URBAN IMAGINARIES OF MEXICAN VICTIMISM : THE IMAGES OF SILENCE ( Dossier thématique : Mexique : espace urbain et résistances artistiques et littéraires face à la « ville générique », Artelogie II, num. 2, enero 2012)

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Universe can be thought as an enormous mountain range in which stars are the visible highlands. All the rest, the slopes, the hillsides covered by the mist, is dark matter. We can´t see it, but it is just right there, beneath the shiny peaks. Mexico City, a megalopolis of more than twenty million people, is quite a universe. Not exactly the modern urban setting that since the thirties historians like to imagine as a Musilian city, that industrial world where people are pressed and pour among roofs, buses and fading industrial lights, as Georg Heym would express. Nor is it a tropical impressionist scenary where an epic past and a (in)dependant future seems to apply to Paul Ricoeur´s postcolonial paradox : how to become modern and turn back to origins ; how to deal with the revival of an old civilization and still be a modern one. Yet, we can be certain that Mexico City is a modern city.  It has the proper clear hights of modernity (including generic imaginaries) just as it veils a silent complex dark matter : the modern invention of a victimist identity.


Johanna Lozoya, Artelogie, enero 2012, RSS 2.0 | ISSN 2115-6395