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Apart from the longstanding and much-debated problem of art's commodification, how does neoliberalism transform and determine the conditions of artistic practice? Further, if neoliberalism is a substantially distinct stage in the history of capitalism, and not merely its intensification, what are the implications of this new condition for the practice and criticism of contemporary art? What does it mean to practice and theorize art, to be an artist or critic, under neoliberalism? Drawing on the central topic of this issue, is aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition? Can, or should, artistic practice constitute a significant site of resistance? Conversely, is the contemporary art world a paradigmatic case of, and even a model for, neoliberal capitalism?

This paper explores two adaptations of world literature starred by Mexican comedian Cantinflas: Los tres mosqueteros (1942) and Romeo y Julieta (1943). Comedic adaptation of world literature is essential for the development of cinema as an instrument of popular cosmopolitanism, which democratizes and massifies world literature in Mexico. From this angle, I argue for the idea of popular cosmopolitanism as a category to describe film industries where the project of the nation state engages world literature and world cinema. I also posit this term as a way to address gaps and limits in Miriam Hansen’s idea of “vernacular modernism.”

This chapter seeks to read the work of one of Mexico’s foremost cinematic auteurs—Felipe Cazals—against the grain of this interpretation of cinematic history, which Cazals himself shares. Rather, I propose a redefinition of “cinematic crisis” as a constant and productive state in Mexican cinema, in which cinematic form and aesthetics can be seen in a tensional and dialectical relationship with the economic and infrastructural scarcities of the industry and the deterritorialized and contradictory role of national audiences. In doing this, I argue that Cazals’s work must be read in a continuum that renders visible an auteurial voice shaped by crisis and marks of cinematic form and ideology that appear across his work, reading side-by-side lowbrow films like Rigo es amor (1980) or Desvestidas y alborotadas with political and social works like Bajo la metralla (1982) or Los motivos de Luz (1985).

This article studies the ways in which the idea of ‘authenticity’ is built and shaped through cultural discourse in Mexican food. The article engages with the intellectual origins of the concept of...

Leaning on two fields of expertise (literary studies and film studies), this chapter discusses two particular scenarios of the shared imagination of neoliberalism, which allow the unfolding of different considerations regarding the Pacific. In the first scenario, I go to the question of history and the erasure of the Pacific, and discuss the book La casa del dolor ajeno by the Mexican writer Julian Herbert. The second scenario is the Latin American connection in the work of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, addressing the question of imagination and sensorium, or the way in which neoliberal aesthetics and affects connect across the Pacific. In doing so, I propose to think the transpacific relations as a shared history and contemporaneity of affective experience. This, in turn, seeks to argue for the need to think transpacific cultural flows and circulations beyond topics of representation, identity and Otherness.

This chapter dissects the opening sequences of Skyfall (2012) in Istanbul and Spectre (2015) in Mexico City in order to argue that Eon’s predilection for runaway productions has begun began to influence the textual composition of the James Bond film series. Eon Productions often modifies the narratives and settings of its Bond features in order to exploit the increasingly global availability of funding schemes, tax incentives, and cheap labor, and to secure, on a global scale, profitable distribution deals, enhanced visibility, and greater revenues from merchandizing. In the process, the Bondian runaway production fashions a colonial imaginary of exotic non-places, which has since long been a staple of the brand of Bond.

This chapter reframes noir from the semi-peripheral space of Mexican cinema. The chapter studies noir in Mexican cinema and literature in the context of the history of Fordist capitalism, American-style modernization, and contemporary neoliberalism. Drawing on readings of a range of different films, the chapter charts the historical arc of Mexican noir as a cultural form that captures the affective registers of Mexican capitalist modernity on three levels: first, fear and loss in relation to the tension between capitalism and tradition in post-revolutionary Mexico; second, a globalization of affective registers as noir connects Mexican to transnational circuits of affect and emotion; third, the creation of an affective polity through the deployment of sentimentalism and melodrama as part of the emergent mediatization and commoditization of the masses’ affects in the new urban settings.

