Acceso usuarios
Manuel Gutiérrez
ver the past two decades, scholarship in Mexican studies has been engaged in an effort to dislodge the once persistent notion of a monolithic, homogenous “Mexican” nation. Consequently, scholars have also been engaged in a reevaluation of the cultural nationalism that accompanied the political project of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In these complementary critical endeavors, cultural critics have largely focused their attention on film, music, popular culture and other forms of symbolic representations and practices. Literature, however, viewed as traditional and, complicit with the development of an essentialist view of Mexican culture, has been notably absent from this necessary revision. Addressing this oversight, Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) examines the emergence of the Mexican literary field and its institutionalization in Post-Revolutionary Mexico while offering a reassessment of the intellectual and political praxis of several canonical Mexican authors of the first half of the twentieth century. Proposing naciones intelectuales (intellectual nations) as an analytical term for understanding the critical projects of Jorge Cuesta, Alfonso Reyes, Luis Villoro and others, Sánchez Prado demonstrates how these intellectuals articulated alternative imaginaries to the hegemonic discourse propagated by the emergent Mexican state. Pointing to the political agency of Mexican literature, Sánchez Prado's study is a significant intervention in the field that will help reorient future studies of Mexican literary history.
