Cooptation Complicity and Representation - Shigeko Mato Gebunden

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) thr ee 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.