Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture (review)
This is an insightful though difficult book that contributes to an emerging literature on the history of the visual in Mexico. Indeed, Erica Segre combines two strands of inquiry in a work analyzing literature, painting, photography, and film over almost two centuries. The question of national identity—its construction, exclusions, and shifting significance over time—has been an unresolved issue in Mexico since the wars for independence and the recent subject of much attention in the scholarly literature. The emergence of visual culture as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has expanded the existing boundaries of art history and the social science disciplines. Segre succeeds in bringing these disparate strands of inquiry into dialogue, providing a detailed though inevitably selective examination of images produced in and representing Mexico.