Posthuman Destinations: Indigenous Cultures in Leonora Carrington’s Mexican Oeuvre

Abstract

ABSTRACT When surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) arrived in Mexico in 1943, she found herself in a post-revolutionary country seeking to steer its new identity away from colonial influence. Carrington’s orientation away from Europe resonated with Mexico’s quest for a new cultural identity, no longer inflected by colonial powers. This article examines the extent to which Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre exhibits an immersion within its post-colonial identity in a way which synthesises with her own revolutionary, feminist politics. I consider how her embrace with Mexico’s indigenous past in her mural “El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas” (1963) connects with a culture which eschews the centrality of the speciesist human for a more balanced ecology, giving voice to the more-than-human sphere and thus loosening European colonial ties. I suggest that Mexico’s embrace with its indigenous heritage is one that aligns with Carrington’s feminist exploration of a pre-patriarchal past, where Goddess figures emerge, and a non-Eurocentric culture of myth and magic is evoked. Examining her evocation of Chiapas Indian culture, Goddess motifs, and images of indigenous flora and fauna, this article suggests that Carrington demonstrates how indigenous philosophies guard against human exceptionalism, thus providing a perspective and portal outside of Western cultural imperialism.