Bogota imaginada: Narraciones urbanas, cultura y politica
Description
During the 1990s, Bogota, the capital of the Republic of Colombia passed through one of its most intense transformations due to new government policies in urban relations. Taking these changes as a point of departure, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the implications that symbolic expressions (novels, essays, films, etc.) have in such transformations, and especially to show how the urban imaginary influences the different uses of the city itself. Thus, the dissertation explores novels, essays, mass media, advertising, film, among other expressions, in order to see how they portray the city, and especially how they position themselves vis-a-vis new urban government initiatives (support, resistance, etc.) The first chapter recounts how the city was seen as a space of chaos and how it was no longer possible to understand the urban. The chapter further explores the first years of the 1990s, where we find texts (novels, essays, and films) perplexed with the growing chaos of the city, its hyper-growth, and the cognitive difficulties it presents as an object of study. The second chapter focuses on a diversity of texts (the mass media, government publicity campaigns, the press, etc.) and explores the communicative actions that were produced by the government and by the media who have the power of informing the people. This chapter makes the argument (which is the overall argument of the dissertation) that to govern is a communicative act, and that it is precisely there, in the act of communication, where memory is or is not constructed in a democratic way The third chapter reviews different novels and films that have Bogota as their setting and subject, showing the different ways that art resists the official gaze of the city government. These are texts that clearly show the poverty, crime, violence, and illegality rampant in the city. Throughout the dissertation, I question the different theoretical tendencies that are used to explain urban and cultural phenomena that take place in a city like Bogota. Furthermore, I propose it should be through a combination of different disciplines and diverse theories that it is possible to explain the new phenomenon that is to inhabit a twenty-first century city such as Bogota