1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy is a philosophical masterwork by a skilled writer, researcher, and thinker. Susana Draper, a professor of comparative literature, weaves recurring theoretical concepts into every story she tells and each literary text, film, and testimony she analyzes. A truer understanding of ’68, she argues, may be gleaned from discursively assessing the encounters that enabled a “cognitive democracy” (understood herein as a political milieu defined by the coming together of diverse perspectives) to flourish in which paradoxes and contradictions could take place without expecting the transparency and coherence of ideal or theoretical positions. Draper’s analysis largely succeeds, and in the process, she forges a more varied, less canonical “constellation of the moment.”
Seeking to use new archives of revolutionary participation to reveal how 1968 and its many afterlives are understood in Mexico and beyond, Draper intensively studies José Revueltas, a cultural figure of the era...
