Good, Carl, and John V. Waldron, Eds. the Effects of the Nation: Mexican Art in an Age of Globalization

Beginning of article

Phìladelphia: Temple UP, 2001. 222 pp. ISBN 1-56639-865-7 (hardcover); ISBN 1-56639-866-5 (paper)

The ten essays collected in this volume use literature, history, and the visual arts in Mexico to study the effects which the notion of nation has over cultural productions and artifacts in an age of globalization. The indefinite article of the title is important in as much as it signals the prospective reader that the current trend to globalization is neither new, nor the only one the world has witnessed to date. In "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue" (Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization. [Durham: Duke UP, 1998] 56), Jameson identifies four possible positions with regards to globalization: 1. that there is no such thing as globalization; 2. that globalization is nothing new; 3. that globalization is related to the world market as the ultimate horizon of capitalista and that this relationship is new in degree but not in kind; 4. that globalizatìon is an intrinsic feature in a new, multinational stage of capitalism. Of these four positions, the editors of The Effects of the Nation seem to subscribe, in part, to the second notion, that "something like globalism always has been at work. At the same time, following Jameson, the editors also acknowledge that this phenomenon, at present, has unique and new characteristics. Jameson defines globalization as "a communicational concept, which alternatively masks and transmits cultural or economic meanings" (Cultures 55). To the interaction between the local and the global, The Effects of the Nation adds the nation, which can be seen as being re-casted in globalism, at the same time that it is challenged by it. The essays in this volume inquire into and present the effects of the three terms in tension: the local, the global, and the national--in the cultural products and movements of a particular nation-state, Mexico.

Thematically, the essays follow a chronological order examining Mexican art and literature throughout the twentieth century. According to the introduction, the essays can be divided in two groups. Those of the first half of the book (essays 1 through 4) look back in time, concentrating on aesthetic and critical issues associated with modernism of the twenties and thirties. The second group (essays 6 through l0) looks forward to themes related to postmodernism and contemporary points …