Latin American Theatre Research Articles

Las musas griegas en América Latina: de tuteladoras de la élite a inspiradoras de la cultura popular

This text shows the survival of classical mythology in Latin America through the specific case of the Greek Muses, who inhabited Latin American theater halls during the 19th and 20th centuries. After a diachronic tour of the halls where the presence of the Muses can be observed in the facades and interiors, we will try to get closer to the political meaning of the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne in these spaces of sociability. Once the corpus of coliseums with Muses has been located and systematized, we will propose that Euterpe, Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore and their sisters, beyond their ornamental or decorative dimension, could have been the expression of the Latin American bourgeois spirit during the Belle Époque (1870-1920). Later, from the second half of the 20th century, the Muses began to appear in popular and mass culture, democratizing their iconography and meaning without losing their inspirational character.

Principled pragmatism: A Latin American contribution for foreign policy analysis?

The key purpose of this paper is to identify key Latin American theories proposed to study foreign policy. The essay points out that Latin America has made a significant contribution to foreign policy analysis. The most important conceptual contribution in the field is the concept of principled pragmatism. A crucial premise is that Latin American nations resort to this type of policy to come to agreement with the United States, address domestic issues, advance national interests, and cope with economic problems. The paper is divided into four sections. The first describes key analytical models and theoretical approaches created to explain foreign policy. The second identifies the Latin American thought on this subject. The third section explains the concept of principled pragmatism. This approach stems from the models and theories explained in the second section and from the Latin American thinking described in the third section. The last segment explains the case study of Cuban foreign policy in the early 1960s using the notion of principled pragmatism.

Principled pragmatism: A Latin American contribution for foreign policy analysis?

The key purpose of this paper is to identify key Latin American theories proposed to study foreign policy. The essay points out that Latin America has made a significant contribution to foreign policy analysis. The most important conceptual contribution in the field is the concept of principled pragmatism. A crucial premise is that Latin American nations resort to this type of policy to come to agreement with the United States, address domestic issues, advance national interests, and cope with economic problems. The paper is divided into four sections. The first describes key analytical models and theoretical approaches created to explain foreign policy. The second identifies the Latin American thought on this subject. The third section explains the concept of principled pragmatism. This approach stems from the models and theories explained in the second section and from the Latin American thinking described in the third section. The last part explains the case study of Cuban foreign policy in the early 1960s using the notion of principled pragmatism.

Activist masks in the Latin American social protest

Abstract Masks, balaclavas, eye masks, and various accessories have been consistently used to hide the face, from Greek times through the grotesque of the Middle Ages to the Latin American theatre festivals of the 1980s. In the twenty-first century, technological advances such as facial recognition, which are being used for the biopolitical control of the face, caused activists to start developing different mechanisms to cover their faces in public spaces. In other words, the mask is not used solely as a device that builds unique aesthetic-political senses but is also used to avoid being captured by surveillance cameras. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the masks used by activists in Latin American public protests, generating new signs that circulate widely in the semiosphere such as physiognomy, representation, and evocation. For this, we will return to Juri Lotman’s proposal on the semiosphere and the notion of facesphere developed by José Finol, concepts that operate as epistemological and heuristic frameworks that allow understanding the concrete meaning production processes as a global dimension and not only a particular one. What faces are hidden and what physiognomies are shown in the social protest? What borders are established? What political and aesthetic meanings do they build? These are the questions that this paper attempts to answer from a perspective of cultural semiotics.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives

Hernández, Paola. Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2021, 232 pp. ISBN: 9780810143364 (tapa blanda) / 9780810143371 (tapa dura) / 9780810143388 (eBook). El auge que las prácticas documentales han tenido en el ámbito de la creación escénica en las últimas dos décadas se ha visto acompañado por un creciente interés crítico dedicado al estudio de los nuevos modos en los que el teatro busca acercarse a lo real. Recibido: 20 de junio 2022 Aceptado: 19 de agosto 2022

