Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Reading Ancient and Classical Cultures
- Part II Renaissance and Early Modern
- Part III Enlightenment Cultures
- Part IV Queer Modernisms
- Part V Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
- 23 Russian Gay and Lesbian Literature
- 24 Spanish Literature in the Long Twentieth Century, 1898–2007
- 25 French and Francophone Literature
- 26 African Literatures
- 27 Notes on Queer Politics in South Asia and Its Diaspora
- 28 The Crucible of Space, Time, and Words: Female Same-Sex Subjectivities in Contemporary Chinese-Language Contexts
- 29 Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics
- 30 Native American Literatures
- 31 African American and African-Diasporic Writing, Post-1930
- Part VI Genres of the Present
- Index
29 - Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics
from Part V - Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Reading Ancient and Classical Cultures
- Part II Renaissance and Early Modern
- Part III Enlightenment Cultures
- Part IV Queer Modernisms
- Part V Geographies of Same-Sex Desire in the Modern World
- 23 Russian Gay and Lesbian Literature
- 24 Spanish Literature in the Long Twentieth Century, 1898–2007
- 25 French and Francophone Literature
- 26 African Literatures
- 27 Notes on Queer Politics in South Asia and Its Diaspora
- 28 The Crucible of Space, Time, and Words: Female Same-Sex Subjectivities in Contemporary Chinese-Language Contexts
- 29 Mesoamerican Mythmaking as Queer(ed) Visionary Hermeneutics
- 30 Native American Literatures
- 31 African American and African-Diasporic Writing, Post-1930
- Part VI Genres of the Present
- Index
Summary
Applied to Mesoamerican history and worldviews, revisionist mythmaking functions as an innovative, transformational practice that queers normative stories in various ways. The various ways include: retelling a well-known mythic story from different points of view, rewriting the story by altering the plot and revising the story itself and writing new stories. While Mesoamerican-inspired revisionist mythmaking often focuses on individual and collective identity related issues, at its most innovative, these recursive uses of "Mesoamerica" produce new ontologies, epistemologies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. This chapter examines these philosophical contributions as they occur within three complex, recurring Mesoamerican-inflected themes: Aztlan, mestizaje, and cosmic mythic figures. Referencing Aztlan and an indigenous "Azteca" identity, Chicano nationalists redefined mestizaje in positive ways, reclaiming their indigenous ancestry while downplaying or entirely ignoring their European-Spanish roots. The cosmologies of the Maya, Toltecs, Olmecs, and other pre-Conquest Mesoamerican peoples were peopled by rich, complicated divinities who defy easy categorization.
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- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature , pp. 529 - 547Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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