Endless Proliferations of Signifiers: Mexican Cultural Studies in the Future Tense
2023; Routledge; Volume: 100; Issue: 9-10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820.2023.2247708
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education
ResumoAbstractThis piece argues that Mexican literary and cultural studies are on the verge of a series of paradigm changes. The essay begins with an imagined walk through Mexico City to illustrate the ways in which scholarship can 'think' a space. The essay later proceeds to with engage three questions in the field of cultural studies in Mexico: questions of method and transdisciplinarity, subjectivities following new ways of thinking race and gender and temporalities through the idea of the future. The discussion will engage as examples leading Mexican theorists such as Irmgard Emmelhainz, Cristina Rivera Garza and Bruno Bosteels among others. Disclosure Statement:No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin, 2000), 3.2 Mabel Moraña, 'Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity', in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini & Luis Martín-Estudillo (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2005), 241–81 (p. 243).3 This building's history can be consulted in Magdalena Escobosa de Rangel, La casa de los azulejos: reseña histórica del Palacio de los condes de Orizaba (México D.F.: San Ángel Ediciones, 1986).4 Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2017), 38.5 Ángel Acuña Delgado, 'El Zócalo de la Ciudad de México: un espacio social total', Antropología Experimental, 17 (2007), 261–75 (pp. 262–63), (accessed 7 July 2023).6 For a perspective on the use of graffiti as feminist protest in the surrounding area of the Alameda, see María Guadalupe Valiñas Varela, 'El Palacio de Bellas Artes y sus alrededores, Ciudad de México. Marca de lugar y expresión cultural del feminismo', Revista Memória em Rede, 14:26 (2022), 441–50, (accessed 7 July 2023).7 Ricardo Pérez Montfort, 'On the Street Corner Where Stereotypes Are Born: Mexico City, 1940–1968', in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, ed. William H. Beezley (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 34–53. On the Chinese experience in Mexico, see Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2017).8 According to Jeffrey M. Pilcher, tacos al pastor is a Mexicanization of the earlier Puebla variety of shawarma, the taco árabe. Second-generation Lebanese Mexicans 'cooked pork in the same fashion, put it on corn tortillas with a slice of pineapple, and called it tacos al pastor'. See Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012), 155. On Levantine immigration to Mexico, see Teresa Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2007); and Camila Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews and Arabs under the French Mandate (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2017). In my opinion, the most important scholar of Lebanese migration in the Mexican academy is Carlos Martínez Assad, who recently published a summa of his research. See Carlos Martínez Assad, Libaneses: hechos e imaginario de los inmigrantes en México (México D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales-Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 2022).9 Maricruz Castro Ricalde, 'Un Distinto amanecer (Julio Bracho 1943) para la nación mexicana', Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 51:3 (2017), 543–69 (p. 556).10 Olivia Cosentino, 'Regimes of Youth and Emotion: Stardom, Affect and Modernity in Mexico's Mediascapes, 1950–1990', Doctoral dissertation (Ohio State University, 2020).11 On the iconic character of Sanborns and its presence in Mexico City urban narratives, see Alejandro Puga, 'Espacios contradictorios y zonas de contacto en el Sanborns narrado', Ciberletras, 46 (2022), 36–55; available at (accessed 10 March 2023). See also Kevin Chrisman, 'Meet Me at Sanborns: Labor, Leisure, Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Mexico', Doctoral dissertation (York University, Ontario, 2018).12 Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2010), 93.13 Salvador Novo, Nueva grandeza mexicana: ensayo sobre la Ciudad de México y sus alrededores en 1946 (México D.F.: Hermes, 1946).14 Monika Kaup, 'Mexico City's Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo's Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena's La grandeza mexicana', in Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, ed. Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis & Peter Krieger (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 255–82 (p. 256).15 Charles Bowden, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture, 1998).16 I follow here Eduardo Mendieta, who understands Plantationcene as 'the enduring inheritances of Western coloniality' and Urbanocene as 'the mega-urban character of world society'. See Eduardo Mendieta, 'Anthropodicies of Coloniality. Urbanocene, Plantacioncene and Critical Theory', Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, 7:1 (2023), 103–30 (p. 113).17 Américo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press 1976), xiv.18 For a discussion of the rich Mexican community in New York City, see Melissa Castillo Planas, A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers U. P., 2020).19 For a book representative of this view from the Anglophone academy, see the essays in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 2007 [1st ed. 1993]).20 Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2010).21 Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 8.22 Abril Trigo, Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2012), 13.23 Trigo, Crisis y transfiguración de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos, 13.24 José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, 'Introducción. Crónica y estudios culturales en México. Teorías de la cultura', in Los estudios culturales en México, coord. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Conaculta, 2003), 15–33.25 Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone, 2005).26 Humberto Beck, 'Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now', Public Books, 1 March 2023, n.p.; available online at (accessed 12 March 2023).27 Mabel Moraña, Inscripciones críticas: ensayos sobre cultura latinoamericana (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2014), 149–50.28 Moraña, Inscripciones críticas, 153; emphasis in the original.29 Many texts in Mexico that deal with this violence, including those cited below, embrace the term as it is defined by Achille Mbembe, which refers to the forms of political violence required to sustain capitalism and colonialism. See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2019).30 Manfred B. Steger, 'Committing to Cultures of Creativity: The Significance of Transdisciplinarity', Globalizations, 16:5 (2019), 763–69. Steger comments here on a book critical of the neoliberal idea of the 'world-class university'. See James H. Mittelman, Implausible Dream: The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 2017).31 Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2018 [1st Spanish ed. 2010]); Oswaldo Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narco-Trafficking and Culture in the US and Mexico, trans. William Savinar (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2022 [1st Spanish ed. 2018]).32 Irmgard Emmelhainz, The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico's Post-Neoliberal Conversion (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021). It