Grotowski, Kantor y Mrożek: Tres itinerarios del teatro polaco en América Latina

The central core of this article aims to theorise about the process of theatrical transitions, specifically based on the part dedicated to the “transitions” of Polish theatre in Latin America. The development of the theory begins with a fundamental question: how did and does Polish theatre influence and influence Latin American theatre, and at the same time, what were its points of departure, its routes, its journeys? In this work, the category of “transition” raises several problems. It is defined in two ways, it is both an episteme and a category. Consequently, this research framework will offer to analyse, present and show which are the axes of transition that have marked the perspective of sense and meaning in Latin American theatricality from the 1960s onwards, taking as the object of study for this purpose the influences of Grotowski, Kantor and Mrożek. If so, these broad time frames would predict an “ultimate destiny” that remains to be discovered and that will “allow” us to cover long periods of time in the context of the proposed study. It is necessary to mention that the article will work on two categories of research, namely 1.- The axis present in Genealogy (Foucault): The pass, the transfers, the mechanisms of translation; 2.- On the axis of the theatrical epistemes that organise, reinterpret, distribute the discourses in their respective fields of action. Finally applying the Theory of Transitions, it will be possible to observe and study in detail the starting points, the “scenic routes” that these three creators had on the continent.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives By Paola S. Hernández. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022; pp. viii + 219, 13 illustrations. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives By Paola S. Hernández. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022; pp. viii + 219, 13 illustrations. $34.95 e-book. - Volume 64 Issue 1

Susana Distancia: memes and popular culture during the COVID-19 pandemic

Between the end of March and June 2020, COVID-19 quickly spread in Mexico. As a response, the Mexican government announced its national prevention campaign, called ‘Susana Distancia,’ a set of measures, recommendations, conferences, educational resources, and a chatbot. At the centre of the campaign was Susana Distancia’s character, a young woman designed in a comic-book-style, echoing the Mexican lucha libre heroes, who recommended keeping 1.5 m (6 feet) of physical distance to prevent contagion. In the following visual essay, we analyse Susana Distancia’s role, from its institutional origins to its later transformation as a popular culture meme. Based on the Latin American theory of the popular, we argue that the Susana Distancia, as a meme, used various mechanisms to support and challenge the institutional discourse. In this sense, Susana Distancia can be considered a meme that embraces the popular: a cultural artefact that travels across different languages, spaces, and rituals, from cyberspace to the streets, from governmental intentions to everyday performativity. When we use lo popular as a category, we refer to the possibility of enacting subaltern narratives in aesthetic and ethical terms. Multiple readings and manifestations of Susana Distancia demonstrate popular culture as a means of travelling through diverse semantic appropriations. Various forms of popular culture: the politised, the artistic, the erotic, the authentic, the mainstream, and the political, converge in the translation of meaning, from the institutional discourse to the lived experiences of the Mexican population.

Lo decolonial como tamiz emancipatorio: dinámicas raciales y religiosas en Cuba

To talk about the decolonial its necesary to know in what context we use the term and the traps it hides itself, which colind itself to ideological, political and racial manipulations. From etnology we will be presenting the subject from contemporary Latin American theories, which unmask continual assumptions of the coloniality of power in full forcé, which generate an epistemic racism that desqualifies all tipe of civilizing though or rationality from ethnic knowlegde. For this reason to delve into the subject at hard We´ll reflecto n what we understand by des and de/ colonial, and from there, taking into account our cuban homeland history establish links of emacipatory propousal, with the racial in general and religious in particular.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance ed. by Trevor Boffone, Teresa Marrero and Chantal Rodriguez

Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance ed. by Trevor Boffone, Teresa Marrero and Chantal Rodriguez

L’avvento del teatro latinoamericano in Italia negli anni Settanta; Un modello etico e poetico per un teatro radicato sul territorio

In 1977 two important theater encounters took place in Italy: the first was the National Convention of Teatri di Base (Casciana Terme, 18-22 March), the second one the International Atelier of the Teatro di Gruppo (Bergamo, 28 August-6 September). These events, attended by hundreds of theater groups including the Teatro Nucleo (Argentina/Italy) and Cuatrotablas (Peru), enabled Italian and Latin American performers to share working methods, to imagine new forms of management and to create an international network of independent groups that claim their marginality as an instrument of affirmation of their ethics and poetics. The energy and creativity of Latin American artistswho used the theater as an instrument of resistance in the hard social and political contexts where they operated leave an indelible mark on Italian colleagues, both from an artistic and a human point of view. In this article we will try to retrace the main stages of these two meetings and reflect on the way in which the Latin American theater of the seventies influenced (and still influences) Italian theater.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

