Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica ed. by Araceli Tinajero Roberto Rey Agudo Tinajero, Araceli, ed. Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica. Madrid: Verbum, 2013. Pp. 227. ISBN 978-8-47962-850-5. Hispanicists will find in Araceli Tinajero’s Exilio y cosmopolitismo en el arte y la literatura hispánica a useful addition to the study of exile in Latin American Studies. One of the book’s strengths is drawing on disciplines like sociology, art history, film studies, and literature. Its ten essays offer a heterogeneous sampling of exile studies across Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, and Venezuela. Another important contribution is focusing on seldom explored representations of exile and diaspora (e.g., Cuba as a refugee destination or the Venezuelan exile under Chávez), and choosing less familiar texts and films to discuss better-known episodes in contemporary Spanish and Latin American history. The most insightful moments come in close readings and analyses of particular texts, films, and paintings. However, the quality of the chapters is somewhat uneven. Given that concepts like exile and diaspora are of great interest in contemporary theory and criticism, it would have been interesting to find more of the authors of [End Page 836] these chapters in dialogue with the critical literature on exile beyond the scope of each chapter. As a result, there is very little overlap in the bibliography on exile between chapters. Other than Said’s Reflections on Exile, cited in three chapters, few critical studies on exile are cited. Notable absences in the bibliography include Chinua Achebe, Terry Eagleton, Nico Israel, Michael Seidel or Kobena Mercer, and, surprisingly, Claudio Guillén. With the exception of the introduction, and the first and ninth chapters, which have only footnotes, all chapters include a bibliography at the end. With that being stated, Araceli Tinajero’s introduction makes a convincing case that most of the contemporary Latin American canon has been written in exile or deals with exile in one way or another. This section would have been a good place to frame the subsequent chapters in the wider critical examination of exile. Martínez-Assad’s thesis in the first chapter, supported by demographic data and his detailed, street-by-street account of how successive waves of foreigners settled in Mexico City, is that foreign contributions to Mexican culture are qualitatively high considering how many fewer foreigners Mexico attracted compared to the United States, Brazil, or Argentina. In the following chapter, Lemus argues that Martín Luis Guzmán’s ideas about the role of the intellectual in the construction of national identity in post-Revolutionary Mexico took shape during his exile in New York (1916–19), as seen in his personal letters and the collection A orillas del Hudson. Chapter 3 summarizes four unpublished testimonies of exiles in Monterrey. The chapter includes some inaccuracies (the term “niños de la guerra” was definitely in use before 2005) and would have benefited from a more analytical perspective. The source texts seem underutilized either as memory texts or as literary artifacts. Chapter 4 traces the lineage of the imagery of Jewish diaspora in four Latin American artists: the transatlantic crossing in Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados, the iconography of Jewish persecution by the Inquisition in Frida Kahlo’s Sin esperanza and Diego Rivera’s Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, and José Gurvich’s use of Jewish themes after moving from Uruguay to Israel and finally to New York. Remba’s comparative analysis of the imagery of Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photo The Steerage (1907) and Víctor Manuel’s Olvidados (depicting the diplomatic crisis of the SS. St Louis, whose Jewish refugees were denied asylum by Cuba in 1939) is one of the highlights in the book. Chapter 5 explores the double sense of alienation felt by exiles in their countries of origin and destination through a close reading of Francisco Ayala’s “El regreso.” Suárez-Galbán Guerra argues that the many layers of meaning in the story—biblical allusions to Cain and Abel, suppressed homoerotic desire, incest, revenge—insinuate the violence...