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Popular Cosmopolitanism: Mexican Cinema, Genre, and the Emergence of World ConsciousnessIgnacio Sánchez Prado
Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film & Media Studies
Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Latin American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis.
Benson Latin American Collection, 2nd floor conference room
Latin American cinemas, just like many other film traditions of the Global South, are often valued and studied under the idea that they are fundamentally “national” cinemas, machines of production of identity and cultural specificity. Mexican cinema from the mid-20th century, particularly the one produced in the so-called Golden Age, has been typically assessed under these parameters. This talk proposes the notion of “popular cosmopolitanism” to build a model for the history of Mexican cinema without nationalism. Using genres such as thrillers, horror films, and noirs, the talk argues that genre cinema is a mechanism of mediation through which popular culture engages with the growing role of Mexico in the world by creating framework of representation for phenomena like urbanization and the cold war. The talk also proposes the idea of popular cosmopolitanism as an alternative to Miriam Hansen’s idea of vernacular modernism, accounting for the particular forms of cinema emergent in the process of Mexican capitalism modernization.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His areas of research include Mexican literary, film, and cultural studies; Latin American intellectual history; neoliberal culture; food cultural studies; and “world literature” theory.
He is the author of seven books, including "Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959)" (2009, winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Book Award), "Screening Neoliberalism: Mexican Cinema 1988-2012" (2014), "Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature" (2018), and "Intermitencias alfonsinas. Estudios y otros textos" (2019).
He is currently working on a study titled "Popular Cosmopolitanism," on genre and the idea of world culture as a social practice in mid-century Mexico, as well as the short book "Taco" for the Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury Press.
Free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paloma Díaz at [email protected].
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
2300 Red River St, Austin, TX, United States, Texas 78705
