Ghosts of the Revolution in Mexican Literature and Visual Culture: Revisitations in Modern and Contemporary Creative Media (Iberian and Latin American Studies: The Arts, Literature, and Identity)

The official centenary commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 provided scholars with an opportunity to consider memorialization and its legacies and ‘afterimages’ in the twentieth century through to the present time. This collection of new essays, commissioned from experts based in Mexico, Europe and the United States, plays on the interrelated notions of ‘revisitation’, haunting, residual traces and valediction to interrogate the Revolution’s multiple appearances, reckonings and reconfigurations in art, photography, film, narrative fiction, periodicals, travel-testimonies and poetry, examining key constituencies of creative media in Mexico that have been involved in historicizing, contesting or evading the mixed legacies of the Revolution. The interplay of themes, practices and contexts across the chapters (ranging from the 1920s through to the present day) draws on interdisciplinary thinking as well as new findings, framing the volume’s discourse with a deliberately multi-dimensional approach to an often homogenized topic. The contributors’ scholarly referencing of artists, novelists, poets, photographers, foreign correspondents, critics, filmmakers and curators is detailed and wide-ranging, creating new juxtapositions that include some rarely studied material. Cover Contents Illustrations Abbreviations Acknowledgements Simon Carnell The Dead Letter Erica Segre Introduction: Cultural Memories of an Unquiet Past Paul-Henri Giraud On Execution Walls, Bones, Horses and Tombs David Craven The Future That Was and Yet Might Be Iván Pérez Daniel Mirages of a Second Revolution Christina Karageorgou-Bastea Xavier Villaurrutia’s Poetics of the Flesh Simon Carnell Through ‘the Literary-Perception Scrambler’? Jesse Lerner The Proletarian Camera Steven Boldy Fading Echoes of the Revolution in Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato Dolores Tierney Residual Presences of the Revolution(ary Melodrama) in Mexico’s Filmmaking Oriana Baddeley Last Rites from Frida Kahlo to Teresa Margolles Afterword A Malefic Return? Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index The official centenary commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 led to this specially commissioned volume, which explores notions such as ‘revisitation’, haunting and memorialization through a detailed examination of Mexican art, photography, film, narrative fiction, periodicals, travel-testimonies and poetry.