“The Peripheral Metropolis: The City, Montage and Modernity” examines Latin American writers in the 1920s and 1930s who, in writing about Mexico City, Lima and Buenos Aires, utilize a logic of montage to suggest that the apparently incommensurable elements found in the peripheral metropolis are not arbitrarily placed side-by-side but internally related elements of a contradictory whole. I put these Latin American writers in dialogue with American, German and Italian contemporaries who also used montage to write about the city. In the first chapter, I argue that aesthetic concerns are integral to the way the Peruvian social thinker and essayist José Carlos Mariátegui reframes the periphery’s non-self-contemporaneity, namely how he uses montage to articulate the nation’s division between coast/city and sierra/countryside, and to outline the possibility of overcoming these antagonisms through political organization and social revolution. The second chapter examines the architectural imagination of the avant-garde group estridentismo and its founder, Manuel Maples Arce. By imagining the city as an abstract space constituted by a process of uprooting, the estridentistas articulate a cosmopolitan politics and a montage aesthetics. But, as I demonstrate by comparing estridentismo to the functionalist architect Juan O’Gorman, the abstract character of the city ultimately appears in their work as an alienated, destructive form of modernity. In the third chapter, I analyze how the Argentine Roberto Arlt articulates modernist and realist techniques to grasp the contradictory dynamics of capitalist modernity and the paradoxical combination of cynicism and deceit in the peripheral metropolis. In short, “The Peripheral Metropolis: Montage, the City and Modernity” takes up the challenge posed by new modernist studies to formulate a global conception of modernity without either effacing the distinction between core and periphery or explaining these differences in terms of elements external to modernity. By using montage to formalize the social logic of the peripheral metropolis, the writers in this project yield crucial insights into peripheral modernity insofar as they suggest that its peculiarities derive not from modernity’s incompleteness but from modernity’s own contradictory logic, which drives it to appear often in the form of its opposite.
Mulder, Tavid,
"The Peripheral Metropolis: The City, Montage and Modernity"
(2019).
Comparative Literature Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/n5py-a740
