcher in Geography at King’s College London.