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"On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him from the streets, caf�s, and lecture halls of Mexico City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rar�muri), but it was a profound turning point in his life. Artaud didn't just leave Europe. He fled it. ""I came to Mexico to escape European civilization ... I hoped to find a vital form of culture."" The vital form of culture that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion, reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun. But Artaud's search for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost. Journey to Mexico collects very nearly all of Artaud's writings related to his voyage to the land of the Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip conveys the very personal - the physical, emotional, and financial - challenges of the journey. Artaud's Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of decolonization in a desperate search for a ""vital form of culture."""

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9781940625645

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"French dramatist, poet, actor, and theorist who attempted to replace the ""bourgeois"" classical theatre with his ""theatre of cruelty,"" a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself. Artaud was a member of the Surrealists and a co-founder of the Alfred Jarry Theater. He is the writer of The Theater and Its Double, as well as plays, poems, radio broadcasts, essays and other works. Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with Italian visual artist Federico Gori, Closing Melodies (2023), a phantomatic encounter between Nietzsche & Van Gogh, and Dionysos Speed (2024), amongst other works. Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of philosophy, poetics, media, & design. He is best known as the author of a biography of Georges Bataille, published in Reaktion Books' series Critical Lives, and as the editor and translator of seven volumes of Bataille's writings, including Inner Experience, Guilty, On Nietzsche, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, and The Cradle of Humanity. Contra Mundum published his translation of Phrases: Six Films by Jean-Luc Godard & his Gilgamesh in a revised second edition."

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