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Rashkin, Elissa J. The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Change in the 1920s. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 275 pp.
The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Mexican avantgardes amongst US based academics. Two recent works that evidence this trend are Rubén Gallos Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technical Revolution (MIT, 2005) and Esther Gabara's Errant Modernism: the Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke, 2008). Elissa Rashkin's The Stridentist Movement in Mexico, also directed to a US academic audience, is another welcome contribution to recent studies in English on the Mexican avant-gardes. The book provides a remarkably thorough overview of Stridentistism that will be of great use to scholars and students wishing to familiarize themselves with Mexican culture during the 1920s and 1930s.
Stridentism was a dynamic and diverse avant-garde movement that, regardless of its name - which accurately reflects its contentious and aggressively provocative traits - is generally not considered to have had a long-term impact on Mexican literature, art or culture. Rashkin's book rectifies this misconception. The author approaches Stridentism as more than a literary movement, covering Stridentist activities in theater, performance, visual arts and politics, as well as in commercial endeavors such as radio, journalism and advertising. As stated in the introduction, this book is guided by "two underlying assumptions: that of the text as cultural artifact and of vanguardism as a multifaceted cultural activity" (11). In this manner, Rashkin succeeds in creating a comprehensive synthesis of the period that will give readers a wide-ranging perspective on the cultural and social ramifications of Stridentism during the 1920s and beyond.
The Stridentist Movement in Mexico is divided into two parts. The first part, "Metropolis," focuses on...