{"id":47948,"date":"2016-06-26T01:27:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-26T01:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47948"},"modified":"2016-06-26T01:32:26","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T01:32:26","slug":"martyrs-of-miscegenation-racial-and-national-identities-in-nineteenth-century-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47948","title":{"rendered":"Martyrs of Miscegenation: Racial and National Identities in Nineteenth-Century Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martyrs of Miscegenation: Racial and National Identities in Nineteenth-Century Mexico<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Hispan\u00f3fila<\/a>
\nVolume 132 (2001)
\npages 25-42<\/p>\n

Lee Joan Skinner<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of Spanish
\nClaremont McKenna College<\/em><\/p>\n

The two most powerful critical paradigms for dealing with the relationship\u00a0between literature and national identity in nineteenth\u2014century Latin America\u00a0have been those established by Benedict Anderson<\/a> and Doris Sommer<\/a>. In\u00a0Anderson\u2019s well-known formulation, \u201cthe nation [. . . ] is an imagined political community\u201d (6). Anderson attributes the early appearance of such national\u00a0imagined communities throughout nineteenth-century Latin America to the\u00a0widespread popularity of the print-capitalism forms of the novel and newspaper, which created communities of readers in the later eighteenth and early\u00a0nineteenth centuries and allowed for the dissemination of large-scale national\u00a0imaginings. More recently, Doris Sommer has looked at the content of the\u00a0novels that these potential national communities were reading in order to\u00a0argue that national consolidation in nineteenth\u2014century Latin America depended not only on the shared activity of reading but on the messages of the works\u00a0that nineteenth-century readers were consuming. According to Sommer, nineteenth-century \u201cnational novels\u201d use metaphors of romance and marriage to\u00a0inscribe ideals of national reconciliation and to establish the ideology of\u00a0nationalism and national identity in Latin America. In her View, the \u201cfoundational fictions\u201d she analyzes disseminate specific messages about the constitution of national identities and play an integral role in consolidating national\u00a0identities and ideologies in nineteenth-century Latin America.<\/p>\n

Both Anderson and Sommer present \u201cnational identity\u201d as a relatively\u00a0fixed category. Their analyses focus not on nineteenth-century Latin American\u00a0national identity itself, but rather on the methods through which national identity is created and consolidated. Hence, Anderson describes the ways in which administrative and communicative structures such as the mechanisms of print-capitalism work to create and disseminate national identity, while Sommer\u00a0examines the ways in which nineteenth-century Latin American romances\u00a0inscribe allegories of con\ufb02ict and resolution whose message is that national\u00a0reconciliation can and should take place based on a uni\ufb01ed national identity.\u00a0Anderson\u2019s and Sommer\u2019s analyses take as their point of departure the idea\u00a0that in the nineteenth century a stable, pre-established national identity is\u00a0inscribed in public discourses such as newspapers and novels. But what happens when the notion of \u201cnational identity” itself is called into question? In\u00a0novels produced throughout the nineteenth century in Latin America, discourses of national identity are frequently shown to be contestatory and con\ufb02ictive. Rather than being a fixed category from the start, national identity in\u00a0nineteenth-century Latin America might more productively be thought of as national identities. National identity is not a \ufb01xed, unchanging category that\u00a0comes into being full-blown and unquestioned at the beginning of the nineteenth century; instead, national identity, like the nation itself, is a site of contestatory discourses and competing definitions throughout nineteenth-century\u00a0Latin America. In this essay I address the novels of the Mexican author Eligio\u00a0Ancona<\/a> and argue that within his works, as within nineteenth-century Mexico\u00a0his repeated attempts to come to terms with the Mexican past and the variations in the way he treats Mexican history based on his own changing position\u00a0demonstrate that the category itself of national identity in nineteenth-century\u00a0Latin America is continually under construction. The versions of Mexican\u00a0national identity that Ancona produces in his texts respond to varying political, social, and ideological pressures and are contingent upon Ancona\u2019s own\u00a0shifting self-identifications at the regional and national level…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martyrs of Miscegenation: Racial and National Identities in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Hispan\u00f3fila Volume 132 (2001) pages 25-42 Lee Joan Skinner, Associate Professor of Spanish Claremont McKenna College The two most powerful critical paradigms for dealing with the relationship\u00a0between literature and national identity in nineteenth\u2014century Latin America\u00a0have been those established by Benedict Anderson and Doris Sommer. In\u00a0Anderson\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,1196,8,103],"tags":[24283,24285,24284,24286],"class_list":["post-47948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-mexico","tag-hispanofila","tag-lee-j-skinner","tag-lee-joan-skinner","tag-lee-skinner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47950,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47948\/revisions\/47950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}