Paper Topics | Spring 2024 | Paper 6
Due Friday, March 8, 5:00 p.m., to your conference leader
Target length: 1700-1800 words
Choose one of the following topics:
- In his discussion of the nation as an “imagined community,” Benedict Anderson writes that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. [New York: Verso, 1998], 7). Compare how two of the following texts represent the relationship between the vertical hierarchies of exploitation and inequality and the “horizontal comradeship” of nationhood: Morelos’s “Sentiments of the Nation”; Iturbide’s “Plan of Iguala”; the Plan de Ayala; or Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico. To what extent does each source either call attention to or occlude the “actual inequality and exploitation” in the nation? How does each source’s approach to representing or not representing social hierarchy shape its vision of the nation? [For a longer excerpt from Imagined Communities, see the lecture handout for February 16.]
- How do the murals of the first half of the 20th century represent the relationship between the modern Mexican state and the past? Does the present, for example, continue, displace, reform, or challenge the past, or relate to it in some other way? You might consider what is used and not used to symbolize the past and the present, or what spaces, attitudes, or activities are associated with the present and the past. (Pick two or three murals [or two to three subsections of Rivera’s History of Mexico] for close analysis.)
- In the Reply to Sor Filotea, Sor Juana repeatedly mentions that she seeks education only because of her “inclination.” Locate several moments where she discusses her “inclination” and explain in your paper how she uses the term. Analyze the philosophical and/or social implications of Sor Juana locating her desire for education in “inclination” (something she claims not to control) rather than personal desire (something she might control).
- Both Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados and José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert represent a period of modernization in Mexican society, depicting both economic growth and those left behind. Analyze how ONE of these works represents what it means to be modern and how that was achieved in the mid-twentieth century. How does the work contrast modernity with the past?
- In “The Cinematic Shot,” Luis Buñuel claims that “the substance of cinematic cinema is, after the lens, the close-up,” which he then defines as “anything that results from the projection of a series of images that comment on or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a person” (An Unspeakable Betrayal, 126). Choose two specific moments in Los Olvidados and explain how the use of the close-up—the narrowing in on an “aspect of the total view”— reveals a central problem in the film as a whole.
- Analyze the relationship between the form a text takes and what it is seeking to achieve in ONE of the following texts: Sor Juana’s “Reply to Sor Filotea,” Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico, or one of the Zapatista’s Declarations of the Lacandon Jungle. Questions you might consider include: Why does this work make use of the form/genre that it does? What about that form/genre allows the author(s) to make their point? Who does the speaking in the work? To whom is it addressed? Does the form seek to include, engage, or distance the work from its readers?
- Magali Carrera argues that the Casta paintings “do not illustrate race but instead locate it in the intersection of certain physical, economic, and social spaces of late colonial Mexico” (38). Choose at least two images from the Casta paintings gallery and explain how and to what extent they locate race in Carrera’s terms.
- How do the Zapatista texts we read (“The Story of the Questions,” “The Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” “The 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” “Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Law,” and “Mexico City: We Have Arrived. We Are Here: The EZLN”) rework the Mexican past and the role of the indigenous population in Mexico in the late 1990s and early 2000s?
- In consultation with your conference leader, write on a topic of your own devising.