The Enigma of Time and History: Images of Death in Revolutions and Armed Conflicts of the Twentieth Century in Mexico and Central America

My dissertation, El enigma del tiempo y de la historia: Imágenes de muerte en revoluciones y conflictos armados del siglo XX en México y Centroamérica, examines photographic and literary images of crucial events in modern Latin-American political history: the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Salvadorian Revolution of 1932, the Sandinista Insurgency in Nicaragua (1978-1979), and the Salvadorian Civil War (1980-1992). I consider how the photographs of these events tend to be grouped into epic-like tales of victory and placed at the service of nationalistic ideologies, which justify subsequent political orders by representing the violence as foundational, and also as safely contained in the past. State-supported photographic archives, such as the influential Archivo Casasola in Mexico, as well as literary and artistic works that support the perspectives housed by such hegemonic cultural apparatuses, define temporality under the homogenous concepts of progress and historicism. In my work, I criticize such a definition of temporality following the work of Walter Benjamin on photography and history and contemporary thinkers who work in his footsteps such as Eduardo Cadava, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Samuel Weber. I pursue a critique of this dominant interpretation of temporality considering how progress and historicism serve to monumentalize national history by allowing the continuous exercise of violent sovereign power and the forgetting of revolutionary violence when the revolutions are institutionalized in the State, and excluding from the main historical discourse many obscure episodes faced by subaltern or expropriated classes throughout modernity. Against progress, I argue that photography performs a fragmentary and heterogeneous relation with time capable of disrupting linear understanding of the past, opening the question of history and image to an irreducible and dynamic heterogeneity. I explore concepts such as the “dialectical image”, the “real state of emergency”, “interregnum”, “heterocronism”, among others, that seem to suspend and interrupt the traditional representation of historical time. Referring to these concepts, at the other extreme of official and linear narratives, I use photographic and literary images of death that introduce a radical heterogeneity that complicates and complements testimonial and fictional narratives beyond the nationalistic view of the revolutionary past. I analyze postcards showing gruesome images of the Mexican Revolution on the border between US-Mexico together with the fragmentary novels of Nellie Campobello; photographs of the Pipil-Mayan ethnocide of 1932 and of the El Mozote massacre in 1981 in El Salvador together with the poetry and testimonial narratives of Roque Dalton; and photographs by Koen Wessing and James Nachtwey during the revolutions of the eighties, along with contemporary novels by Horacio Castellanos Moya and Julian Herbert that return and resignify historical materials of the revolutions in Mexico and Central America.PHDRomance Languages & Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146099/1/juanleal_1.pdfDescription of juanleal_1.pdf : Restricted to UM users only