The Slum and the City - (Illuminations) by Agnese Codebò (Hardcover)

About the Book

An Original Intervention into Theorizations of Buenos Aires's Urban History

Book Synopsis

The Argentine capital is largely perceived as a middle-class space. Yet in reality, urban poverty and precarious settlements are defining features of the city. Agnese Codebò investigates how slums have produced culture as well as their representation in literature and the visual arts from the 1950s to the present. Looking at government-led urban projects, as well as novels, artworks, films, militant magazines, poems, and music, she tells the story of how villas miseria have mattered culturally and socially as spaces that produce new aesthetics, cultural trends, and social alliances, while offering a vantage point to understand the city and its problems. Slums represent a heterogeneous urban space, and Codebò makes the case for their relevance in Argentine culture, demonstrates the need to rethink spaces of production, and develops a new premise for a decolonial approach to Argentine cultural production.

Review Quotes

The Slum and the City is a brilliant book that challenges not only the historical boundaries between the formal and informal neighborhoods of Buenos Aires but also those that separate 'high' and 'popular' culture. Codebò masterfully restores the unity of a complex metropolis, without losing sight of the contradictions that cross this particular urban space.--Valeria Snitcofsky, University of Buenos Aires

Agnese Codebò's superb book, The Slum and the City, consists of a rigorous itinerary through the paradigmatic space of the villa miseria in Buenos Aires. In the convergence of cultural figurations, where the aesthetic and the social intersect, Codebò's book finds the generative nature of urban spaces that to date had not been analyzed in their vast complexity.--Gisela Heffes, author of Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment

By situating proletarian culture and grassroots politics at the center of her analysis, Codebò offers a paradigm-shifting account of the contemporary cultural history of Buenos Aires. Far from being marginal sites, slums are constitutive of the city's--and the nation's--history. They are key sites of knowledge production, political organizing, and artistic expression, as Codebò demonstrates in this fascinating and important book.--Jennifer S. Ponce de León, author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War

About the Author

Agnese Codebò is assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture in the Spanish Department at Villanova University. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the Journal of Latin American Geography, the Latin American Literary Review, Les Cahiers Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire, and other venues in English, Spanish, and Italian.