An Australian Neobaroque: The Latin American neobarroco and Antipodean transgression

This essay will argue for the relevance of the ‘neobaroque’ in relation to recent examples of Australian poetics. The baroque and neobaroque are central strains of Latin American poetry, and much has been made of the neobaroque turn in Latin American theory, with the alternatives it proposes to hegemonic, linear narratives of modernity and rationalism. However, despite the fact that some of Australia’s greatest writers have profoundly baroque qualities, the baroque as an aesthetic, ontological and/or political category receives scant attention in Australian criticism. In light of these concerns, this essay will provide an outline of both baroque and neobaroque poetics with relation to Australian, European and Latin American examples. I then address the work of leading Mexican poet Coral Bracho, and consider her influence on the last collection of the late Australian poet Martin Harrison (Happiness, 2015). In examining the relations between Bracho’s neobaroque contortions and Harrison’s ‘late style’, I propose that Happiness is illustrative of an alternative trajectory of Australian poetics, which turns from the discipline and reticence of Anglophone models in order to embrace ambiguity, disorder and incompletion – an imagination of complexity (as opposed to its reduction).

Analola Santana. Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theater. U of Michigan P, 2018.

Analola Santana. Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theater. U of Michigan P, 2018.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives by Paola S. Hernández

Latin American theory on dependency and marginality: Revisiting anandiacute;bal quijano to analyse extractivism

Latin American theory on dependency and marginality: Revisiting anandiacute;bal quijano to analyse extractivism

Brazilian Portrayals of Indigenous Rights in Western Europe during the 1970s and 1980s

AbstractFrom the mid-1960s, Brazilian and European activists collaborated to raise awareness about human rights violations in Brazil, which at the time was under an authoritarian military regime. From reports on torture, to week-long conferences, cultural events, boycotts, petitions and protests, a wide range of activities contributed to the emerging transnational human rights movement. For the most part, activists focused on the themes of political repression, torture, inequality and development. However, at some point during the dictatorship, the discourse of Brazilians—and, by association, of their solidarity networks—began to address the indigenous question, raising indigenous peoples’ struggles as a matter of human rights, as valid as any other, and contributing to their salience within the domains of international human rights organizations and institutions. Given the Brazilian Left’s failures to cohesively mobilize for indigenous rights thus far, this change in discourse is deserving of further attention. In this article, I address the emergence of indigenous rights within the Western European network of solidarity movements comprising resistance to Brazil’s military regime. These debates, as components of the transnational human rights movement of the 1970s, can be used to better understand the behaviour of Brazil’s Left in this international setting, as well as the wider movement itself. Furthermore, it will be shown that indigenous rights were portrayed through the conceptual framework of ‘Latin American Theory’, as opposed to more commonly cited concepts of minority rights or multicultural citizenship.

Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theater By Analola Santana. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; pp. x + 256, 22 illustrations. $75 cloth, $29.95 paper, $29.95 e-book.

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RETHINKING POPULIST DISCOURSE FROM LATIN AMERICA: ALGORITHMIC ACTIVISM AND THE CONSTITUTION OF A PEOPLE IN CHILE

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to explore some of the ideological and empirical limits of studies on populism from a perspective based on Latin American history and theories, on one hand, and current ideas about digitalization and political discourse, on the other. I will first argue that studies on populism have a monolingual bias that conceals an ethnocentric view on academic research. As a consequence, when the term “populism” is applied to Latin American political discourse and history, it implies a pejorative view on democracies other than liberal European. Leaving aside this perspective, I will then present a different view of Latin American populisms, which allows for a richer, more complex perspective, including the key role of “the people” as a discursive actor that can even dispense with a populist leader, especially in the case of mediatized democracies. As a case study, I will analyze activism in Chile by observing Twitter’s Trending Topics (TT) during the first week of the mass protests in October 2019. The analysis of TT hashtags helped us to better desccribe this process as one of handcrafted algorithmic activism which developed at least four tactics: the formulation of explicit demands, off-hours tweetstorms, syntagmatic variation, and HT confrontation and appropriation.