After the Utopias, Nostalgia. The Nineteenth Century and its Reception in the Twentieth

Abstract

This article focuses on the historiography of nineteenth-century photography as it appeared in the early twentieth century. It addresses two books by Enrique Fernández Ledesma as a means to analyze the forms of textual and visual representation of the nineteenth-century bourgeois experience, in particular that of romanticism. It emphasizes the importance of the behavioral constructs of social class and gender, while emphasizing the coexistence of the dichotomy tradition/modernity as an inescapable tension in the construction of national Modernity. Hence these behavioral constructs are linked to utopian dreams and remembrances of a viceregal and decimononic past. In other words, to a nostalgia for the past as an historical attitude, and as yet another expression of the paradoxical nature of the energies that moved culture, after the cultural revival of the post-revolutionary period, and that shaped Mexico’s Modernity.