“Amantes del Barrio Franklin”: Reading Chilean Shakespeare Through Cultural Anthropophagy

Abstract

Cultural Anthropophagy, an artistic approach that originated in Brazil, takes cannibalism as a metaphor for consuming what is useful from the colonizer’s culture and using it to make new, self-affirming art. Because of its emphasis on the artist’s autonomy, Cultural Anthropophagy provides a useful framework for reading Latin American Shakespeare productions without casting the practitioners as the subaltern. Cultural Anthropophagy makes space to see the cultural and political impact of Latin American Shakespeare performance when practitioners engage anthropophagically with Shakespeare. This article analyzes a 1987 street performance of Romeo y Julieta by Chilean theater troupe La Compañía Escuela Teatro “Q” in Santiago, Chile. I argue that Teatro “Q’s” production—which used Pablo Neruda’s 1964 translation of Romeo and Juliet—is an example of a dual-level process of Cultural Anthropophagy. Neruda’s translation was itself anthropophagic and enabled Teatro “Q” to produce an adaptation of Romeo y Julieta that viewers recognized as distinctively Chilean, and which drew on community participation to enact a process of empowerment at a time when a repressive regime offered few outlets for the popular voice. Reading Latin American Shakespeare performance through Cultural Anthropophagy centers the process and outcomes of practitioners’ work while destabilizing the dominance of Shakespeare.