Imaginary Cities, Violence and Memory: A Literary Mapping

Abstract

Imaginary cities, cities which do not exist as concrete geographical places, enjoy a long tradition in the history of Latin America. Juan Rulfo’s eerie ghost town of Comala, which formed the setting for Pedro Páramo in 1955, is part of this tradition and stands alongside cities of unparalleled international repute, such as Macondo in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez. The powerful reach of Macondo extended as far as the outskirts of Vienna, where its name was given to a housing estate inhabited by former refugees.1 The imaginary map of Latin America also contains such cities as Juan Carlos Onetti’s Santa María, which is located to the south of Buenos Aires and forms the common spatial context for his trilogy of novels La vida breve (A Brief Life), El astillero (The Shipyard) and Juntacadáveres (Body Snatcher), or Rodrigo Fresán’s Canciones Tristes, the city with no fixed position on the map. Of course, imaginary cities are not restricted exclusively to Latin America.2 As Mabel Moraña points out it is quite possible that, since its violent colonization, Latin America has been a locus of desire, a space that has conjured up not only utopias of a longed-for Arcadia, but also imaginary places of rejection which reveal more about the constitution of European societies at that particular time than about the so- called newly discovered continent (Moraña, 2006, p.32).KeywordsCollective MemoryHousing EstateHegemonic MasculinityVisual ParameterMilitary DictatorshipThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.