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There has always been an important visual element to the construction and questioning of national identity in post-Independence Mexico, though one that has not always been given its due, outside of the celebrated and much-studied muralists. Ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present – from the vogue for the picturesque, illustrated periodicals and the influential writings of Altamirano to a wealth of twentieth-century graphic artists, filmmakers and photographers – this book re-examines the complex variety of ways in which that visual element has operated. In particular, it looks at the ways in which discourses concerning ethnicity and cultural hybridity have been echoed and transformed in Mexican visual culture, resulting in fields of visual discourse which are eclectic and increasingly self-reflexive.
"This is an excellent piece of scholarship. The author has clearly devoted herself to a sustained reflection on a very substantial visual archive of Mexican culture, and in so doing, she has generated virtuosic interpretations of many visual artifacts, some canonical, others less well-known." · Bulletin of Latin American Research
"…an outstanding contribution to the growing documented history of visual representations and technologies in Mexico.” · Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
“…this is provocative book that will be referred to for years to come.” · The Americas
“…[a] fascinating scholarly work, whose greatest merit is to provide a model for extensive subsequent scholarship…[that] belongs to the core bibliography of outstanding Mexican cultural studies.” · Bulletin of Spanish Studies
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: A Tradition of Intersections? Interdisciplinary Slippages, Borrowings and Collaborations in Mexican Visual Culture
Chapter 1. The Development of Costumbrista: Iconography and Nation-building Strategies in Literary Periodicals of the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Chapter 2. An Italicised Ethnicity: Memory, Renascence and Visuality in the Literary Writings of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano
Chapter 3. Visualising Mexico: The Interplay of Graphic Arts and Film in the 1930s and 1940s
Chapter 4. Reframing the City: Images of Displacement in Urban Films and the Visual Arts of the 1940s and 1950s
Chapter 5. Allegory, Self-reflexivity and Irony: A Photographic Genealogy
Chapter 6. The Poetics of Skin: Surface and Inscription in Contemporary Photography
Chapter 7. The Hermeneutics of the Veil in Photography: Of Rebozos, Sábanas, Huipiles and Lienzos de Verónica
Chapter 8. Relics and Disjecta in Modernism and Post-Modernism: A Comparative Study of Archaeology in Contemporary Photography and Multimedia Art
Bibliography
Index