Through the reading of Marc Ripley's book on Luis Bunuel and Seraina Rohrer's book on La India Maria, this review reflects on the ways in which criticism and historiography on Mexican cinema gradua...

espanolEste articulo estudia la manera en que Alfonso Reyes usa la bibliofilia, la filologia, el clasicismo y otras practicas relacionadas para construir una cultura literaria publica en Mexico. El articulo discute la representacion que Reyes hace de la materialidad del libro y la cultura libresca, la construccion de redes de lectores, el acunamiento de ideas del clasico, nacional y universal, y la manera en que conceptualiza colecciones literarias y series editoriales. En su conjunto, estos elementos proveen una mirada sobre la manera en que Reyes imagino el rol de la cultura literaria en el Mexico posrevolucionario. EnglishThis article studies the way in which Alfonso Reyes uses bibliophilia, philology, classicism and related practices to construct a public literary culture in Mexico. The article discusses Reyes's representation of the materiality of the book and book culture, the construction of reader networks, the coining of ideas of the classic, both national and universal, and the way in which he conceptualizes literary collections and editorial series. Taken together, these elements provide a view of the way Reyes imagined the role of literary culture in Postrevolutionary Mexico.

Mexican writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes has historically enjoyed a strong reputation as a Hispanist. He was one of the first Latin American intellectuals to engage Spain in the 20th century, becoming close to figures such as José Ortega y Gasset in the 1920, as well as a privileged reader of Góngora in the Spanish American context. Later on, Reyes was a crucial figure in allowing the Spanish Exile in Mexico to integrate to the tissue of Mexico’s cultural field. The affinities that Reyes had with his Spanish counterparts have obscured the fact that, alongside his Hispanism, he also was a strong critic of the idea of Spain as the center of Spanish-language culture and the false symmetry between Spain and Latin America as equal parts of an equation. Using his highly critical Vísperas de España as a departing point, the proposed paper will argue that Reyes was in fact “Provincializing Spain”, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s expression, that is challenging the status of Spain as the Transatlantic metropolis and questioning the supposed spiritual unity between Spain and Latin America posed by intellectuals at the time.

This chapter is an approach to the periodization of neoliberalism, based on the concrete experience of Mexico as a privileged site in the historical arch of neoliberalism. The chapter proposes a cartography based on two axes: Mexico as a site of different ideas of development from Austrian libertarianism to democratic transitionism, and the development of crisis and precarization around the so-called War on Drugs. This cartography points to the reconfiguration of the fields of culture, politics, and economics in their relationship to each other as a fundamental trait of neoliberalization. The article seeks to create an understanding of the ways in which the materiality of those fields permits the thinking of neoliberalism in its periodization.

This chapter is concerned with the concepts of literary field, autonomy and symbolic capital, as manifested in the paradoxical relationship between the literary field and the state. Through a study of Mexico’s National Fund of Artistic Creators (FONCA) and the Young Creators program, the chapter discusses the way in which the “public economy of prestige” (a term elaborated after James English’s idea of “economy of prestige”) creates forms of capital that allow writers in different genres to participate in the literary and social fields. Using cases such as Yuri Herrera and Maria Rivera as well as discussions on the publication of books, the chapter focuses on the paradoxes of a state-funded literary field that, at the same time, operates under neoliberal principles of transfer of capital from the public to the private sphere.

