FOR 5700:  TransExile. Negotiations of aesthetics and community in postrevolutionary Mexico

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523073917

TransExil focuses for the first time on networks between exiles of different origins and local artists, writers and intellectuals in Mexico from the 1920s to the 1950s. The research group is based on the thesis that Mexico became a laboratory of national, i.e. political and cultural reconstitution during this period, in which exiles played a significant role. In particular, it examines the diverse artistic activities and productions that characterized this field. Mexico is understood as an exemplary space of contact and as a hub of further ramified networks, and Mexican reform efforts had an inspiring effect on the activities of exiles from fascist-ruled Europe, but also from dictatorships in Ibero-America and the Caribbean. Part of the reforms was Pan-American indigenism, a political and multidisciplinary movement with national variations, whose representatives were concerned with finding ways to integrate the indigenous population. The accompanying debates about concepts of ‘raza’/race and heterogeneity expanded the possibilities of thinking and shaping community and belonging.The key term TransExile is conceptualized in close relation to concepts of transnationality, but also of diasporic space, and combines interdisciplinary perspectives on translocal and transmedial networking processes. It contributes to a cultural studies reorientation of exile research by revising its traditionally national framings and definition of subject matter with regard to the dynamics of knowledge circulation, translation and transculturation. The project's innovative focus lies on the extent to which cultural-anthropological discourses, cultural-theoretical reflection and a creative and transformative approach to narratives, images and objects in cultural encounters stimulate imaginations and practices of community that complement, but also undermine, dominant political programs and positionings of the time. In addition to transfer processes between literature, art and science, the project thus focuses on fundamental questions about the interweaving of political and literary-artistic activities. Their systematic description and theoretical explication is meant to put a particularly dynamic historical field and its impact on the present into a new perspective. At the same time, it will outline subsequent research on artistic and literary negotiations of community and belonging in a world characterized by migration and global networking

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Mexico

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Bandau, Anja )
• Cultural anthropology, indigenism and local materialities in the context of exile (Applicants Noack, Karoline ;  Troeller, Jordan )
• Mythical thinking and transnational community building in cultural magazines: Interconnections between politics, anthropology and aesthetics (Applicant Ehrlicher, Hanno )
• TP5. Viewing Communities: Cinema as transcultural public sphere in Mexican exile (Applicant Chihaia, Matei )
• Translation and Transnationality: Practices, Aesthetics and Reflections of Translation in Networks of German and Spanish-speaking Exiles in Mexico (Applicants Bischoff, Doerte ;  Buschmann, Albrecht )
• Visions of cultural heterogeneity between Afro- and Indo-America. Transexilic networks in post-revolutionary Mexico (Applicant Bandau, Anja )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Anja Bandau