Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Seminar

Title: Indigeneity in Mexican Muralism: Theorizing Cultural Critique on Stolen Land

Speaker: Matylda Figlerowicz 

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Chair: Panagiotis Roilos

George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Abstract
The post-Revolutionary period in the early 20 th-c. Mexico was marked by an intense reshaping of the national imagination. Though not always remembered as such, the Mexican Revolution was largely Indigenous, and one of the urgent issues within the new vision for the country concerned the space occupied by Mexico’s pueblos originarios. Mexican Muralism is a crucial site for analyzing this question, as it was a largely state-sponsored project, but it also exceeds and subverts the ideological framework proposed by the political dignitaries. In the talk, I’ll focus on the role of two figures in the modes of representing Indigeneity that crystalized in Mexican Muralism—philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos, who was the main promoter of Muralism, and Luz Jiménez, Nahua author and intellectual, who modeled for all of the most important artists of the movement. Based on this analysis, I hope to reflect more broadly on how to build tools of cultural critique that respond to the interpellations of Indigenous thought and cultural production.

Contact: Hannah Stone; hannahstone@g.harvard.edu

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