Cultures of the city

About this book

"This collection creates a new kind of urban dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities by transgressing the traditional boundaries of what is considered urban or cultural studies within Latin/o America."--Setha M. Low. City University of New York. "Original and stimulating. Cultures of the City considers very current and often unexpected topics with creativity and rigor. This book fills significant gaps in the field of urban cultural studies as it examines the city from both humanistic and social science perspectives."--Marcy E. Schwartz. Rutgers University. Cultures of the City explores the cultural mediations of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America and how these shape the identities of cities and their residents. The contributors to this volume examine identity and the sense of place and belonging that connect people to urban environments, relating these to considerations of ethnicity, social and economic class, gender, everyday life, and cultural practices. They also consider history and memory and the making of places through the iterative performance of social practices. As such, places are works in progress, a condition that is particularly evident in contemporary Latin/o American cities where the opposition between local and global influences is a prominent facet of daily life. These core issues are theorized further in an afterword by Abril Trigo, who takes the preceding chapters as a point of departure for a discussion of the dialectics of identity in the Latin/o American global city. --Book Jacket.