Rebecca Janzen, "The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Summary

In The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Rebecca Janzen explores the complex interaction between the national body created by the rhetoric of the 1910 Mexican revolution and those bodies that did not find a space in the new national project. Through the literary fictional work of Jose Revueltas, Juan Rulfo, Rosario Castellanos, and Vicente Lenero, the book explores the contradictions of the state through the literary representations of people that lived at the margins of its ideology. Drawing on feminist and disability studies, Janzen explores unusual bodies---peasants, prostitutes, indigenous people, and garbage sorters, among others---and their intense relationship of control, resistance, and power with the government and its bureaucracy. In these literary works, illness, body fluids, or bodies reduced to their basic functions demonstrate the inconsistencies of a national project that failed to fulfill promises such as agrarian reform, health services or labor rights. Each chapter of the book shows an analysis deeply engaged with the profound changes of almost three decades. The characters created by Revueltas, Rulfo, Castellanos, and Lenero span from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, which allows Janzen to show not only the construction of a national discourse and its flaws, but also its interaction with other important institutions, such as the Catholic church.
Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at Pace University---NYC campus.

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Pamela Fuentes

Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

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Pamela Fuentes historiadora y editora de New Books Network en español - Directora de Comunicaciones del Instituto para la Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia y la Tecnología de la Universidad de Toronto

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