Academic literature on the topic 'Political poetry, Mexican'

In an intervention that blurs methodological boundaries traditionally separating the researcher from the researched, history from poetry, and the personal from the political, the author weaves a narrative account of her Euro-American family's early history in California into a larger set of social and historical events taking place during the nineteenth century. She employs the metaphor of ‘legitimacy’ to trace her growing awareness of the physical, psychological, and political parallels at work in the colonization of lands, cultures, and bodies in the ‘New World’. Providing context for the mid-nineteenth century war between the USA and Mexico, she analyzes discursive constructs such as hybridity, impurity, and ‘mongrelization’ as they are evoked in the legend of Malinche – the sixteenth-century, indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortés. Four centuries later, echoes of that ‘intermarriage’ and the transgression of many other kinds of boundaries can be heard in the author's unconventional relationship with her son's Mexican father. She offers a ‘post-critical’ perspective in the conclusion by bringing her own voice into dialogue with those of several post-colonial theorists. This ethnography integrates autoethnography, voices from history, and textual analysis into seldom-heard conversations about the conventional and unconventional workings of power and identity. In so doing, both the fixity and fluidity of concepts such as culture, nation, family, language, social class, race, and gender are revealed.

What does it mean to be a migrant, to be itinerant, to forever engage in a“dialogue of civilization”? How do migrants make sense of their identity in aworld where every aspect of it is constantly under negotiation by border-keepersand original settlers and earlier immigrants? In his bold new book PassportPhotos, Amitava Kumar, a professor of English at the University of Florida,examines some of the problems faced by diasporic communities through thestudy of an important document, the passport. To the immigrant, the passportis an important intersection between “identity” and “document.” This deep,sensitive and, at times, funny reading of the passport makes for a very thoughtprovokingbook, and I unreserved19 recommend it to anyone who is interestedin a sensitive portrayal of the immigrant experience. The book is like immigrantsthemselves. It speaks in multiple languages, and is obsessed with documents.Among its many tongues, it speaks in academic and political cadences,mixes prose and poetry, sprinkles Urdu and Spanish, quotes Namdeo Dhasal,a poet from India and Louis Arrago, the Mexican poet-activist. It layers Urduupon Spanish, words upon pictures, and best of all, garnishes it with Kumar’spoetry, which is quite magical. There are several poems, each of which is worththe price of admission on a stand-alone basis.In the second paragraph of its preface, the author makes his point clear: “thisbook is a forged passport.” There is, of course, a delightful wordplay here. Wecan read the act of forging as illegal duplication, but we can also read it in termsfamiliar to a blacksmith, the book is forging or creating a new way to understandpassports, borders, being an immigrant and being foreign. As someonewho personally knows several “illegal immigrants,” I used their reality as atouchstone to judge the book. If the book speaks to their condition, withoutromanticizing them or being condescending to them, displaying both theirbravery and their baggage, then it is a good book. If the book cannot reachthem, it is little more than words and I will dismiss it as yet another piece ofdesultory identity politicking.The book certainly fulfiils the above criteria, and much more. It representsthe multilayered experience of immigrants without reducing it to wordplay. At ...

Este artículo propone una lectura postcolonial de los numerosos vínculos lazos que la obra del poeta canario Andrés Sánchez Robayna (1952) teje con el mundo latinoamericano y, en particular, con el pensamiento del poeta cubano José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), del mexicano Octavio Paz (1914-1998) y del brasileño Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). Dichos lazos son interpretados como parte de un proyecto poético y político que busca simultáneamente en la realidad canaria y en su vocación atlántica, las materias y los patrones necesarios para componer una obra singular, autónoma y dialogante, capaz de apropiarse críticamente de su pasado y de generar asimismo espacios para defender el ideal de un cosmopolitismo plural y disruptivo. This article offers a postcolonial reading of the tight bonds that the work of the Canary poet Andrés Sánchez Robayna (1952) weaves with the Latin American culture and, in particular, with the literary thought of Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976), Mexican Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Brazilian Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). These relations are interpreted here as part of a poetic and political project, seeking simultaneously in the Canarian reality and in its Atlantic counterpart, the examples and the necessary patterns to compose a singular, autonomous and dialogical work, capable of critically appropriating the past and of generating also a new space to defend the ideal of a plural and disrupting cosmopolitanism.

