The article investigates the transcultural exchanges and the traces of a creole consciousness in the loa of the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso by Juana Inés de la Cruz. Our reading of this allegorical play takes the concept of belonging as a tool for the analysis of the multifaceted dynamics of cultural identification and differentiation that are deployed in this literary text from the Mexican colonial baroque of the 17th century. We will focus on...

Recently discovered documents dating back to the time of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz call for a reappraisal of the Novo-Hispanic poet’s biography. While perusing documents related to her family, her court life, and her conventual destiny, we perceive the contours of a “novel” portrait of her person in her own lifetime. We already have what we could call “data”, pointing to an integral and multifaceted biography: Sor Juana the thinker, the intellectual, the...

The readings of the work dedicated by Sor Juana to her patron, the Countess de Paredes, have followed different paths: between literature and life, rhetoric of courteous love and feminine friendship, poetic and politics, Sapphic, Neoplatonic or Petrarchan tradition. This work focuses on the exchange of representations between the poet and her patron and proposes that in this dialogue of figurations new feminine agencies arise in the XVII century, from an orbital place with respect...

The present article analyses Sor Juana’s metatheatrality and self-fashioning in the loas that precede the autos sacramentales El Mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo and El Divino Narciso, starting from the hypothesis that Sor Juana uses authorial figures to highlight her authority as Creole writer and educated woman in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Interpreted from the angle of the Creole consciousness, the implied author positions herself between the new and the old world, knowing both...

The printing revolution of the 17th century made possible the development of the “Theories of the Earth”, an interdisciplinary set of publications that included different visual representations of the earth as a globe, as well as debates and dialogues regarding its shape. Magruder states that global sections (a type of wedge) and global views (only showing the surface) were the two most common ways to represent the earth. Sor Juana contributes to the so called...

As in most of Mexico’s contemporary indigenous communities, in Ocotepec, Morelos the funerary culture preserves two primordial postulates of the Mesoamerican religious imaginary: the body-soul duality and the life-death duality. According to the first postulate, the soul of the individual survives the death of the body and, symbolically, remains in the family home for nine days before embarking on a supernatural journey to its rightful place in the afterlife. The funeral honors involve two burial...

Alas a la palabra (2008) is a book of memoirs that speaks to the cultural and personal experiences of the hñähñu (or otomí) author Adela Calva Reyes, born in the community of San Ildefonso in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico. The text offers the author’s memories interwoven with those narrated by her family. The memories present traditions, beliefs and events in the community that are also intertwined with the hñähñu worldview. Furthermore, some of the...

The ghostly, the spectral and the idea of haunting as theoretical framework has been previously used to discuss violence(s) in Latin America (Petersen / Ribas-Casasayas 2016, Hopenhayn 2002) as well as gendered violence in Mexico (Petersen 2016). I argue that the spectral allows recent Mexican films to nuance the seen and unseen processes of violence that Central American female migrant bodies experience and the reactionary performances those bodies enact to counter the violence. I first...

The theme of criollismo in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has been one of the most debated topics in her work. But how did the Spanish intellectuals who published and read her understand this topic? This article reflects on the “ingenio indiano of mother Juana Inés de la Cruz” -so defined by the anonymous author of the prologue of Inundación castálida (1689)- in the paratexts of the three original volumes of her work published...

This paper examines recent discourse around gender violence in social media protests in Mexico and a short story collection that anthologizes representations of gender violence in short stories by Mexican women authors as part of a greater genre of anti-feminicide cultural production. I focus my analysis on the hashtag campaigns #MiPrimerAcoso and #SiMeMatan and the microcuento collection ¡Basta! 100 mujeres en contra la violencia de género (Edición mexicana 2014) as ghostly discourses that create a...

The present essay examines the semiotics of Djudeo-Espanyol in the novel Tela de sevoya (2012) and the poetry collection Ansina (2015) by Myriam Moscona. While in some of her previous volumes of poetry Moscona explores her Sephardic identity –in part through language– in these two recent works Djudeo-Espanyol takes center stage not only as a marker of identity, but as integral to the process of liteary creation. In both the autobiographical novel and the volumen...

This article proposes an interdisciplinary analysis of the play Lomas de Poleo (2002) by Ediberto Galindo through the studies of liminality by Victor Turner and the social construction of space by Henri Lefebvre. This reading allows for the articulation of the complexity of feminicide within the context of the socio-economic spatiality of "glocal" neoliberalism in which Galindo situates the plot of Lomas de Poleo. The article starts from the perspective of the murdered women who...

iMex XVI. México espectral, año 8, n°16 | Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (ed.)

The Enigmas offered to the Discrete Intelligence of the Sovereign Assembly of the House of Pleasure by her Most Solicitous and Devoted Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, Tenth Muse (Lisbon, 1695) is an unpublished work considered minor, whose finding Enrique Martínez López made public in 1968 (reprinted in 1970) and Antonio Alatorre reedited in 1994 (reprinted in 1995). The Enigmas, addressed to a feminine public, both courtly and learned, including the Countess of Paredes...

The article offers a synthesis of spectral theory from the publication of Spectres de Marx by Jacques Derrida and Ghostly Matters, by Avery Gordon, with a focus on its impact and relevance for Latin American cultural and narrative studies. He also offers a summary of the contents in the special issue "México Espectral".

When a family member dies, the loss is of a person. But in cases where that person embodies the last living link to an exilic homeland – a not uncommon occurrence for Jews in the Americas – the death of a parent can also mean the loss of a home. Mexican writer and daughter of Sephardic immigrants, Myriam Moscona chronicles the experience of her unmooring grief after the generations before her die in her novel...

This paper examines Luis Felipe Fabre’s La sodomía en la Nueva España (Pre-Textos 2010) and Sara Uribe’s Antígona González (Surplus 2012) from the perspective of spectrality that Jacques Derrida outlined in Spectres of Marx. In order to situate both works in their context of production two main concepts are revised: Josefina Ludmer’s idea of postautonomous literatures (Aquí América Latina) and Cristina Rivera Garza’s necrowriting (Los muertos indóciles). In the intersection between both theories I propose...

As economies and cultures morph due to technoscience, vampire entities also mutate so as to still provoke fear ‒their bodies change, their populations grow and their networks expand; yet the way to annihilate them becomes less obvious. Responding to these modern day changes, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s television series The Strain (2014-2017) uncannily echoes, or perhaps foreshadows, the social realities under an informational, networked, and epidemiological paradigm. The filmmakers here present viewers with...

Norma Yamille Cuéllar’s Historias del séptimo sello (2010) is a novel that puts hauntology in dialogue with cyborg theory because the main characters communicate with the dead through technology. As such, the novel provides an interesting space from which to gauge the reach of both cyborgs and ghosts in engaging trauma. Unlike many hauntological works, where the main protagonist—who functions as a synecdoche for an entire community—brings about a healing of sorts by engaging with...

The article analyzes the play and festejo Los empeños de una casa by the Mexican Golden Age playwright Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and claims that the play is a transcultural creation. In the play, the different “rooms” of the house, meaning the different parts of the festejo, allude to other cultural spaces, whether they be texts from the canon of Spanish Golden Age theater (for example by Calderón de la Barca) or Latin-American...

In the last decades, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s work has become a prime example of marginal writing that calls into question, from the periphery, the centre of Spanish colonialism, of the ecclesiastical authorities and of the scholarly elite in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Without doubt, the diversity of the texts composed by the nun is all the more remarkable as it indicates, in the light of and against the patriarchal power, their...