María del Pilar Blanco ---- Mexico’s La Ilustración Espírita: Toward a Transatlantic Understanding of a Spiritualist Archive

‘La Ilustración Espírita: Toward a Transatlantic Understanding of a Spiritualist Archive’ Dr. María del Pilar Blanco (maria.blanco@ucl.ac.uk) The publication of John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission (2011) represents a very recent and popular example of how contemporary criticism and philosophy continues to show a deep interest in the relations between humanity’s desire for immortality and the modern age of scientific confidence. Like Gray, other authors like Roger Luckhurst (The Invention of Telepathy, 2002) describe how subjects in Anglo-American industrial cultures in the nineteenth century, having broken the codes to some of the most enduring of mysteries of life, envisaged applying the same methods to dispel the shadows surrounding the afterlife. However, the narratives about the material cultures that contributed to a spectral turn of the nineteenth century have mostly focused on how this was predominantly a European and North American phenomenon. This essay seeks to shed new light on this transatlantic network of spiritualism through an analysis of Mexico City’s La Ilustración Espírita, one of the country’s magazines devoted to this doctrine. Published for over two decades, the magazine was contemporaneous with similar publications in the global north, and represents an excellent repository of the debates between spiritualists and materialists in the dawn of Mexico’s liberal age. Spiritualism and ultimately spiritualist journalism were practices that went hand in hand with the opening of transatlantic exchanges about science in the last decades of that century. I argue that by opening these archives we can start building a more historically and culturally nuanced methodology that addresses how global societies came to terms with dreams of immortality and the ghosts of an expanding scientific age. Opening the archive of La Ilustración Espírita is therefore an example of how we can begin to understand haunting as a historical phenomenon that asks to be examined at both local and global levels.