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Calaveras and commodity fetishism: the unhallowed supernatural in the work of José Guadalupe Posada’

Contribution and context: In his chapter, Gretton provides a new interpretation of Posada’s well-known ‘calaveras’ and of ‘ejemplo’ images that show humans under the power of devils, reading them against the conventional tendency to accept that Posada is reproducing (and producing) ‘mexicanidad’, the ‘eternalist’ special relation that Mexican culture to entertains with death. The chapter is a contribution to the book ReNew Art History which offers new ways of thinking Marxist approaches.

Research imperatives and process: In this essay, Posada is understood as a visual-culture producer rather than as an author, whose production arose in response to transformations of the labour market and that for cultural goods in booming Mexico City in the Porfiriato. The essay uses the work of Michael Taussig to theorise the enhanced visibility of the unhallowed supernatural in situations of intense modernisation and draws on material in collections in Mexico City and Aguascalientes, and in the US, Library of Congress, University of Austin, University of Hawaii and Art Institute of Chicago.