In 2666, Roberto Bolaño configures, situated at the Mexican desert of Sonora, a latinamerican and post-apocalyptic scenario, a paradigmatic state of exception where, in an almost forensic style, innumerable corpses of women proliferate during more than 350 monotonous and inexhaustible pages: byproducts of a large scale femicide, nude lives deprived of political existence. In the structure of this posthumous novel, unfinished, demesured in its extension, Bolaño, through fragmentarities, digressions, interruptions, reveals an authentic poetic of inconclusion: there is no narrative totality capable to address the unlimited character of crime and absolute evil experienced during the twentieth century. This way, read under the lacanian logic of the pas-tout, this poetic of inconclusion enables the irruption of the real that interrupts the narration, the ideological closure of a perverse socio-symbolic order.

This article investigates the concepts of love and eroticism of the Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz, in his book The Double Flame. The purpose is to show how the author, in his treatment of the intersections between love, eroticism and sexuality in Western cultural life during several centuries, by way of an interdisciplinary and analogical method, makes as well a poetic manifesto in defence of sensitivity against the process of the commercialization of desire in the contemporary world and proposes an erotic re-education of society at this century's end through the rehabilitation of the idea of love.

In their considerations of Chicanola border poetry and narrative, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and José David Saldívar have suggested that the cultural condition of the border writer addresses central concerns of contemporary American culture and what one can regard — as I try to do here — as its aspiring cultural outlaws. In the context of their postmodern approaches to culture the notion of the American frontier outlaw has a rather archaic ring, for such an identity recalls 19th–century constructions of self and an underlying belief in individual agency. Even in the 1930s the figure of the folkloric Tejano rebel existed in a similar historical halfway house, one in which the idea of the Mexican outlaw is both utterly anachronistic and politically relevant. Nonetheless, the traditional heroic outlaw of Tejano balladry — corridos — still has the power to signify a legacy of opposition to Anglo power, and the themes of such balladry persist today in the form of legal conflict over unresolved land claims (Verhovek), as if yesterday's outlaw has materialized from legend and taken form as lawful claimant. Thus it is valuable to see how the concerns of contemporary theory can be related to antiquated legends and to note any intermediary texts located in a moment between the late 20th-century present and the mid-19th-century past. Arguably, Américo Paredes's 1930s novel George Washington Gomez prefigures the newly lawful claims of those heir to the mythos of legendary outlaws and at the same time prefigures postmodern border theory. The novel underscores the divided character of a culture inheriting a folkloric tradition in a newly modern American context and elaborates on themes pertinent to a postmodern one.

¡Pobre hombre de Dios! El mundo está necesitado de realidades externas, objetivas, vulgares, y Usted a través del zodiaco de sus cartas actuales se me esfuma en radiosas visiones de poetas o se me rompe en un fracaso de cristales… CARTA DE REYES A GUZMÁN, 1914. Resumen El presente artí­culo analiza la crí­tica literaria contenida en la correspondencia que mantuvieron los Ateneí­stas Alfonso Reyes y Martí­n Luis Guzmán, a partir de 1913 y hasta 1959. Dichas cartas exponen el punto de vista de ambos autores sobre la configuración de la obra propia y la ajena. La correspondencia dibuja un panorama de la relación í­ntima entre Reyes y Guzmán, que se vio afectada desde un momento temprano en la vida de ambos, debido al estallido de la Revolución Mexicana y a partir de la Decena trágica, en la que fallece Bernardo Reyes. El resultado de sus intereses personales se manifiesta en estas cartas; Reyes se muestra como autor cosmopolita y Guzmán como un narrador con profundas preocupaciones polí­ticas. Palabras clave: Literatura, crí­tica, correspondencia, Reyes, Guzmán. Abstract This article analyzes the literary criticism that exists in the letters written by Alfonso Reyes and Martin Luis Guzman, from 1913 and until 1959. These letters outlined the point of view of both authors on setting their own work and that of others. The correspondence paints a picture of the intimate relationship between Reyes and Guzman, who were affected from an early stage in the life of both, due to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution and from La Decena trágica, in which Bernardo Reyes dies. The results of their personal interests are manifested in those letters; Reyes is seen as a cosmopolitan author and Guzman as a writer with deep political concerns. Keywords: Literature, criticism, correspondence, Reyes, Guzmán.

