Studies of Latin American culture have returned time and again to the issue of how to capture the many conflicts and tensions inherent in national, group, and individual identities of the region. This dissertation examines an overlooked component of identity debates: the experience of being anonymous or unrecognized. In particular, I focus on late twentieth and early twenty-first century representations of anonymity in Argentina and Brazil. These countries share various key characteristics: emergence from recent military dictatorships; accelerating urbanization and globalization; rapid transformation of public spaces and media technologies that shape the possibilities of expressing an identity and having it recognized. Within these contexts, my dissertation considers a corpus of novels and films centered on attempts to either escape anonymity or become anonymous. Chapter 1 analyzes the decay of family and community bonds as a source of recognition and social value in Fernando Bonassiâ"u20ac™s Subúrbio and Guillermo Saccomannoâ"u20ac™s El oficinista. Chapter 2 examines media technology and the relationship between audiences and celebrities. I read Alejandro Lópezâ"u20ac™s La asesina de Lady Di and Ignácio de Loyola Brandãoâ"u20ac™s O anônimo célebre as depictions of individuals seeking mass-media fame as a form of large-scale, public recognition. Chapter 3 looks at two cinematic representations of the bus 174 hijacking in Rio de Janeiro. José Padilhaâ"u20ac™s Ã"u201dnibus 174 and Bruno Barretoâ"u20ac™s Última parada 174 show the challenge of preserving the disruptive potency of the hijackerâ"u20ac™s demand for recognition, and the danger of neutralizing it through conventional narrative tropes. Chapter 4 analyzes representations of â"u20acœdesired anonymityâ"u20ac"u009d in Sergio Chejfecâ"u20ac™s novel Mis dos mundos and Albertina Carriâ"u20ac™s film Los rubios. The first explores the freedom of anonymous wandering in cosmopolitan and digital spaces. The latter imagines the creation of a community in which the burden of post-dictatorship memory and identity can be de-individualized and shared. Taken together, these works illustrate the continued demand to identify oneself and be(come) recognized as a basis for everyday social-civil interactions. They also question the value and viability of expressing a clear identity or cohesive self-narrative in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian society. / Adam Demaray

Raúl, the protagonist of Pablo Larraín’s 2008 film Tony Manero, is a serial killer obsessed with “Saturday Night Fever.” Living in 1970s Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, Raúl symbolizes the abuse of Chilean culture committed by dual hegemonic forces: the political oppression of the Pinochet regime, and the ideological force of the North American culture industry. His efforts to participate in Chilean cultural production by staging a dance performance based on Saturday Night Fever becomes a ridiculous parody of Bhabhain mimicry: almost, but not quite. In this paper, I read against the postcolonial narrative of the mimicking subject in Tony Manero. Using fan theory from Michel de Certeau and Henry Jenkins, I seek voices of resistance or reappropriation within the film. I argue that because Raúl’s final dance performance is unplugged from the culture industry, it becomes a site for the performance of deviant identities and for the construction of a local community. I find that the film, however, denies the implications of this resistance, reasserting the omnipotence of the government and of mass media in constructing cultural identity. / text

This study analyzes the relationship between the access to capital and the individual's construction of gender as presented in six Latin American cinematic depictions from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico that focus the point of view on young women in the urban space. David Harvey's theory on the urbanization of consciousness is used to analyze the females' relationship to family, class, community and state in terms of how each of these elements will impact the access to capital. The interaction with these factors determine that capital will also impact the construction of gender in the city-space. The films analyzed are as follows: Perfume de Violetas (2000) directed by Maryse Sistach, Àngel de fuego (1991) directed by Dana Rotberg Un día de suerte (2002) directed by Sandra Gugliotta, Hoy y mañana (2006) by Alejandro Chomsky, Uma Vida em Segredo (2001) by Suzana Amaral and Antônia (2006), by Tata Amaral. Film theory, feminist film theory, and gender studies are applied in the analysis of films.

abstract: This dissertation proposes a re-evaluation of the films of Caliwood—a close-knit group of film fanatics who produced socially-minded independent cinema in Cali, Colombia—and the group’s contribution towards a national film industry. Focusing primarily on the works of Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo during the period ranging between 1971 and 1991, this study analyzes six key films—Oiga vea! (1972), Cali de Película (1973), Agarrando Pueblo (1977), Pura Sangre (1982), Carne de tu carne (1983)—which showcase the evolution of the group’s production from experimental documentaries to pseudo-documentaries and fictional films. Additionally, It All Started at the End (2015) is analyzed because it is the last film produced by Luis Ospina and it showcases the history of the group from his own perspective. In totality, these films represent a political stance derived from the tenets of the Third Cinema movement—a call for a revolutionary cinema which reverberated throughout Latin America—which denounces neocolonialism, the capitalist system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment for profit. Furthermore, this comprehensive analysis of Caliwood’s films covers a representative sample of their film legacy, as well as their critique of socio-political and cultural issues in Colombia. The reflections yielded from this study propose a reframing of Colombian film history and acknowledges the importance of Ospina’s and Mayolo’s contribution to the development of a “national” film tradition in Colombia. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2020

The brothel has an important role in Latin American literature and film. The fictional brothel is expected to produce gender in both men and women, but these gendered identities are placed at the extremes within the bordello. This gender extremism creates opposition, or gender transgression, in the characters of twentieth-century Latin American narrative and film. Here I map the brothelized iteration of both genders through prohibitions, taboo, abjection, and violence within various texts and films. Much of the discipline of this cultural production of gender rests on the body. The body must bear the mark of its gender or the character risks violent consequences. Fatness plays an important role in this sexual economy, because fatness destroys gender, pushing the subject toward an androgyny that other characters reject or hate. Though the brothel has been studied before, it has not been analyzed from this gendered perspective. / text

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