A joint venture between Mexican media company Televisa and Lionsgate, Pantelion is a film production and distribution venture aimed at US Latino audiences. Its catalog, however, departs from historical traditions of Latino and Chicano film in the United States, and its model of business more clearly resembles the aesthetics and ideologies developed by Mexican television and cinema in the neoliberal era. This paper discusses the way in which Pantelion films—both the ones produced in the United States and the ones imported from Mexico—participate in a new logic of neoliberalization of precarity. In other words, Pantelion productions reflect many of the economic and political concerns of the Latino community—such as economic justice and immigration—and its cultural traditions, but this reflection does not articulate a political stance, but rather a narrative that reconciles these economic difficulties in languages compatible with ideologies of meritocracy, racial hierarchy, and middle-class respectability identifiable with neoliberalism. This chapter seeks to show that the commoditization and representation of Latino issues in Pantelion’s catalog ultimately engage narratives where individuality, creativity, and other cultural ideologies deactivate communal and identitarian ideologies present in previous film and promote an idea of the Latino community as participating in a free-market society. The paper also aims to discuss the way in which these aesthetics of precarization have been essential to the current success of the studio. To illustrate these points, the chapter compares early films that participated in more traditional Latino cinema tropes, such as the representation of growing-up stories of young Latina women facing economic marginalization in films such as From Prada to Nada (Angel Gracia, 2011), Girl in Progress (Patricia Riggen, 2012), and Filly Brown (Youssef Delara and Michael D. Olmos, 2012), and the role that Mexican neoliberal cinema and Televisa played in the reconfiguration of the studio’s ideologies, using the example of Instructions not Included (Eugenio Derbez, 2013).

In December 2013, as I write this article, Mexico is at a level of political turmoil few could have predicted when Enrique Pena Nieto's victory in the 2012 presidential election allowed the Partido...

This essay reviews two theoretical books on neoliberalism written by Mexican cultural critics: Capitalismo gore (Gore Capitalism), by Sayak Valencia, published originally in Spanish in 2010 and translated into English in 2018, and La tiranía del sentido común ( The Tyranny of Common Sense) by Irmgard Emmelhainz, published in Spanish in 2016 and yet to be translated into English. These works are pioneering in their discussion of the correlation between neoliberalism, subjectivity, and culture in Mexico, and they have become widely influential in broader discussions of art, visual culture, literature, and cultural production. They add to the work of economic and political historians, such as Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and María Eugenia Romero Sotelo, by connecting landmark moments in neoliberalization (from the financialization of the global economy in the 1970s to the War on Drugs in the 2000s) to changing paradigms in art. Author Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado contextualizes both books within larger discussions of Mexican cultural neoliberalism and describes the theoretical frame works through which both authors read Mexican politics, art, and popular culture. In Valencia's case, Sánchez Prado discusses her idea of “gore capitalism”: a framework for understanding how neoliberalism relies on dynamics of the shadow economy and on the subjectification of gore (what Valencia calls endriago subjectivity) to function at the social and artistic levels. In the case of Emmelhainz, Sánchez Prado engages with the author's idea of semiocapitalism, a term borrowed from theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, which Emmelhainz deploys to account for the interrelation between culture and capital in the era of neoliberalism. As such, Sánchez Prado argues, Emmelhainz and Valencia provide ways of reading artistic and visual production, including museum curatorship and narcocultura, in ways that show their organic relationship to neoliberal economic and political reforms. Find the complete article at artmargins.com .

Este articulo es un estudio del trabajo ensayistico de Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez. En e´l se argumenta que, en libros como El centauro en el paisaje (1992) o De sangre y sol (2006), Gonzalez Rodriguez busca construir un nuevo espacio para la especificidad del pensamiento literario en el contexto de la contemporaneidad. Al invocar formas de pensamiento esoterico y recuperar ideas sobre la modernidad literaria, su trabajo sigue el de autores como Roberto Calasso y Claudio Magris en la reconfiguracion de problemas como el cosmopolitismo y la ideologia literaria en la epoca contemporanea.

In this final chapter, Sanchez Prado seeks to relocate Chavez Castaneda as a writer whose travails with literary forms are essential to understand the impulse and relevance of the Crack group in the reconfiguration of Mexican fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century, and focuses on two novels: El dia del huron (1997) and La conspiracion idiota (2003). Sanchez Prado concludes that Chavez Castaneda’s fiction is an attempt at reconfiguring the very structure of literary narration in Mexico.

