Seeks to configure the ways in which the interdisciplinary, the eclectic and the combinatory have served a strategic purpose in the development of a self-aware and identity-conscious visual discourse in Mexico, from the formative nineteenth century to the post-national 1990s.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: A Tradition of Intersections? Interdisciplinary Slippages, Borrowings and Collaborations in Mexican Visual Culture Chapter 1. The Development of Costumbrista: Iconography and Nation-building Strategies in Literary Periodicals of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Chapter 2. An Italicised Ethnicity: Memory, Renascence and Visuality in the Literary Writings of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano Chapter 3. Visualising Mexico: The Interplay of Graphic Arts and Film in the 1930s and 1940s Chapter 4. Reframing the City: Images of Displacement in Urban Films and the Visual Arts of the 1940s and 1950s Chapter 5. Allegory, Self-reflexivity and Irony: A Photographic Genealogy Chapter 6. The Poetics of Skin: Surface and Inscription in Contemporary Photography Chapter 7. The Hermeneutics of the Veil in Photography: Of Rebozos, Sábanas, Huipiles and Lienzos de Verónica Chapter 8. Relics and Disjecta in Modernism and Post-Modernism: A Comparative Study of Archaeology in Contemporary Photography and Multimedia Art Bibliography Index

"This is an excellent piece of scholarship. The author has clearly devoted herself to a sustained reflection on a very substantial visual archive of Mexican culture, and in so doing, she has generated virtuosic interpretations of many visual artifacts, some canonical, others less well-known."  ·  Bulletin of Latin American Research "…an outstanding contribution to the growing documented history of visual representations and technologies in Mexico.”  ·  Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology “…this is provocative book that will be referred to for years to come.”  ·  The Americas “…[a] fascinating scholarly work, whose greatest merit is to provide a model for extensive subsequent scholarship…[that] belongs to the core bibliography of outstanding Mexican cultural studies.”  ·  Bulletin of Spanish Studies