El presente trabajo busca analizar el proyecto de solidaridad intelectual que articuló la revista mexicana El Corno Emplumado (1962-1969), el cual formó parte de una amplia red intelectual de solidaridad que se estableció a nivel continental y con un carácter transnacional. En los estudios sobre la intelectualidad de los sesenta, las revistas de corte contracultural como El Corno Emplumado y los proyectos de solidaridad de tipo intelectual no han sido los tópicos más revisados, de ahí el alto valor de acercarnos a esta temática desde otros enfoques y actores. Como se verá en las siguientes páginas, el desarrollo de un proyecto de solidaridad a través de una red intelectual representó una novedosa y diferente forma de establecer relaciones intelectuales para la época y produjo importantes momentos como el Movimiento de Nueva Solidaridad y el Primer Encuentro de Poetas.

After balaclava-clad Zapatistas seized control of a handful of southern Mexican towns on New Year’s Eve, 1993, and soon after became implicated in the first wide-scale use of the Internet in a warlike scenario, it was thought that the age of postmodern Internet warfare had arrived. However, while the centrality of the Internet to the movement’s relative success evokes romantic images of Zapatista rebels uploading communiqués onto the World Wide Web from remote mountain hideaways, these myths are dispelled when the impoverished living conditions of its indigenous Maya constituents are taken into account. Instead, the Zapatistas’ presence on the Internet is mediated by NGOs and other support groups who electronically publish hand-written Zapatista communiqués. While this paper demonstrates the political utility of information-age communication strategies for localised struggles for cultural autonomy, it is shown that, for the Zapatistas, these strategies work with, rather than against, traditional print culture. The Zapatistas, NGOs and the Internet Soon after the Zapatista uprising began, the New York Times, prompted by the movement’s rapid acquirement of an Internet presence, declared that the world’s first “postmodern revolutionary movement” had appeared in the unlikely location of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (Burbach 116). Other analyses that investigate the significance of the Internet in the uprising define the EZLN as the world’s “first informational guerrilla movement” (Castells 79), and the “first social netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. 1). After such descriptions were assigned to the EZLN, an image of Zapatista rebels typing e-mails on laptops in remote mountain hideaways featured in many initial media reports. These ideas were still dominating much of the media a year after the uprising when the Mexican President ordered a raid on suspected EZLN hideouts in an attempt to capture the movement’s mestizo spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos. Media reports at the time claimed that in some of the raids “they found as many computer disks as bullets”. There were also claims that “if Marcos is equipped with a telephone modem and a cellular phone [he could] hook into the Internet [directly] even while on the run, as he is now” (Knudson 509). However, while the Internet contributed significantly to the advance of the EZLN struggle, this romanticised and mythologised imagery is far removed from the material impoverishment that led to the movement’s uprising and which still characterises the lives of its constituents. Indeed, the Marcos that I saw addressing a crowd in the Mexican city of Puebla during the EZLN’s 2001 March for Indigenous Dignity read his speech from an old-tattered notebook—the old-fashioned printed kind, not one from the Toshiba range. He stumbled over some sections, telling the crowd that it had been smudged by the rain earlier in the day. This may have been a move calculated to enhance the charismatic appeal of the pipe-smoking, poet-guerrilla, but it is also consistent with the impoverished circumstances from which the Zapatistas emanated and within which they continue to struggle. There is a glaring anomaly between descriptions of the Zapatistas as postmodern or as the initiators of informational guerrilla warfare, or netwar, and the movement’s location in the most remote regions of an impoverished state, which has Internet hubs in only two of its towns and “no telephone or electricity at all in most of the rural areas” (Froehling 291). Indeed, the Zapatistas’ relationship with the Internet is mediated via a support network that, most significantly, includes NGOs. For the Zapatista word to reach a national and international audience the movement had to firstly rely on hand-written documents and old-fashioned means of covert communication whereby messages were passed secretly from hand to hand, galloped inside a saddle satchel, hidden in a cyclist’s bag, slipped into a backpack, or perhaps thrust inside a sack of beans, then propped in the back of an open truck, crammed with indigenous villagers who make the hours-long journey to the closest market, or doctor, and our messenger to a contact person with Internet access. (Ponce de León xxiii) The journey of the EZLN’s communiqués from the remote Chiapan highlands to a world-wide audience via its Internet-connected support network has created what Cleaver calls a “Zapatista effect” (1998). This effect demonstrates that by establishing an international electronic web of support, particularly between marginalised groups and NGOs, dominant political, economic and social policies can be effectively opposed and alternatives articulated. The Zapatista uprising marks the first time that the electronic media have been used as a strategy in their own right, producing “an electronic fabric of opposition to much wider policies”, rather than simply facilitating the “traditional work of solidarity” (Cleaver 622). Cleaver claims that this “Zapatista effect” has the potential to permeate and inform social struggles throughout the world and reweave “the fabric of politics” by demonstrating the ability of grassroots movements to form national and international collectives to challenge the power of