Serial Mexico
Storytelling Across Media, From Nationhood to Now
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vanderbilt University Press
Published:30th Jun '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
No book until now has tied in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives—striking tales of glory, of fame, of colorful epic characters, grounded in oral folklore—with their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Amy Wright's colorful multidisciplinary Serial Mexico delves deep into this rich national storytelling tradition for the first time: examining nostalgic tales told and reimagined from popular novelas to radionovelas then telenovelas and onwards, examining the enduring foundational figures woven into the very fabric of society, from the country's beginnings into the twenty-first century.
This panoramic view offers a glimpse into how the Mexican people have experienced their stories from the country's early days until now, showcasing a penchant for protagonists that mock authority, that make light of hierarchy, that embrace the hybridity and mestizaje of Mexico itself. These tales vividly reflect and respond to a variety of crucial cultural concerns such as family, patriarchy, gender roles, racial mixing, urbanization, modernization and political idealism. Serial Mexico shows clearly how serialized storytelling's mix of melodrama and sensationalism was not devoid of revealing political and cultural messaging.
In a detailed yet accessible style, Wright highlights how these stories and concerns have continued to morph, along with changing social media, into current times. Will these tropes and traditions carry on within new and reimagined serial storytelling forms? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for the next surprising episode.
Once in a blue moon, a scholarly work drops that upends what we know in the humanities. Serial Mexico is this—and more. Gorgeous, lively prose serves up sophisticated, smart scholarship that radically reorients us toward Mexico's deep and rich transmedia history. Wright's edge-of-seat odyssey takes us far back into Mexico's history of storytelling, as well as all subsequent instances of cross-media proliferation and pollination. From astute analyses of early-nineteenth-century popular serialized stories to twentieth-century comics, radionovelas, and telenovelas, Wright does with Serial Mexico what Jenkins did with Convergence Culture, but with one colossal difference: Wright aptly anchors Transmedial Studies in the Global South."
—Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Mex-CinÉ: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century
"Propelled by its colorful subject matter and Wright’s artful analysis, Serial Mexico is a groundbreaking meditation on how Mexican mass media addresses memory, national identity, and formula storytelling. Packed with illustrations and forgotten cultural histories, this is a major contribution to Mexican and Latin American Studies."
—Christopher Conway, author of Heroes of the Borderlands: The Western in Mexican Film, Comics, and Music
"Serial Mexico belongs to a critical continuum, guided by Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, and Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions, that studies modern national identity. As befits this lineage, Serial Mexico concerns itself with family romance (and domestication) as national allegory."
—John A. Ochoa, author of The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity
ISBN: 9780826505613
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 363g
302 pages