Project Details
Projekt
Mythical thinking and transnational community building in cultural magazines: Interconnections between politics, anthropology and aesthetics
Applicant
Professor Dr. Hanno Ehrlicher
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523073917
The sub-project will pursue the objectives of the FOR with a special media-specific focus on cultural periodicals in the period from 1917-1936. It will work out the networks of different cultural mediators and their ideas of community in the context of post-revolutionary Mexico that can be observed in this medium, but also study the reception, appropriation and transformation of new models of transantional community-building discussed in Mexico, but also in other Latin American countries. In a first step, we will analyze "El Maestro Revista de cultura nacional" (1.1921-17.1923), edited by José Vasconcelos. This magazine allows not only to study the intersections between politics, anthropology and aesthetics within a project of mythical community building that was exemplary for the Mexican context after the revolution, but which also had an wide impact on Latin America in general. "El Maestro" also served as a hub for the dissemination of the ideas of the Clarté group founded by Barbusse in France immediately after the First World War, which not only quickly found offshoots in various contexts in Europe, but also led to the founding of corresponding groups and an entire series of journals in Latin America. We will investigate tof Latin American this serie of "Claridades" (in Peru, Chile and Argentina) focusing on the question if there can be identified programmatic similarities and common transnational discourse traditions, or how and why context-specific discourse traditions developed in each of these journals. Thirdly, projects of transnational community building under the sign of Indoamerica will be examined, focussing on José Mariátegui's cultural magazine "Amauta" and the "Editorial/Boletín Titikaka", also published in Peru, as well as a series of more political journals entitled "Indoamérica" in Mexico and Buenos Aires. Beyond the reconstruction of discourses and historical ideas, we will explore the aesthetic dimension of the journals taking into account particularly the analysis of the visual language and the circulation of concrete images. Methodologically we install a data-based workflow and persue a mixed-methods approach in which quantitative and statistical procedures (such as topic modelling) are intertwined with (post)hermeneutic qualitative interpretations.
DFG Programme
Research Units
