UC San Diego

This dissertation examines literary representations of the neoliberal transformations of urban space in Santiago, Chile and Havana, Cuba since the 1990s. It draws on the influential work of scholars who argue that throughout the later part of the twentieth century cities have acquired important significance as spaces that register the conflicts that emerge in national contexts and are perpetuated on a global scale by neoliberalism. This dissertation evaluates how the urban imaginaries of Santiago and Cuba have been reshaped since 1990 as a neoliberal reconfiguration of urban space has taken place in each city as a result of important transitions that occur after political and economic crises that have strongly impacted social justice debates. In the Chilean context, it focuses on how neoliberalism was institutionalized with the political transition from a dictatorship to a democracy. In the Cuban context, it focuses on how amidst the economic crisis of the special period, the State began to transition from a socialist planned economy to a mixed system that integrates partially neoliberal policies. This dissertation analyzes how, through the respective direct and indirect neoliberal reconfiguration of Santiago and Havana, the discourse of the neoliberal market imposes a neoliberal imaginary of Chile as a neoliberal paradise and Cuba as a revolution in ruins. Thus this dissertation examines how those imaginaries are dismantled in Cuban and Chilean literary production. Chapter one analyzes literary representations of the social production of the city in Nancy Alonso's Tirar la primera piedra (Cuba, 1997), Ramón Díaz Eterovic's La oscura memoria de las armas (Chile, 2008), Pedro Lemebel's De perlas y cicatrices : crónicas radiales (Chile, 1998), and Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared (Cuba, 2002). The chapter evaluates how the texts intervene in the social production of postdictatorship Santiago and special period Havana by establishing a relationship between memory, time, and space that opposes the dominant conceptions of these that are established through the neoliberal reconfiguration of urban space. It argues that the texts re-write the city to re-think the possibilities for social change by theorizing memory as a vehicle that constantly elucidates an oppositional re-mapping of the city. Chapter two analyzes literary representations of the act of writing the city in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante (Chile, 1996), Díaz Eterovic's La oscura memoria de las armas, Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared, and Anna Lidia Vega Serova's Noche de ronda (Cuba, 2001). The chapter revisits the foundational relationship between writing and power in Latin America to examine transformations in the texts' literary depictions of how intellectuals map out Santiago and Havana. It contends that by tracing the relationship between those transformations and the economic and political transformations that have taken place in Chile and Cuba since 1990, the texts situate themselves at the margins of the State and the market as a strategy toward social justice that proposes an alternate relationship to power and knowledge. Chapter three analyzes the literary construction of the act of walking in Alonso's Tirar la primera piedra, Lemebel's De perlas y cicatrices : crónicas radiales, Karla Suárez's Silencios (Cuba, 1997), and Diamela Eltit's Jamás el fuego nunca (Chile, 2007). The chapter reviews foundational theorizations of the construction of the urban walker to understand the ways in which the neoliberal reconfiguration of postdictatorship Santiago and special period Cuba determines the characters' movement through those cities. It argues that as the characters walk through Santiago and Havana documenting the changes--forms of justice and injustice-- that have taken place since 1990, they not only identify different forms of marginality that have emerged both in public and private spaces but also represent how the reconstruction of urban space inevitably redefines their identities. This dissertation concludes with an analysis of how debates on justice became a central focus in Chile and Cuba since the mid-twentieth century. It explores the ways in which those debates were impacted in Chile by the military coup d'�tat that in 1973 established the dictatorship as the embodiment of injustice, and in Cuba as the success of the 1959 Cuban Revolution was seen as the triumph of justice. It explores how the works make significant interventions in current social justice debates in each country through their focus on the neoliberal reconfiguration of the city. The conclusion argues that the texts dismantle the neoliberal imaginaries of Chile and Cuba to open a space for new theorizations of social justice beyond the limits of the market and the State. It contends that in refuting the neoliberal reconfiguration of their cities the texts propose alternate relationships between time, space, and memory that represent a possibility to conceptualize social justice not as a closed project imposed from above but as a struggle from below that must constantly be redefined to address diverse injustices. This dissertation underlines the importance of the intersections of culture, politics, economics, and history to understand social justice struggles in Chile and Cuba. By examining how the neoliberal transformations of the city impact conceptualizations of social justice transnationally, this dissertation is relevant for understanding these debates in other contexts where the logic of neoliberalism is posited as the only possibility for a prosperous future