Is the affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony unbreakable? When intellectuals attempt
to retell history from its bottom side or when writers try to represent the so-called
marginalized subject are they not simply reinforcing the perspective and agenda of society's
hegemonic currents? Cooptation Complicity and Representation engages in a discussion of the
problem of this potentially unbreakable affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony. Through
five twentieth-century Mexican literary works: Pedro Páramo (1955 Juan Rulfo) Hasta no verte
Jesús mío (1969 Elena Poniatowska) three short stories from Ciudad Real (1960 Rosario
Castellanos) Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992 Carmen Boullosa) and Muertos incómodos (falta
lo que falta) (2005 Subcomandate Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II) this book attempts to
examine the contradictory phenomenon that emerges when intellectuals' desire to represent a
marginalized subject or history clashes with their own limited ability to fully know the
marginalized. No critics have compiled these five seemingly unrelated Mexican texts in order to
scrutinize such a contradictory tendency. Cooptation Complicity and Representation provides
an innovative way to connect the five texts by delineating within specific Mexican historical
and geopolitical contexts how and why intellectuals have difficulty moving away from the
reproduction of «otherness» when they attempt to represent a marginalized subject or history.
This book can be useful for those who are interested in the Spanish American boom literature
twentieth-century Mexican literature women writing testimonial writing subaltern studies
postcolonial studies historical novels and cultural studies.
