México Noir

These essays explore the allusive nexus of the dark in contemporary Mexican literature and visual culture. They chart the poetics of 'negrura-oscuridad' in creative media during decades of deepening crisis marked by the high-profile staging of atrocities and the re-emergence of an ironic noir aesthetic.

These essays by critics, theorists and artists explore the allusive nexus of the dark in contemporary Mexican literature and visual culture. They chart the poetics of 'negrura-oscuridad' in creative media during decades of deepening crisis marked by the high-profile staging of atrocities, the re-emergence of an ironic noir aesthetic and the consolidation of forensically inspired art-making.

In the wake of Walter Benjamin's 'unfinished' thinking structures, this volume operates through contiguous directions, transitions and regressions, incorporating images as part of the discussion of a ruinous visuality. Its polycentric mesh covers a wide range of art, writing, photography and film: from ritual uses of the 'darksome' and its legacies in pre-Hispanic cultures to colonial religious iconography of penitential blindness; from narco-noir in the novels of Roberto Bolaño and Yuri Herrera to techno-noir in dystopian border films; from the quotidian taxonomy of horror expurgated in art practice to the haunted 'other darkness' of the photographic blink. It also explores how we can contest the threat of dark ecology and 'horrorism' through sense expansion within new media and by positing fruitful blind spots in text and art.

Autorentext

Erica Segre is Senior Lecturer in Latin American and Hispanic Studies and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, art and thought and twentieth-century and contemporary visual culture. She is the author of Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture (2007) and the editor of Ghosts of the Mexican Revolution in Mexican Literature and Visual Culture (2013).

Inhalt
ERICA SEGRE (ed.) Introduction: La negrura- oscuridad y su imagen: Rethinking the Poetics of Darkness and Dark Materials in Contemporary Writing and Visual Culture in Mexico DEBBIE NAGAO Proscenium of the Dark: Darkness and Liminality in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica ANDREW CHEN Blindness, Darkness and the Penitential Religious Experience: Practices and Imagery from the Flagellant Confraternal Contexts in Italy, Spain and New Mexico GERARDO SUTER Blink: A Path to the Other Darkness CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA Los materiales ajenos: Re-escritura, comunalidad y desapropiación/ Estranged Materials: Re-writing, Communality and Dis-appropriation (Cambridge 2015) Escrituras comunalistas/On Communalistic Writing ELSA M. TREVIÑO ¡Basta de luz!: Configurations of Revelatory Darkness in Twenty-First Century Fiction STEVEN BOLDY Trabajos del poeta del reino: Dark Power and Art in Yuri Herrera and Octavio Paz MARCOS RICO DOMÍNGUEZ Oscuro artefacto de la memoria: Huecos, pliegues y cortes en Amuleto (1999) de Roberto Bolaño/Obscure Artefact of Memory: Gaps, Folds and Cuts in Roberto Bolaño's Amulet (1999) JOHN KRANIAUSKAS A Monument to the Unknown Worker: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (2004) as Noir and as Installation JOSÉ LUIS BARRIOS De estupidez y oscuridad: La sujeción y subversión en el cine y la literatura en México/ Of Stupidity and Darkness: Subjection and Subversion in Mexican Film and Literature GEOFFREY KANTARIS Techno-Noir in the Borderlands: Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008) ROBIN GREELEY Narco-Noir: A Quotidian Aesthetic Taxonomy of Expressive Violence (with reference to Moris [Israel Meza Moreno]) MARA POLGOVSKY After Darkness: Sense-Expansion and the Aesthetics of New Media