Professor Ignacio Sánchez Prado Wins Two Awards from LASA

Prof. Sánchez Prado's book "Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana 1917-1959" (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures No. 47. Purdue University Press, 2009) was awarded the LASA Mexico Section's 2010 Humanities Book Prize. The book is a revisionist history of the emergence of the literary field in Mexico. Against the grain of traditional studies, which focus on literature produced by intellectuals actively promoting the Mexican Revolution and its ideals, the book argues that the most important and influential work in literature was produced by authors who distanced themselves from that perspective. By virtue of this, intellectuals like Alfonso Reyes and Jorge Cuesta in fact created a notion of national literature based upon its autonomy from the ideological positions of the regime, which, in turn, allowed for the creation of "intellectual nations," namely, symbolic spaces and concepts where alternative ideas of "Mexico" could be developed. The book describes this process by focusing on four foundational instances of Mexican literary life: the debate around the idea of "national literature" in the 1920s, the emergence of the idea of the "literary intellectual" in the 1930s, the emergence of literary institutions in the 1940s and the attempts of literature and philosophy to become the privileged voice in defining the idea of the "Mexican self."

In addition, Prof. Sánchez Prado's article “Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze, Vuelta, Letras Libres and the Reconfigurations of the Mexican Intellectual Class," published in Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos 26, 1 (2010): 47-78, was awarded the LASA Mexico Section's 2010 Humanities Essay Prize. The essay studies the intellectual genealogies of Enrique Krauze, Mexico's foremost liberal public intellectual, along with the way in which a particular liberal tradition focused on anti-communism and individual freedoms fluorished in the works translated in two major magazines connected to Krauze: Vuelta and Letras Libres. In doing so, Sánchez Prado contends that liberalism is a word of many meanings and practices in Mexico and that these meanings and practices are connected to distinct ways to conceive the role of the "public intellectual." Thus, the essay shows that the study of liberalism in Mexico requires a careful work of analysis and definition, to understand the way in which specific definitions of the term articulate different practices of the intellectual in the Mexican public sphere.