Combined Academic Publishers

How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture

Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State

Mary Coffey Dartmouth College

Februar 2012 · 240 S. · 9780822350200 · Geb. · GBP £ 67,00

9780822350378 · Pb. · GBP £ 16,99

A public art movement initiated by the post-revolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico’s most important public museums—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum—Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico’s murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the pre-eminent symbol of post-revolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.

“This is a major work of scholarship, a sorely-needed and comprehensive treatment of the relationships between muralism and nationalist political culture, and between mural production and museum practice, in mid-twentieth-century Mexico.” Leonard Folgarait, author of Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order
“How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture is art history and socio-cultural analysis at its best. We now have, for the first time in English, a detailed discussion of how murals were integrated into museum practice in the one country in the Americas where muralism underpinned the development of state ideologies and popular culture.” Barry Carr, author of Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Equal Time

Television and the Civil Rights Movement

Aniko Bodroghkozy University of Virginia

Februar 2012 · 328 S. · geb. · 9780252036682 · GBP £ 34,00

Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement explores the crucial role of network television in reconfiguring new attitudes in race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. Due to widespread coverage, the civil rights revolution quickly became the United States’ first televised major domestic news story. This important medium unmistakably influenced the ongoing movement for African American empowerment, desegregation, and equality.

“Bodroghkozy’s well-written, smart, and nuanced analysis makes us think about the relationship between the media and the Civil Rights Movement in fresh and interesting ways.” Susan J. Douglas, author of The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild

“A thoroughly researched analysis of the intersection between race, social change, and network television in the 1960s. Bodroghkozy shows in vivid detail how television served as a powerful tool of moral persuasion that played a key role in turning the tide toward the passage of historic civil rights legislation.” S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future