Objetos itinerantes: prácticas de escritura, percepción y cultura material

Abstract

<italic>Objetos itinerantes: prácticas de escritura, percepción y cultura material<italic> explores the relationship between nineteenth-century Mexican cultural production and material objects. It argues that at the beginning of the nineteenth century different categories of objects started to play a paradigmatic role in different cultural and political discourses, which are crucial for an understanding of how a Mexican national imaginary was created, whether within a literary text, a museum, or a private collection. By examining objects in texts and objects as texts, this dissertation investigates the ways in which material objects became active agents in different literary, visual, and artistic practices, and considers the epistemological, cultural, and geopolitical logics that define their written, visual, or material displacements.

Guided by a series of theoretical approaches that converge in their effort to decode the cultural, social, and political meanings of objects, <italic>Objetos itinerantes<italic> is structured around three distinct yet related areas of analysis: the circulation of pre-Columbian antiquities in European collections, the relationship between <italic>costumbrismo<italic> and material culture, and the presence of animate objects in Mexican <italic>modernismo<italic>. Chapter 1 explores the collections of Mexican antiquities brought to Europe by William Bullock and Eugène Boban. By analyzing rarely studied sources, such as travel narratives, illustrated catalogs, and photographic albums, it examines the ways in which such objects entered a hybrid space of cultural and semantic exchange, creating new spaces of knowledge, where the alterity of the unknown is redefined and normativized. Chapter 2 explores how Mexican <italic>costumbrismo<italic> interacts with material culture, and analyzes the presence of foreign jewels and local artifacts in Manuel Payno's novels. It argues that <italic>costumbrista<italic> aesthetics was constantly traversed by distinct categories of objects, which reconfigured their function in the redefinition of a new national and cultural identity. Chapter 3 considers the presence of animate objects in Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera's and Amado Nervo's texts and analyzes how they generate new writing practices that problematize a socioeconomic system based on capitalist production and utilitarianism. It argues that these animate objects revealed the urgency of a new sensibility towards material culture and a subsequent redefinition of the ways in which we approach objects.