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Manoela Massuchetto Jazar, Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, BrazilAbstract
This article examines how literature participates in the construction and contestation of urban narratives, treating fiction not as a mirror of the city but as a critical practice that refracts and reshapes urban life. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it analyzes literary works from the Global South, particularly Brazilian classics such as Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1902) and Rachel de Queiroz’s O Quinze (1930), to show how they dramatize exclusion, resilience, and the uneven geographies of modernization. Alongside these texts, writings by Carolina Maria de Jesus and Conceição Evaristo highlight how marginalized voices articulate alternative historiographies of the city. By engaging with the triad of memory, history, and narrative, the study demonstrates how fiction constructs symbolic geographies that challenge colonial frameworks and unsettle dominant spatial ideologies. In doing so, literature manifests itself as a form of urban theory: it documents collective memory, reevaluates historical events, and generates imaginaries that complement and contest institutional accounts of development. The article concludes that urban narratives in literature expand the repertoire of urban studies and contribute to global debates on cultural representation, resilience, and the redefinition of cities in contemporary imagination.
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Conference: BAMC2025Stream: Architecture and Urban Studies/Design
This paper is part of the BAMC2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Jazar M. (2025) Urban Narratives in Literature: Cultural Representation, Resistance, and the Reinterpretation of Cities in the Global South ISSN: 2435-9475 – The Barcelona Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 13-21) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2435-9475.2025.2
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2435-9475.2025.2
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