Another excellent title from the Critical Mexican Studies series (edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado) that we have indexed at Southwest Humanities, Carolyn Fornoff’s Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), will be published soon, in January 2024. In this wide-ranging study, the author examines the dynamics of and links between the environment and topics including revision/rewriting, land defense, the cinema of “rural resilience,” and practices of greening in the Mexican film industry. “Subjunctive Aesthetics studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation.” Throughout, Fornoff argues that what unites the artists she considers here is the way they use hypothetical, uncertain modes of representation, or “subjunctive aesthetics.” For more information about this important new work, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 