Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780826517265)

Violence as a way of life, and murder as a political tool. This philosophy is nothing new to Mexico, most recently demonstrated in the wave of assassination and indiscriminate killing brought on by the drug war gripping the country. In Artful Assassins, author and scholar Fernando Fabio Sanchez unveils the long record of violence inspiring artistic expression in Mexico, focusing on its use and portrayal in film and literature. Sanchez is uniquely positioned to explore this topic, through his work as a novelist and poet in Mexico before entering academia in the United States.

Sanchez argues that the seemingly hopeless cycle of violence experienced by Mexico in the 20th century, as reflected in its "crime genre," reveals a broader intrinsic cultural and political failure that suggests grave implications for the current state of crisis. Tracing the development of a national Mexican identity from the 1910 Mexican Revolution onward, Sanchez focuses on the indelible presence of violence and crime underlying the major works that contributed to a larger communal narrative.

Artful Assassins ultimately offers a panoramic overview of the evolution of Mexican arts and letters, as well as nationalism, by claiming murder and assassination as literary and cinematic motifs. The collapse of post-revolutionary political unity was presaged all along in Mexican culture, Sanchez argues. It need only to have been sought in the art of the nation.

Author: Fernando Fabio Sanchez
ISBN-10: 0826517269
ISBN-13: 9780826517265
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/29/2010
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2011 pg. 230