Publication: The AmericasAuthor: Fox, Claire FDate published: April 1, 2010
>¡Viva la historieta! Mexican Comics, NAFTA, and the Politics of Globalization. By Bruce Campbell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Pp. vii, 234. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.
Bruce Campbell's engaging study contends that comic books are an important cultural form through which one can chart the impact of globalization in Mexico and responses to it. Long associated with the commercial entertainment sector, comics have enjoyed broad working-class readerships in Mexico since the postrevolutionary period, but as Campbell explains, the production, content, and circulation of comics have undergone dramatic changes over the past two decades. Campbell frames his study around the political and economic transformations registered in the world of Mexican comics by two recent watersheds: ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and the election of Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate Vicente Fox to the presidency in 2000, which brought an end to the seven-decade -long domination of the Mexican political system by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). During these turbulent years, comic books increasingly engaged neoliberal economic reforms and their attendant cultural values of U. S. -inflected cosmopolitanism from a variety of ideological positions. While government-operated industries and services were being privatized en masse, comic books underwent a contrary movement, entering the sphere of political institutions, as both the center-right Fox administration and the center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) utilized them to publicize policies and campaigns.
Meanwhile, commercial and countercultural comics in Mexico were also responding to the large-scale shift toward free market economics and intensified discourses of modernization heralded by NAFTA. Campbell's meticulous analyses of comics produced by many different social actors - from political parties to trade unions, community-based organizations, government agencies, large corporations, and artists' collectives - demonstrates that NAFTA-era "culturescapes" (p. 8) were being articulated in comics through plodines about the gap between rich and poor, internal and transnational migration, narcotraffic, and scenarios of social mobility, as well as through the minutiae of formal aesthetic representation, including the depiction of racial characteristics and body types, the incorporation of slang, and the casual placement of commodities and projection of everyday desires in the comic cell's mise-en-scène. By distinguishing the critical, celebratory, and even contradictory ways in which comics articulate perspectives on neoliberalism, Campbell introduces the concept of popular sovereignty into scholarly discussions about globalization that have described its operations in top-down fashion, without acknowledging the knowledge production and political visions emanating from local cultural producers.
Following a lucid introductory chapter, Campbell's eight subsequent chapters provide a panorama of contemporary Mexican comics. From the PANista and PRDista forays into the genre described above, the author turns to examine presentisi irruptions in Golden Age classics, such as Gabriel Vargas's long-running La Familia Barran, as well as experimental and provocative work produced by a generation of young graphic artists. Campbell's case studies balance formal and socio-historical analysis, offering perceptive narratological readings and a breadth of knowledge about Mexican popular culture and political movements. The interpretations are peppered with insights from Latin American cultural critics, such as Jesús Martín-Barbero, Carlos Monsiváis and Néstor García Canclini, as well as from Marxist, semiotic, and poststructuralist theory.
Campbell's overall project correlates the aesthetic registers of NAFTA-era comics with their respective ideological positions. In terms of critical values, the author tips his hand toward committed auteurism in several chapters dedicated to innovative projects that stretch the boundaries of generic formulae. Campbell's interpretations of community- and trade union-based comics, his discussion of Edgar Clement's noir fantasy, Operación Bolívar (2006), and his reading of Sebastián Carrillo's redux of the superhero narrative, El Bulbo, vindicate the artist-intellectual as memory keeper of the postcolonial longue durée, one who freely intercalates references to neoliberalism with iconography culled from the Conquest and other cataclysmic historical events. Rather than staking claims to cultural authenticity in a globalizing society, these graphic artists embrace strategies of self-conscious appropriation and the Mexicanization of a U. S. -identified image repertoire.
In the end, Campbell's survey problematizes left-right ideological oppositions, as it exposes underlying affinities between pro- and antiglobalization discourses in comics coming from both sides of the political spectrum. He demonstrates, for example, that in both the PANista and the PRDista comics, the "view from below is so effectively silenced that the global order is never questioned or resisted" (p. 46). Likewise, he finds fissures between nationalist and free-market sectors of the bourgeoisie and among different popular movements. Campbell's mapping of diverse perspectives on globalization nonetheless stresses that concepts of national identity still function at a narrative level to mediate interactions between local cultures and transnational movements of capital, goods, ideas, and people. This book is a valuable addition to the existing bibliography on Mexican comics by scholars such as Anne Rubenstein and Charles Tatum, and it would be wellplaced in graduate and undergraduate courses dealing with visual culture and art history, cultural anthropology, literature, and other forms of expressive culture in the Americas.
Author affiliation:
University of Iowa CLAIRE F. FOX
Iowa City, Iowa
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