On the outskirts of aesthetic: precarity and resistance in Mexican culture

Session Submission Type: LASA Section Panel

Abstract

Mexican culture has been historically bounded to the representations of poverty and precarity: the topics about the poverty-stricken in the Colonial period; the league between poverty and crime, or the projects of social cleansing during the Porfiriato; the artistic uses of remnant and detritus in contemporary art and literature.
This panel aims to read the aesthetic forms of the precarity and exclusion along with the resistance to their effects in the Mexican culture. In dialogue with the main theme of LASA 2019, Nuestra América: Justice and Inclusion, our goal is to present various approaches to the representation and uses of precarity in the mexican art and literature across the time. By mapping the aesthetics forms of precarity, we also expect to identify the distribution of the sensible (Ranciére 2004), the production of the common through the assemblages of the multitude; or, as Jean-Luc Nancy says, the common growl that “passes underneath, making every thing tremble” (2016).

Sub Track

• Section Sessions

Session Organizer

• José Roberto Cruz Arzabal, Universidad Iberoamericana

Chair

• Jorge Tellez, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Jorge Tellez, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Eguiara's "academies" and the virreinal culture of the first half of the 18th century or culture as a remedy to the precariousness - Laurette Godinas, Mexico

• Precarious stones, precarious bodies: allegorization and deallegorization of the indigenous body - José Roberto Cruz Arzabal, Universidad Iberoamericana

• You are What you Eat: Identity and Consumption in Mario Bellatin’s and Gabriel Orozco’s Works - Martin L Gaspar, Bryn Mawr College

• The persistence of listening - Cinthya García Leyva, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)