Black aesthetics and cultural intervention in the magazine Mandrágora

Abstract

This article examines the magazine Mandrágora (1938–1943) as a vanguard cultural project that intervened critically in the Chilean literary field through an aesthetic of the “black.” Focusing on the group’s manifestos and poetic production, the study argues that darkness functions not merely as a formal resource, but as a generative and subversive principle that articulates aesthetic negativity and poetic autonomy. The analysis situates Mandrágora within the cultural and literary debates of Chile during the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting its confrontation with dominant realist and socially committed poetics. From a theoretical framework grounded in aesthetic autonomy and cultural intervention, the article proposes that Mandrágora constituted a sustained challenge to prevailing mechanisms of literary legitimation, redefining the role of poetry as a space of resistance, non-identity, and symbolic critique within the modern cultural field.