Most scholars study postrevolutionary Mexico as a period in which cultural production significantly shaped national identity through murals, novels, essays, and other artifacts that registered the changing political and social realities in the wake of the Revolution. In Biocosmism, Jorge Quintana Navarrete shifts the focus to examine how a group of scientists, artists, and philosophers conceived the manifold relations of the human species with cosmological forces and nonhuman entities (animals, plants, inorganic matter, and celestial bodies, among others).
Drawing from recent theoretical trends in new materialisms, biopolitics, and posthumanism, this book traces for the first time the intellectual constellation of biocosmism or biocosmic thought: the study of universal life understood as the vital vibrancy that animates everything in the cosmos from inorganic matter to living organisms to outer space. It combines both analysis of unexplored areas—such as Alfonso L. Herrera’s plasmogeny—and innovative readings of canonical texts like Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica to examine how biocosmism produced a wide array of utopian projects and theorizations that continue to challenge anthropocentric, biopolitical frameworks.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Alfonso L. Herrera’s Plasmogeny: The Inorganic Life of the Cosmos
Chapter 2: Resurrecting the Past: Animality and Chemical Ethics in Alfonso L. Herrera
Chapter 3: José Vasconcelos: Botanical Ethics and the Cosmic Race
Chapter 4: Dr. Atl and Nahui Olin: Volcanism, Cosmological Forces, and Space Exploration
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Index
