Corpus and Archive: Figurations and Disfigurations of Popular Sovereignty in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

This dissertation considers the political-theological legacy of sovereign power in twentieth-century Mexico. Tracing this legacy through representations of the figure of the People in national-popular cultural production in the decades after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, this work demonstrates how secular iconography of this period drew on a humanist-Christian consciousness of lost immanence to project an image of national unity, predicating notions of history and national identity on a retrospective consciousness of loss. Positing that this melancholic paradigm continues to define ways of seeing and thinking the meaning of history and national identity in Mexico, this study signals the need to deconstruct this paradigm and disentangle the thinking of history, community, and being-in-common from the national-popular imaginary and the melancholic notions of lost immanence that animate it. This work examines the operation of this melancholic paradigm in a corpus of visual and literary works drawn from three historical junctures of the twentieth century in Mexico. Considering the celebrated archive of imagery of the Mexican Revolution and focusing on three photographs of the Plaza del Zócalo in Mexico City taken by the photojournalist Manuel Ramos during the 1913 counter-revolutionary insurrection known as the Decena Trágica [Ten Tragic Days], the first chapter of this dissertation explicates a fundamental tension between archives and images. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theory of the archive and Georges Didi-Huberman’s work on images, I argue that Ramos’s photographs abound with anarchivic, archiviolithic violence, destabilizing from within the archive of photography of the Mexican Revolution and unsettling our gaze, which has been conditioned to encounter in historical images iconic subjects of history through which to articulate a relationship to the past. Examining a broad corpus of social-documentary and street photography from the post-revolutionary period in chapter two, this work demonstrates how early practitioners of the genre in Mexico, such as Tina Modotti and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, framed peasants, workers, and indigenous subjects as iconic figures of the People. Drawing on the theoretical work of Roger Bartra and Jean-Luc Nancy, I argue that this photographic tradition operated in parallel to national-popular discourse in Mexico to promote a humanist metaphysics of subjectivity grounded on the notion of a lost community to be redeemed or reconstituted. Against this tradition, I position the works of the nota roja [tabloid] photographer Enrique Metinides, positing that the profanization of death in Metinides’s photography unworks the sacred framing of the motif of death in national-popular cultural production. Turning to Roberto Bolaño’s novel Los detectives salvajes, chapter three considers the themes of melancholy and loss in Bolaño’s narrativization of literary and artistic community in 1970s Mexico City. Drawing on a broad corpus of critical and theoretical works, I demonstrate that Bolaño’s novel unworks modernist notions of aesthetic renewal and redemption, presenting a vision of community and being-in-common that takes place in the wake of the exhaustion of the promise of revolutionary art and the utopian projects of modernity. Drawing from the critical and theoretical traditions of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, political philosophy, and Latin American history and political theory, this dissertation speaks to the need to critically reexamine and unwork discourses of national and popular identity grounded in a melancholic consciousness of lost immanence, rearticulating notions of political community and popular sovereignty on new grounds.