This dissertation examines how three contemporary Mexican intellectuals confront the cultural milieu and political economy of the neoliberal era by revising the utopian imaginaries of Mexico’s major 20th century student movements. Building on recent scholarship on Mexican history and geography, urban studies, and political theory, I analyze the cities and politics that Mexican intellectuals have imagined to challenge the neoliberal cultural injunction against alternative forms of utopian thinking. The principal works studied in this dissertation are Roberto Bolaño’s novels Amuleto (1999), Los detectives salvajes (1998), and El espíritu de la ciencia-ficción (2016); Eduardo Ruiz Sosa’s novel Anatomía de la memoria (2014); and Alonso Ruizpalacios’ film Güeros (2014). The first chapter examines Roberto Bolaño’s treatments of the 1968 student movement and the Tlatelolco massacre within his broader Mexico City works. Bolaño uses metaphors derived from horror film to critique traditional historiographies of ’68 that are colored by morbid fascination with the violence, while positing science fiction as a utopian method for rethinking the relationship between the past and the future. The second chapter analyzes how Eduardo Ruiz Sosa’s novel Anatomía de la memoria conjures the specters of the 1970s student guerilla uprising in Sinaloa to shed light on the present struggles against the contemporary violence plaguing cities like Culiacán. I approach Ruiz Sosa’s novel as a study of the ruins of revolutionary Third Worldism which politicizes individual and collective processes of mourning and reaffirms a future open to possibilities beyond narco-neoliberal sovereignty. The third chapter unpacks the utopian resonances of Alonso Ruizpalacios’ film Güeros about the 1999-2000 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) student strike against the neoliberal effort to privatize higher education. I read the portrayal of the student occupation of the UNAM campus as an exploration of the dialectical utopian tensions between the needs for access to urban resources and poetic encounters with the unexpected in city life. By studying these intellectuals as critics of neoliberalism and as visual and textual philosophers of the utopian, my dissertation conceives of utopia as a strategy of finding potentialities within historical narratives to restore a sense of possibility to contemporary political landscapes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42047 |
| Date | 13 February 2021 |
| Creators | Shames, David |
| Contributors | Pineda, Adela, Long, Ryan |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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