Why should we care about genre?

Following a hint from Wai Chee Dimock, let us perform a conceptual experiment. Imagine that literature departments were to begin hiring faculty members primarily by their expertise in particular genres instead of (as is usually the case in the larger departments) primarily by their expertise in particular historical periods. Literary study, I hope you will agree, would very soon cease to exist in its present form. This prospect exposes something about literary study in its present form that might after all prove unworthy of being mourned, which is to say of being preserved.

In the 1970s many persons of andean origin migrated to Lima. Informally and through the mediation of emerging grassroots organizations, the nuevos limeños negotiated with the state for their right to residency in the city and to sanitation and other services. They struggled for recognition as citizens. Gradually an informal economy mainly based on Andean cultural practices of production gave way to entrepreneurship, which created a new middle class. In this way Andean migrants to Lima became urban workers and consumers and appropriated and transformed the city.

“Reading the city” is so commonplace a metaphor that we tend not to see or hear it as such: It is an indifferent building in the lexicographical landscape, something we see and pass by every day without giving it a second look. Geographers, sociologists, and architects, as well as literary critics, all speak of—and write about, and design courses on—the “legibility” of the city, usually taking the phrase for granted, taking “reading” as read. But why should it seem so obvious to speak of reading in relation to urban experience? (Or, putting this from another direction, why does “reading the village” sound like a contradiction in terms?) And what kind of reading is being evoked when we go about “reading” the city?

The world's great cities have long been a focal point for artists, writers, poets, and social commentators, who have sought to use them both as backdrop or canvas for their work and as the subject matter of commentary and critique about the condition of society. Some have cast cities as places of nightmares and dystopian visions and landscapes. The French writer Octave Mir-beau evokes this genre when he notes that the dirt and smog of nineteenth-century London are part of “a dream, of mystery … of chaos,” what he refers to as the “special nature of the prodigious city” (qtd. in Ackroyd 773). Others, such as the Romantic poets, described the city as antinaturalistic, a place of nature's expulsion. Here urban dirt and pollution were metaphors for the degradation of human spirit and character; the English novelist George Gissing, for instance, characterized the smells in the district of Southwark in London as rising like “a miasma that caught the breath.”

Metro manila in 2006 is a labyrinthine, megalopolitan fortress of foreclosure. Almost all the main arteries of the metropolis have become virtually enclosed corridors of free-flowing vehicular traffic, without regulated crossings where pedestrians and cross-street flow might momentarily interrupt the stream of hundreds of thousands of cars, buses, and trucks careening down these roads every day. With the help of numerous “flyovers,” or overpasses, and underpasses built by the metropolitan government over the last decade and a half, these ten-lane roads have become highways that coast and tunnel through the thick of the city, connecting the scattered, archipelagic commercial centers and gated communities where the upper-class and upwardly mobile sectors work, live, shop, and socialize.