Aversive pleasures: Urban violence and poverty in contemporary Brazilian and Colombian literature and film
Description
My dissertation examines contemporary Brazilian and Colombian literature and film that focus on urban poverty and violence. Frequently, these texts question the conflation of slum residents, drug traffic and extreme violence through the theme of the gangster. The gangsters of these texts look different than the classic gangsters of American film and the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s. They rather construct elaborate parodies of journalistic and sociological texts that purport to explain marginalized and criminalized groups by juxtaposing them with the aesthetic of the guapos celebrated in tango and salsa music in the case of Colombia, and the aesthetic of malandragem in samba in the case of Brazil I also chose to look at emblematic texts that are frequently invoked in discussions of violence and poverty from a variety of ideological perspectives. For this reason, I analyze and compare Cidade de Deus by Paulo Lins, Virgen de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo, and Rosario Tijeras, by Jorge Franco. These novels were adapted into major feature films, and in the case of Cidade de Deus, a television miniseries entitled Cidade dos Homens, that were important experiments that served to amplify a debate about how poverty and violence are represented in Latin America to both Latin American and foreign audiences This dissertation therefore sees these texts as part of an emerging group of multidisciplinary artists engaged in a shared project to reframe 'common sense' solutions to crime and urban poverty that advocate ongoing police repression. Instead, these texts call attention to notions of second-class citizenship based on class and race difference and a critique of a shared societal notion of masculinity that encourages violence. Theoretically, this dissertation contextualizes the texts and films as interventions in debates in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies and testimonio criticism through their complex relationship to reality and aesthetic