The Boom Femenino In Mexico

The Boom Femenino in Mexico: Reading Contemporary Women’s Writing is a collection of essays that focuses on literary production by women in Mexico over the last three decades. In its exploration of the boom femenino phenomenon, the book traces the history of the earlier boom in Latin American culture and investigates the implications of the use of the same term in the context of contemporary women’s writing from Mexico. In this way it engages critically with the cultural, historical and literary significance of the term illuminating the concept for a wide range of readers. It is clear that the entry of so many women writers into an arena traditionally reserved for men has prompted discussion around concepts such as ‘women’s writing’ and the very definition of ‘literature’ itself. Many of the contributors grapple with the theoretical tensions that such debates provoke offering an important opportunity to think critically about the texts produced during this period and the ways in which they have impacted on the Mexican and international cultural spheres. The project is comprehensive in its scope and, for the first time, brings together scholars from Mexico, the U.S. and Europe in a transnational forum. The book posits that despite certain aesthetic and thematic commonalities, the increased output by women writers in Mexico cannot be appraised as a unified literary movement. Instead it embraces a wide range of different generic forms and the subjects under study in the essays in the book include the best-selling work of Ángeles Mastretta, Elena Poniatowska and Laura Esquivel as well as the social and political preoccupations of journalists, Rosanna Reguillo and Cristina Pacheco. Contributors offer readings of the aesthetic visions of writers as diverse as Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua, and Eve Gil while other essays examine the nuances of contemporary gender identity in the work of Ana Clavel, Sabina Berman, Brianda Domecq and María Luisa Puga. There are essays devoted to poetry by indigenous Mayan women and an analysis of the complex place of poetry within the broader framework of literary production. The problems that emerge as a result of literary cataloguing based on gender politics are also considered at length in a number of essays that take a panoramic view of literary production over the period. Various critical approaches are employed throughout and the collection as a whole demonstrates that academic interest in Mexican women’s writing of the boom femenio is thriving. Above all, the essays here provide a space in which the location of women within prevailing cultural paradigms in Mexico and their role in the mapping of power in evolving textual canons may be interrogated. It is clear from the collection that interest in such issues is still alive and that the debate is far from over.

Ana Clavel is a remarkable contemporary Mexican writer whose literary and multimedia oeuvre is marked by its queerness. The queer is evinced in the manner in which she disturbs conceptions of the normal not only by representing outlaw sexualities and dark desires but also by incorporating into her fictive and multimedia worlds that which is at odds with normalcy as evinced in the presence of the fantastical, the shadow, ghosts, cyborgs, golems and even urinals. Clavels literary trajectory follows a queer path in the sense that she has moved from singular modes of creative expression in the form of literary writing, a traditional print medium, towards other non-literary forms. Some of Clavels works have formed the basis of wider multimedia projects involving collaboration with various artists, photographers, performers and IT experts. Her works embrace an array of hybrid forms including the audiovisual, internet-enabled technology, art installation, (video) performance and photography. By foregrounding the queer heterogeneous narrative themes, techniques and multimedia dimension of Clavels oeuvre, the aim of this monograph is to attest to her particular contribution to Hispanic letters, which arguably is as significant as that of more established Spanish American boom femenino women writers.

"The post-revolutionary Mexican literary canon was formed by cultural and political elites who sought to identify and reward those novels which would best represent the new nation. Reviewers found what they were looking for in Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes's El indio (1935) for example, but not in Consuelo Delgados's Yo tambien, Adelita (1936). This groundbreaking study provides a fresh perspective on canon formation by uncovering the circumstances and readings which produced a male-dominated Mexican literary canon."

"From poetry, short stories, plays, novels, photographs, personal correspondence, advertising, and interviews, Boob Lit. draws on both well-known and nearly forgotten materials to make visible the anti-feminine tendencies in femenism and to imagine a femmenism that might appeal to the startling numbers of young women in US and Mexican university classrooms today who do not self-identify as feminists. Catwoman, the cabrona, the diva-lectual, Barbie, the compulsory asexual, the clothes mind, the Boob, and the "beard" are just some of the swishy responses that Boob Lit. proposes as a response to the metonymic threat* of having boobs. *(Having boobs might make you one.) "--Provided by publisher.

This book - now available in paperback - is the first in-depth review and assessment of Laura Esquivel criticism. Outstanding essayists - from diverse critical perspectives in Latin American literature and film - explore Esquivel's critical reputation, contextualize her work in literary movements, and consider her four novels, as well as the film based on Like Water for Chocolate. The book begins with An Introduction to Esquivel Criticism, reviewing 20 years of global praise and condemnation. Elena Poniatowska, in an essay provided in the original Spanish and in translation, reflects on her first reading of Like Water for Chocolate. From unique critical perspectives, Jeffrey Oxford, Patrick Duffey, and Debra Andrist probe the novel as film and fiction. The Rev. Dr. Stephen Butler Murray explores Esquivel's spiritual focus, while cultural geographer Maria Elena Christie uses words and images to compare Mexican kitchen-space and Esquivel's first novel. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez and Lydia H. Rodriguez affirm divergent readings of The Law of Love, and Elizabeth M. Willingham discusses the contested national identity in Swift as Desire. Jeanne L. Gillespie and Ryan F. Long approach Malinche: A Novel through historical documents and popular and religious culture. In the closing essay, Alberto Julian Perez contextualizes Esquivel's fiction within Feminist and Hispanic literary movements. This book has won the Harvey L. Johnson Book Award for 2011, conferred by the South Central Organization of Latin American Studies at its 44th annual Congress in Miami, Florida (March 9, 2012).

Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture. In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists. Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.

By incorporating a variety of critical approaches within a feminist framework, the author here argues that Mexican women writers participate in a crucial project of unsettling dominant discourses as they strive for new ways of capturing the ambivalent position of the Mexican women in their texts.

The Politics of Literary Prestige provides the first comprehensive study of prizes for Spanish American literature. Covering state-sponsored and publisher-run prizes including the Biblioteca Breve Prize – credited with launching the 'Boom' in Spanish American literature – the Premio Cervantes and the Nobel Prize for Literature, this book examines how prizes have underpinned different political agenda. As new political positions have emerged so have new awards and the role of the author in society has evolved. Prizes variously position the winners as public intellectual, spokesperson on the world stage or celebrity in the context of an increasingly globalized literature in Spanish. Drawing on a range of sources, Sarah E.L Bowskill analyses prizes from the perspective of different stakeholders including states, publishers, authors, judges and critics. In so doing, she untangles the inner workings of literary prizes in Spanish-speaking contexts, proposes the existence of a prizes network and demonstrates that attitudes to cultural prizes are not universal but are culturally determined.