Project Details
Projekt
Visions of cultural heterogeneity between Afro- and Indo-America. Transexilic networks in post-revolutionary Mexico
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Anja Bandau
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523073917
As part of the research group TransExil, the project examines concepts of community that emerge from the engagement of exiled and Mexican intellectuals and artists with indigenous and Afro(Latin)American cultures in post-revolutionary Mexico. It focuses on how (re)conceptualizations of Indo- and Afro-America emerged between 1920 and 1950 through the articulation of anthropological knowledge and in part opposing aesthetics and asks specifically how these concepts relate to one another. One hypothesis is that the exiles' preoccupation with Afro(Latin) America took place against the background of indigenist conceptions of America. In reverse, the question arises as to what extent the latter benefited from African-American research. The examination of reciprocal references - analogies, parallelisms, but also an emphasis on their differences - is carried out at both the institutional and the textual level. In a first step, the project traces how the demand for the visibility of Afro(Latin) America was promoted by Caribbean actors in transexilic networks with European exiles and Mexican intellectuals and led to the founding of the Interamerican Institute for the Study of Afro-America (1943 in Mexico). The main focus, however, is on an intertextual and transmedia analysis of texts of different formats and disciplinary origins, in which anthropological texts are contrasted with literary ones. The project is organized along the three systematic axes of the research group. It is based on the reconstruction of hitherto little-researched networks between Caribbean, Ibero-American and European intellectuals, which opened up not only political, but also scientific, cultural and aesthetic horizons. The four intellectuals at the center of the project are the Haitian author, politician and anthropologist Jacques Roumain (between 1942 and 1944 in Mexico), the French surrealist Benjamin Péret (between 1942 and 1948 in Mexico), the Guatemalan artist and cultural politician Carlos Mérida (1932-1940 and from 1942 until his death in Mexico) and the poet and political activist Salomón de la Selva (between 1935 and 1959 in Mexico). They all interact with (cultural) political and aesthetic actors and institutions in the post-revolutionary Mexican field and refer to anthropological knowledge, which they process in transmedial practices, according to the central thesis of this project. The extent to which the essayistic, literary and artistic designs lead to transcultural visions of communities will be investigated. The aim is to make a contribution to the history of discourses on race and cultural difference in 20th century Latin America.
DFG Programme
Research Units