the nation-state (637). Investigation into the usefulness of new communication technologies in times of war and struggle has also been the focus of studies conducted for the US army, leading to the development of the concept of “netwar” (Ronfeldt et al. iii). Ronfeldt et al. contend that, as a result of what they claim is the increasing dependency of contemporary society on information, “more than ever before, conflicts are about ‘knowledge’—about who knows (or can be kept from knowing) what, when, where, and why” (7-8). The study concludes that the EZLN’s development of an NGO support network that could rapidly disseminate reports on human rights abuses, information about the intolerable living conditions endured by indigenous Chiapans, and the EZLN’s communiqués has been crucial to developing the movement’s support base. However, the movement’s establishment of an electronically wired NGO support network able to circulate information about the EZLN, its struggle and its aims relies on the movement’s ability to convey information to them, the “what, when, where, and why”, before it can appear on the Internet and in other media forms. It is not simply the publication and distribution of figures relating to disease, impoverishment and human rights violations that have contributed to people’s interest in, and support for, the Zapatistas. Rather, the intriguing content and style of their discourse, which is heavily indebted to the charismatic figure of Subcomandante Marcos, has also played a crucial role. The writings of Marcos are rich with poetic imagery, humour, symbols of Mayan mythology and references to Latin American and Spanish literary figures and styles, particularly magic realism. Zapatista Narratives Marcos’ innovative and engaging discursive style is particularly evident in the stories he tells of Don Durito, a beetle named Nebuchadnezzar who has assumed the nom de guerre of Durito, which literally means the little strong or hard one, a reference to his shell, fighting spirit and his status as a ladies’ man (Subcomandante Marcos 9). Don Durito has made the floor of the Southern Mexican Lacandón jungle his home, but in Marcos’s stories he often travels the world as a knight-errant, reminiscent of Cervantes’s delusional do-gooder Don Quijote. Durito also intermittently assumes the role of a detective and that of a political analyst, and it is in this guise that he first meets Marcos. This occurs when Marcos, unable to find tobacco to fill the pipe he is never seen without, notices a trail of the dried black leaves weaving away from his hammock. After following the trail for a few metres Marcos sees, behind a stone, a bespectacled beetle clenching a tiny pipe, sitting at a tiny desk studying, as we soon discover, neoliberalism “and its strategy of domination for Latin America” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). Marcos, unfazed by the discovery of a literate, smoking beetle is taken aback by his investigation of neoliberalism. Durito explains that his scholarly interest is quite pragmatic for it stems from a desire to know how long and how successful the Zapatista struggle will be so as to ascertain “how long us beetles are going to have to be careful that you [Marcos and the other members of the Zapatista army who are based in the jungle] aren’t going to squash us with your big boots” (Subcomandante Marcos 12). In these encounters with Durito the political analyst, Marcos is given lessons in politics and economics from an inhabitant of the jungle floor, from a beetle who recognises that the danger of being squashed by “big boots” in his small patch of land is intimately linked to the global issue of neoliberalism and its much bigger boots. Through these stories, Marcos highlights the detrimental impact that global economic policies have had on the Maya of Chiapas. The character of Durito also enables him to demonstrate the potential for small, seemingly insignificant individuals or groups to radically challenge these policies and articulate alternatives. Conclusion Such entertaining and lyrical prose enables the EZLN to present itself as a new style of social revolutionary movement, far removed from traditional Latin American revolutionary struggles. This has, arguably, broadened the movement’s international support network, a situation facilitated by the circulation and publication of these writings and communiqués on the Internet by the movement’s NGO support network. However, while the use of information-age technology to stimulate the creation of collective transnational support networks presents as a useful strategy for contemporary social struggles, it does not guarantee the procurement of significant political, economic and social change. Indeed, after more than a decade of struggle, the Zapatistas have not precipitated the radical reconstruction of the Mexican political system that they had hoped for. References Burbach, Roger. Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume II: The Power of Identity. Malden, Ma.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Cleaver, Harry M. Jr. “The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric.” Journal of International Affairs 51.2 (1998): 621-40. Froehling, Oliver. “The Cyberspace ‘War of Ink and Internet’ in Chiapas, Mexico.” The Geographical Review 87.2 (1997): 291-307. Knudson, Jerry W. “Rebellion in Chiapas: Insurrection by Internet and Public Relations.” Media, Culture and Society 20.3 (1998): 507-18. Ponce de León, Juana. “Editor’s Note: Travelling Back for Tomorrow.” Our Word Is Our Weapon. Ed. Juana Ponce de León. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001. xxiii-xxxi. Ronfeldt, David, et al. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. Santa Monica, California: RAND, 1998. Subcomandante Marcos. Don Durito de La Lacandona. San Cristóbal de Las Casas Chiapas: Centro de Información y Análisis de Chiapas, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Turner, Bethaney. "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>. APA Style Turner, B. (Jun. 2005) "Information-Age Guerrillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/01-turner.php>.

