Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture (review)

This is an insightful though difficult book that contributes to an emerging literature on the history of the visual in Mexico. Indeed, Erica Segre combines two strands of inquiry in a work analyzing literature, painting, photography, and film over almost two centuries. The question of national identity—its construction, exclusions, and shifting significance over time—has been an unresolved issue in Mexico since the wars for independence and the recent subject of much attention in the scholarly literature. The emergence of visual culture as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has expanded the existing boundaries of art history and the social science disciplines. Segre succeeds in bringing these disparate strands of inquiry into dialogue, providing a detailed though inevitably selective examination of images produced in and representing Mexico.

Segre's goal is to demonstrate "the development of a self-aware and identity-conscious visual discourse in Mexico, from the formative nineteenth-century to the post-national 1990's" (p. 1). Though some will find the text's theoretical framework opaque, the persistent reader will be rewarded with important insights. The book is organized thematically as well as chronologically. Thus, each chapter can be read as an independent essay, though they all examine the contingent ways that national identity is defined, represented, and contested in various historical moments. Segre moves from nineteenth-century literature through twentieth-century photography and film to the "post-national fluidity and relativism" of the contemporary Mexican art scene (p. 275). Indeed, the book's "unifying analytical interest" in "the construction and interrogation of visual identities in reproductive media" (p. 2) reveals the deconstructive concerns of the 1990s, a time when Mexico appeared to be unraveling while being transformed in diverse and occasionally unexpected ways.

The author succeeds in expanding the visual field beyond the well-worn terrain of the Mexican mural movement and revolutionary nationalism. The book begins with the rise of literary periodicals in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the conflictive emergence of the Mexican nation corresponded to intellectual interest in the "inherent properties denoting Mexican traits and customs" (p. 12). During this era several recurring themes are distilled out of complex social realities. These included an emphasis on the picturesque, concern with Mexican folk art, and the emergence of types, such as the china poblana. An analysis of the writings of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, whose indigenous ethnicity fit uneasily with Porfirian celebrations of past Aztec greatness and neglect of the indigenous present, extends the study into the 1870s and 1880s. At this time, the continued maturation of photographic technology and the emergence of moving images transformed visual culture and "the crucial ocularcentric vein in the discourse of identity in post-independence Mexico," as old themes were recycled and new ones added into the mix of recurring tropes (pp. 2, 88). Subsequent chapters journey through the cultural nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s, the urbanization and "modernization" of the 1940s and 1950s, and the decline of ruling party hegemony from the 1960s on, as reflected in diverse graphic and visual arts. The final four chapters focus on disparate themes, including allegory, self-reflexivity, and irony; the poetics of skin; the hermeneutics of the veil; and relics and disjecta in modernism and post-modernism.

This book will be of interest to specialists, though undergraduates might face sticker shock and theory trauma. As a historian, I appreciate the recognition of the challenges to photographic realism in the 1920s and 1930s and other precursors to concerns superficially defined as exclusively "postmodern" (pp. 173, 191). The author's eclectic methodology at times reveals startling convergences between literature, archaeology, painting, photography, and film, and the sustained consideration of the contributions of women artists is long overdue. These contributions balance occasional frustrations with excessively ornate passages and the gaps that remain when we move from the 1880s to the 1930s, or leap from one thematic topic and chapter to the...