Artaud: In Search of Myth and Revolution in Mexico feat. Stuart Kendall on "Journey to Mexico"

Buy 'Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages & the
Tarahumara' (Contra Mundum Press) with introduction by Stuart
Kendall:
https://www.contramundumpress.com/journey-to-mexico

'Dionysus Speed' (Contra Mundum Press):
https://www.contramundumpress.com/product-page/dionysos-speed


About  'Journey to Mexico: Revolutionary Messages & the
Tarahumara':

On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist,
Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would
take him from the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico
City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The
journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to
eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), but it was a
profound turning point in his life.

   Artaud didn’t just leave Europe. He fled it. “I came
to Mexico to escape European civilization … I hoped to find a
vital form of culture.” The vital form of culture that he sought
was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in
the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion reinforced a
connection in human lives between the earth and the sun.

   But Artaud’s search for a vital form of culture
would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would
first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic,
religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this
intellectual work would not be without a psychological
cost.

   Journey to Mexico collects very nearly all of
Artaud’s writings related to his voyage to the land of the
Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the
pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered
there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years
after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A
selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip
conveys the very personal — the physical, emotional, and
financial — challenges of the journey. 

   Artaud’s Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to
the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to
confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of
decolonization in a desperate search for a “vital form of
culture.”


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