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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• feminist ecologies
• Mexico
• indigenous philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gloria Anzaldúa (2012), 90. Anzaldúa, like Carrington, equates the destruction of Earth with the subordination of women and calls for a turn away from a white ‘Anglo’ point of view that leads us towards violence and futility. Instead, she points to the fecundity of the land and cultures of Latin America in reorienting white human exceptionalism in a treatise that espouses the philosophy that underpins this chapter. She explains, ‘By taking up curanderismo, Santeria, shamanism, Taoism, Zen and otherwise delving into the spiritual life and ceremonies of multi-colored people, Anglos would perhaps lose the white sterility they have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries, and missile bases […] Let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of “primitiveness”, can divert the indifferent, right-handed, “rational” suicidal drive that, unchecked, could blow us into acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond’, p.91.

2. Tony Davies ([1997] 2008), 141. Davies posits that humanism has powered the ‘imperial destinies of nineteenth-century Germany, France and, supremely, Great Britain’, p.23. Critiquing humanism as a movement and a philosophy he argues further that ‘It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity’, p.141.

3. Rosi Braidotti (2013, 25). Braidotti’s eschewal of such nationalism in her quest to move beyond Eurocentric humanism speaks to Ades’ insistence that Surrealism is about geographies, not nationhood. It thereby further demonstrates the way in which the movement has the capacity to think beyond the human in its mobile iterations of space, place and geography.

4. While it is true that the European surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s were already interested in the occult and magic due to its perceived connection with the irrational and unconscious worlds, Carrington’s immersion in Mexico galvanised a more feminist trajectory. Whitney Chadwick explains: ‘[…] it was in Mexico that she [Carrington] defined a relationship to the ancient healing arts that was not circumscribed by Surrealism’s belief in a childlike sorceress as the medium for male creative liberation’. Chadwick (1991), 13.

5. Carrington further explains: ‘My grandmother used to tell me we were descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold’, Aberth, Leonora Carrington Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, p.12.

6. Carrington painted the mural in her studio in Mexico City using casein paints on curved wooden panels. It was installed in the Chiapas section of the city’s Museum of Anthropology and was then later moved to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of the Chiapas State in the late 1980s.

7. The practice of curanderismo is a Mexican healing tradition that encompasses the use of alternative therapies and medicines including acupuncture and homeopathy. It is grounded in the belief that illnesses have both natural and supernatural causes. Anzaldúa, cites the practice as one of the potential ways of navigating our way out of what she calls a homogenous Anglo ‘sterility’ towards a more interconnected and broader understanding of the belief systems and cultures that also constitute our species, Borderlands p.90–91. Carrington’s time with the Chiapas Indians was an immersive one. Chadwick explains that ‘Carrington’s knowledge of and respect for traditional healing arts inspired such trust that the curanderos shared with her their healing lore and permitted her to attend their ceremonies’, Leonora Carrington The Mexican Years, 23.

8. Jaguars are indigenous to Mexico and are the only extant member of the genus Panthera which are native to the country. Significantly, in Pre-Columbian Central and South America, the jaguar was seen as a symbol of strength and power.

9. Mujeres Conciencia is a totemic example of Carrington’s investment in the country’s new political trajectory—a vision that chimes with the posthuman feminist ecologies she articulates in her essay two years before. Such posthuman feminist ecologies where women and nature unite as a powerful force that has the potential to reconfigure phallocentric, humanist hegemony. It speaks to a kinship between ancestral natures and contemporary feminist concerns in Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre, demonstrating how ‘Feminist theories, politics, and fictions … can “play nature” with a vengeance by deploying discourses of women and nature in order to subvert them’. In this way they destabilise the ‘nature/culture divide whilst constructing feminist alliances with postmodern natures’. Alaimo (2000), 136.

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Karen Eckersley

Karen Eckersley has recently submitted her doctorate and passed her viva in December 2022. Her interdisciplinary project was funded by the Vice Chancellor’s Studentship award at Nottingham Trent University. Her thesis was entitled ‘Out of this World: Surrealist Practice and Posthumanist Ethics in the Writing and Visual Arts of Elizabeth Bishop, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning.’ She has articles on Bishop and Tanning published in peer reviewed journals, examining their work from an ecological feminist perspective. Her most recent essay was published in Gothic Nature, exploring dark ecologies in Bishop’s poetry of the shoreline. Her first book chapter on Leonora Carrington, investigating her hybrid creatures, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in the collection Beastly Modernisms, edited by Alex Goody and Saskia McCracken