Since the highly successful inauguration of PORTAL in January 2004, we have received many kind expressions of support from international studies practitioners in a range of fields, and from such places as Canada, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand, Spain, Trinidad, the U.K., and the U.S.A. Particularly gratifying have been the endorsements of the journal and its publishing aims by people involved in their own electronic publishing enterprises. For their generous responses to PORTAL, the Editorial Committee would like to express its collective appreciation to the following people: Professor Jean-Marie Volet, of the University of Western Australia, and the guiding editor of the ground-breaking e-journal Mots Pluriels (www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels); and Francis Leo Collins, member of the Editorial Committee for the Graduate Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (GJAPS), based in Auckland, New Zealand. PORTAL's readers may be interested in the current call for papers from GJAPS (www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/gjaps), for a special issue on "Imagining the Asia-Pacific" (deadline October 31, 2004). This issue of PORTAL contains essays that cover wide terrain: the Chilean diasporic community in Australia; the world of German intellectuals; contemporary Mexican socio-political movements; rural-urban migration in China; and transnational advocacy networks and election monitoring in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua and Mexico. In the cultural section of this issue, we are delighted to present a short story from the noted German Studies scholar Anthony Stephens, and the first half of a beautiful, deeply poetic and haunting novel entitled Son, from the London-based writer and art-critic Jennifer Higgie. The novel’s second and final part will appear in PORTAL vol. 2, no. 1, in January 2005. On a different note, we would like to express our support for the inaugural Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, to be held in Ubud, Bali, from October 11 to 17, 2004. The Festival, which is attracting interest from writers across the world, maintains a website at: http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com/ Finally, I would like to remind readers that the next issue of PORTAL (vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005) will be a special issue devoted to "Exile and Social Transformation." I would also like to encourage international studies practitioners and cultural producers working anywhere in the world to submit material for future issues. Paul Allatson, Chair, PORTAL Editorial Committee

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s overlooked archive of photographs and scrapbooks from his 1931 trip to Haiti, arguing that Hughes’s photographic encounter with Haiti is part of the construction of a transnational vision that starts in the Caribbean and moves through the U.S. South and Mexico. Photography becomes fundamental to Hughes’s attempts to map the connectedness of persons and locales in a capitalist world system and to imagine the formation of political communities. The chapter begins by considering how Hughes’s experience of taking photographs, along with organizing them in albums and scrapbooks, generated questions about the politics of representation in his subsequent political poems. The chapter then extends these considerations to Hughes’s interwar radical verse, showing how Hughes’s encounters with visual objects continue to influence his poetry during the 1930s. The chapter closes by demonstrating how Hughes’s contemplation of the relationship between photography and writing opens up new readings of James Agee and Walker Evans’s foundational documentary text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Hughes’s engagements with photography place him in a developing documentary modernist tradition that pushes beyond New Deal initiatives and employs documentary in the shaping of an international public sphere.

Chapter 4 disentangles the distinct ideologies often conflated under the expansive and notoriously vague rubric of Latina/o “transnationalism.” It first interrogates the limits of Radical Regionalism Studies by explicating the specter of nationalism in Emma Pérez’s ostensibly contestatory Tejana lesbian feminist regionalist historical fiction. The chapter further deconstructs the Latina/o Studies fixation on hyperlocalities and celebratory transnationalisms by interrogating the various aestheticizations of violence in Latina/o literatures about Central American civil wars, femicide in the US-Mexico border, and revolutionary insurgencies throughout North, Central, and South America, in addition to the Caribbean. It closes by underscoring Pan-Latina/o political diversity through the recovery of testimonial prose and poetry from Latina/o internationalist partisans and combatants vis-à-vis the antitestimonial memoirs, novels, and poetry by and about right-wing Latina/o soldiers and CIA officers.