After reading the first few chapters of Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs I began to suspect that the novel would follow the same broad narrative path as Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the hero of the Revolution replaced by the fictional but no less charismatic Demetrio Macias. From the offset he is shown to …
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into Viva Zapata!, knowing it was both written by John Steinbeck – a figurehead of American socialism – and produced in the heyday of McCarthyism. Despite having now seen film, I still find it hard to ascribe it any kind of clear-cut ideological line. If anything, Viva …
This week’s texts are quite diverse, and yet they are each interesting to look at and think about in their own right, so I’ll do my best to cover all of them. First off, we have Thomas Jefferson’s “Tree of Liberty” Letter. Reacting to Shay’s Rebellion, which saw a group of rebels attempt to seize …