Américo Paredes’s The Shadow:

Abstract

This essay argues that Paredes’s novel diagnoses the causal interrelations between the emerging world economy and the Mexican Revolution. It locates these broad social changes in the analytic of Greater Mexico, and links these transformations at the sulyective level by noting their effects on ideological self-understandingg. Thus, the ascendance of the world economy parallels that vexed movement between traditional and modern fonns of thought. By representing such a tenuous subject formation, The Shadow finally permits a critical relation to the processes of capitalist modernity.