"'In and Out of the Peripheral Network City: Urban Spaces Written by Violence in Postwar Guatemala' analyzes transformations of urban space and culture in contemporary Guatemala. More specifically, the study focuses on material and discursive responses to urban violence as they appear in literature and related cultural products in and about postwar Guatemala City (1997-present). The study contends that, while Guatemala City undeniably operates under the same logic as substantially larger Latin American megacities, with populations of 8 million and up, it must be read under its own terms, considering its recent history and cultural production that responds to such history, as well as the city layout, which shapes cultural mediations of people. Thus, I propose the trope of the peripheral network city---a mid-sized, partitioned urban sprawl, shaped by citizen and state involvement, with qualities of the megacity and the megaslum---to analyze Guatemala City's heterogeneous spaces and the role of violence in constructing them. I conceptualize the peripheral network city through the lens of four main theoretical approaches: the archive, the repertoire, necropolitics, and violence. Discussions of these main theoretical concepts draw upon critical debates by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton, Diana Taylor, Mike Davis, Achille Mbembe, and Slavoj Zizek, among others. To read the peripheral network city, the specific texts under consideration are the site of the Archivo Historico de la Policia Nacional [Historical Archive of the National Police, AHPN] and its novelistic representation in Rodrigo Rey Rosa's 2009 novel El material humano [Human Matter], photographs of disappeared persons on the walls of buildings in Guatemala City's Historic Center, the novel Ruido de fondo [Background Noise] (2006) by Javier Payeras, and the collection of short stories perZONA (2014) by Juan Pensamiento Velasco. By offering new paradigms through which to read the Global South city in the 21st century, this study contends that cultural production, and the city itself, register traces of the recent past and ensure the survival of urban violence not as a transient mode but rather as a structuring principle of culture in postwar Guatemala. More broadly, the dissertation posits that such a reading of violent urban spaces allows us to understand Latin America and the Global South from a Guatemalan perspective, which until now has been largely ignored by cultural criticism."--Pages ii-iii.
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