is worth noting that this translation by Emmelhainz herself is a significantly updated and revised edition from the original in Spanish.33 See Dawn Marie Paley, Guerra neoliberal: desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (México D.F.: Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2020).34 See Alice Driver, More or Less Dead: Femicide, Haunting and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2015).35 Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria: pro-nacionalismo (Forging a Nation), ed. & trans. Fernando Armstrong-Fumero (Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 2010 [1st Spanish ed. 1916]).36 For a good history of this process see Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2020). On the idea of mestizaje as state ideology, see Joshua K. Lund, The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012).37 See Rick A. López, Reading Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans and the State after the Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2010).38 Horacio Legrás, Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory and the Making of Modern Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2017), 5.39 Pedro Ángel Palou, Mestizo Failure(s): Race, Film and Literature in Twentieth-Century Mexico, trans. Sara Potter (Boston: Art Life Lab, 2016).40 See Mónica García Blizzard, The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerading Throughout the Golden Age (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022).41 Susan Antebi, Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Culture (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2021).42 See Chang, Chino; and Julián Herbert, The House of the Pain of Others, trans. Christina MacSweeney (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2019 [1st Spanish ed. 2016]).43 Claudio Lomnitz, 'Anti-Semitism and the Mexican Revolution', Representations, 110:1 (2010), 1–28; Daniela Gleizer, Unwelcome Exiles: Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).44 Rebecca Janzen, Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019); Gareth Williams, The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police and Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2014).45 On this line of thinking, see Federico Navarrete, Mexico Racista: una denuncia (México D.F.: Grijalbo, 2016). For a study of racismo in the post-revolutionary period, see Beatriz Urías Horcasitas, Historias secretas del racismo en México (México D.F.: Tusquets, 2007).46 See Ricardo A. Wilson, The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Evanston: Northwestern U. P., 2020); Miguel Valerio, Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2022).47 Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, Ää. Manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística (México D.F.: Almadía/Bookmate, 2020).48 Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab'awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2018).49 On the question of masculinity and its role in Mexican culture then and now, see Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican Masculinities (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2021).50 Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia U. P., 1990). For a discussion of the role of feminist journals in the period, see Rebecca Biron, 'Feminist Periodicals and a Political Crisis in Mexico: Fem, Debate Feminista and La Correa Feminista in the 1990s', in Women and the State in the Americas, Feminist Studies, 22:1 (1996), 151–69. Of course, this is just the foreground to two decades of bibliography.51 See, for example, Alejandra Márquez, 'Cuir-ing Queer: Speculations on Latin American Notions of Otherness', in The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, ed. Jacqueline Rhodes & Jonathan Alexander (London/New York: Routledge, 2022), 446–52; and Alba Pons Rabasa, 'From Representation to Corposubjectivation: The Configuration of Transgender in Mexico City', in Translating Transgender, ed. David Gramling & Aniruddha Dutta, Trans Studies Quarterly, 3:3–4 (2016), 388–411.52 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2018); xiv; emphasis in the original. Mexicanness and 'Latinidad' as concepts carry the same issues of Black erasure. On this topic, see Tatiana Flores, ' "Latinidad Is Cancelled": Confronting an Anti-Black Construct', Latin American and LatinX Visual Culture, 3:3 (2021), 58–79.53 Alan López Peláez, Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (New York: The Operating System, 2020).54 See for example Carlos Alberto Sánchez, Contingency and Commitment: Mexican Existentialism and the Place of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016). From a Mexican-American perspective, see Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity and the Self (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014).55 Bruno Bosteels, La comuna mexicana, trad. Simone Pinet (México D.F.: Akal, 2021), 92.56 Thomas Nail, 'Constructivism and the Future Anterior of Radical Politics', in Post-Anarchism Today, ed. Lewis Call, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 1 (2010), 73–94 (p. 92).57 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2003), 236.58 José Rabasa, Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency and the Specter of History (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 100.59 Rabasa, Without History, 9.60 Cristina Rivera Garza, The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation, trans. Robin Myers (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2020 [1st Spanish ed. 2013]), 5. It is important to observe that the English edition is different from the Spanish one in some significant ways. For the ideas of the commons with which Rivera Garza dialogues see Floriberto Díaz, Comunalidad, energía viva del pensamiento mixe, comp. Sofía Robles Hernández & Rafael Cardoso (México D.F.: UNAM, 2007); and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Horizonte comunitario-popular: antagonismo y producción de los común en América Latina (Puebla: BUAP, 2015).61 Rivera Garza, The Restless Dead, trans. Myers, 82–83. Rivera Garza engages here in dialogue with Nathalie Piégay-Gros, Le Futur antérieur de l'archive (Quebec: Tangence, 2012).62 Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras geológicas (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2022), 15.63 Cristina Rivera Garza, Autobiografía del algodón (México D.F.: Literatura Random House, 2020); Cristina Rivera Garza, El invencible verano de Liliana (México D.F.: Literatura Random House, 2021). There is an English-language work with the same title, but Rivera Garza presents it as a book written originally in English, drawing on the same materials and experiences: Liliana's Invincible Summer (New York: Hogarth, 2023).64 Humberto Beck & Rafael Lemus, 'Prólogo', in El futuro es hoy: ideas radicales para México, ed. Humberto Beck & Rafael Lemus (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2018), 9–19 (pp. 9–10).65 Gabriela Damián Miravete, La canción detrás de todas las cosas (México D.F.: Odo, 2022).66 Irmgard Emmelhainz, Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living As Resistance (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2022).67 Carolyn Fornoff, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., forthcoming).68 Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, trans. Ruth L. C. Sims (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1973 [1st Spanish ed. 1956]), 170.
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