City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America (review)

A colleague of mine who studies urban anthropology once offered a succinct definition of a city: a place with a Chinese restaurant. While his answer might have been glib, it reflects the need for a set of theoretical tools to make sense of the global surge in urbanization. Scholars of Latin America, in particular, can now rarely study peasant communities or indigenous villages in isolation. Colonial administration relied on the concentration of bureaucratic power in capital cities. Contemporary political, economic, and cultural forces have conspired to turn those centers into megacities.

The volume City/Art, edited by Dartmouth professor of Spanish and comparative literature Rebecca E. Biron, proposes approaching Latin America's cities through the lens of creative activity. The arts—both officially sanctioned and subversive—shape the way citizens experience the urban landscape. The scale of Latin American cities is so vast that any single person perceives it only in fragments. Artistic representation frames the heterogeneous environment so that viewers can order the shards into a complete picture.

The contributors span disciplines from anthropology to philosophy to cultural studies. The cities they draw on as examples include Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo. The artistic forms they analyze are similarly diverse: novels, films, agitprop, architecture, and sub-way mosaics. Despite the multiple ways of capturing the concreteness of the city, the essays come across as abstract academic treatises. The most present voice is that of the detached observer writing from a tranquil remove, not the hyperactive urban denizen.

Part of the distancing effect results from the frozen-in-time quality of some of the chapters. Making the work of Néstor García Canclini, an influential theorist in Latin American studies, accessible in English is always welcome, but in this case, his essay is adapted from a book published in 1997. The "recent" survey he cites as a measure of automobile use in Mexico City was taken in 1994. Similarly, James Holston's essay about the unintended consequences of the planning of Brasilia was first published in 2001. Of course, authors must limit the scope of their analysis, but capturing the vibrancy of the city requires more up-to-date evidence.

Another factor that distances the collection from the urban context it seeks to describe is the lack of ethnographic data. The reliance on close readings of artistic creations suppresses information on how city dwellers receive those images. For instance, in a learned discussion of the depiction of Jews in Argentine fiction, Amy Kaminsky mentions in passing the history of anti-Semitic violence in Buenos Aires. Then she returns to a survey of novels without considering how literature might have been implicated in the real-world suffering of Jews. The conversion of a prison into a mall in central Montevideo smoothly sets up Hugo Achugar's argument about the panopticon of commerce. But without hearing from the shoppers, the chapter is less persuasive.

Fitting a book about aesthetics, City/Art provides ample illustrations. Drawings, photographs, and blueprints accompany key points. Even here, the authors tend to remain detached. In the chapters by Nelly Richard and Marcy Schwartz, which deal explicitly with visual art, the text comments directly on the works shown. Elsewhere, though, the images act more as a generic backdrop. For instance, José Quiroga's chapter on film and books about Miami includes photos of art deco architecture in South Beach and street scenes in Havana that do not correspond to anything specific in the essay.

The volume resembles the jumble of city life in one area where it should not: editorial incoherence. Biron has assembled chapters that complement each other thematically and ably translated four of the ten essays into English. What she did not achieve is a consistent narrative that propels the reader forward. Although Biron groups the essays into three sections, her introduction admits that the categories blend together. Indeed, there seems to be no logical progression from chapter to chapter. A few...