This article proposes a multilayered reading of Alfonso Reyes’s engagement with Spain from the perspective of what he called, in his essay “El Quijote en mano,” the desire to “discover the Mediterranean by ourselves.” This notion, a clear inversion of the foundational event of America’s purported discovery by Spain, encapsulates a way of thinking about the Ibero-American Atlantic against the grain of colonial and imperial practices. This operation responds to the idea of reclaiming the Spanish heritage for the construction of a Mexican and Latin American universalism, in the context of an intellectual discussion that sought to reclaim the region’s cultural citizenship in the world.

Utopias, those ideals both revered and disdained, inhabit crucial corners of the literary canon. One can certainly remember the elaborate utopias that filled the advent of cultural modernity, from the delusional dreams of El Dorado and the New Jerusalem, passing through Thomas More's excessively normative world, all the way to Jonathan Swift's brilliant but ultimately obnoxious archipelago. Still, those comprehensive utopias are only a part of the complex history of the idea, particularly when one considers that, at least in many cases, it carried nothing less than colonialism in its underbelly. Still, more promising utopias remain in the forgotten corners of textual traditions, buried in the marginal writings of major figures, ignored by the critical whirlwind that monumentalizes their authors. I want to start this note by one such moment, a striking assertion that promises a utopia without describing it, and an engagement with centuries of political and literary thinking that leads to a crucial statement: El estado normal puede ser el de pasividad; pero el estado frecuente, constante, el que da su sello a la humanidad, y que, por lo mismo, merece llamarse--siquiera practicamente--el estado humano, es el de protesta. Si el hombre no hubiera protestado, no habria historia --historia en el sentido comun de la palabra. El albor de la historia es un desequilibrio entre el medio y la voluntad humana, asi como el albor de la conciencia fue un desequilibrio entre el espectaculo del mundo y el espectador humano. El hombre sonrie: brota la conciencia. Y el hombre se nutre de los elementos que le da el miedo. ?Sonrie por segunda vez? Protesta, no le basta ya la naturaleza. ?Emigra, o siembra, o conquista, o forma las carretas en circulo como una trinchera de la tribu contra los ataques de las fieras? Pues entonces funda la civilizacion y empieza con ella la historia. Mientras no se duda del amo no sucede nada. Cuando el esclavo ha sonreido comienza el duelo de la historia. (Reyes III, 242). The master and the slave in this passage come from a familiar source, Hegel's Phenomenology (111-19), except that in here the consciousness of the slave does not emerge at the end of the dialectic, but at its outset, a smile that marks the consciousness of the slave as the foundational act not only of civilization, but of history itself. In this assertion we do not see utopia defined, but the necessary gesture at the beginning of every utopian intervention. The source of this paragraph is a little-known essay entitled "La sonrisa," originally published in a 1917 book called El suicida. Its author is Alfonso Reyes, a foundational figure of the tradition of thinking known as Latin Americanism, which may be defined as the constant assertion of Latin America as a site of critical thinking and as an articulation of projects of emancipation vis-a-vis modernity and colonialism. The historical background of Reyes's essay is not trivial either: "La sonrisa" was written in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, from a self-imposed exile in Spain and France, as one of the first attempts to theorize the emergence of a large array of social sectors into a form of historical agency and subjectivity previously denied by the national elites. The historical implications go even further: it is important to note that Reyes, the son of a prominent Porfirian general who died in the revolt that overthrew the first Revolutionary regime in 1913, was nonetheless ideologically sympathetic to the Revolution. Being a man of letters, Reyes was part of a group of intellectuals, the "Ateneo de la Juventud," strongly committed to translate the social force of the Revolution into a spiritual transformation of Mexico at large. In these terms, "La sonrisa" is an almost unique effort to understand the Mexican Revolution as a philosophical event of ontological emancipation, thus departing from the work of many of his contemporaries, like Jose Vasconcelos, who understood it in racial terms, as the triumph of the mestizo. …