Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Our Theater,” In Performance, Debra Castillo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The final chapter of Miguel Rubio Zapata’s El cuerpo ausente (performance político) ‘Absent body (political performance)’ begins with an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, at first glance a very unexpected inspiration for a group famed for its politically-charged performances...

Where The Wild Things Go: Tourism And Ethnic Longing In The Theatre Of Rodolfo Santana , Vicky Unruh

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Tapping into the performative intricacies of tourist activity and showcasing the negotiations of performed ethnicity in the implicit contrasts between tourists and the people they travel to see, Latin American and U.S. Latino theatre artists use the tourist character or theme to investigate the cultural negotiations marking contemporary social life. This work parallels critical theory that investigates the tourist as an improvisatory player in trans-regional interactions and unpacks the tourist-“native” binary to revise conceptions of people and cultures that travel. As exemplified in two plays by Rodolfo Santana (Venezuela), artists deploy the tourist theme to critique culturalism, that is, to …

The Procession That Travels Inside: Yuyachkani's "Santiago" , Miguel Rubio Zapata

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In collaborative theater projects like Yuyachkani, it is hard to define the exact moment when a new project begins. Generally we have a very imprecise idea as our initial point of departure and we explore it more fully in the day-to-day work, where it changes a great deal. Santiago is a project that began as a processional performance piece in the public plazas before premiering as a theatrical work in its current form, as a largely Quechua-language play focusing on permutations of faith in an almost uninhabited Andean village. The final project arrived as a result of this complex …

The Lost Apple Plays: Performing Operation Pedro Pan , Kimberly Del Busto Ramírez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors took flight from Cuba to the United States, establishing the largest recorded exodus in the Western Hemisphere. The displaced children and the country they left behind are often metaphorized using a popular Latin American nursery rhyme, “The Lost Apple.” Now, more than four decades later, Operation Pedro Pan persists through a revealing body of performance by and about a nation’s exiled children. The Lost Apple Plays investigates how memory, identity formation, nationhood, citizenship, and migration have been dramatized through these performances. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, director/actor/playwright Mario Ernesto Sánchez, singers …

Passion Plays: The Dominican Diaspora In Waddys Jáquez’S P.A.R.G.O., Maja Horn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article analyzes how the play P.A.R.G.O. (2001), written, directed, and performed by the Dominican Waddys Jáquez represents the contemporary experience of the Dominican diaspora. Jaquéz himself forms part of a new generation of diasporic artists who frequently return “home,” to the Dominican Republic, and who, unlike the previous generation of diasporic artists and writers, continue to find their most valuable audience there. This tendency towards an increasing interconnectivity between diaspora and homeland is represented and a/effectively reinforced in P.A.R.G.O. The play brings the experience of the diaspora close to home for the audience, not by compelling them to identify …

It’S My (National) Stage Too: Sabina Berman And Jesusa Rodríguez As Public Intellectuals, Stuart A. Day

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Based on interviews with Sabina Berman and Jesusa Rodríguez, this article offers a view of artists as public intellectuals in Mexico. These two prominent figures, in addition to staging biting commentaries on Mexican politics, have reached beyond the traditional theater to take on the role of public intellectuals (artists, activists, professors, performers, writers, among others, who speak truth to power) on the national stage, Berman through a book on the 2006 elections and her television program, Shalalá, and Rodríguez as the stage director for the massive public demonstrations of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Both artists see the importance of reaching …

Dangerous Spaces, Dangerous Liaisons: Performance Arts On And Of The U.S./Mexico Border, Kirsten F. Nigro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay will consider the performative arts on the border, ranging from script-based plays to performance pieces in urban spaces and public installation pieces. These will be analyzed according to their focus on 1) the plight of the illegal immigrant; 2) the violence that has become a daily factor in the lives of border citizens; and 3) the symbolic efforts to make a sacred space out of one as seemingly unsacred as the border; and if not a sacred space, one that is more transparent and hopefully, less dangerous and threatening.

From The Margins To The Mainstream: Latino/A Theater In The U.S., Jorge Huerta

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The author discusses Latina/o theatre as it evolved from social protest theatre of the 1960s to professional theatre companies and theatre artists working throughout the country. Whereas there were few scholarly articles, no books about Latina/o theatre and no plays in print (in English) in 1970, today there is a wealth of material about the theatre of the three major Latina/o groups, Chicana/os, Cuban-Americans and (mainland) Puerto Ricans. Each of these groups has a distinct relationship to the United States, as expressed in their plays.

Mobile Thresholds, Immobile Phones: Staging Migration, Return, And The Empty Home In Recent Ecuadorian Theater , Amalia Gladhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians have emigrated, principally to Spain and the United States. A growing body of recent Ecuadorian plays has treated the experiences of the migrants and, tellingly, the experiences of those left behind. This essay focuses on three plays that present migration as a kind of threshold, a space of transition that is paradoxically temporary yet solid: Con estos zapatos me quería comer el mundo ‘With These Shoes I Meant to Take on the World,’ (2002) by Jorge Mateus and Pablo Tatés; El pueblo de las mujeres solas ‘The Village of Solitary Women,’ …

(De)Humanizing Humor: The Anthill Of Life And Politics In The Theatre Of Sabina Berman, Priscilla Meléndez

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines several theatrical works of this Mexican dramatist by means of ironic humor as a powerful resource to examine the nature of human communication, and to expose the serious and devastating social and political aspects of contemporary culture: machismo, political corruption, sexual violence, sexism, exploitation, historical manipulation, and hopelessness. In a tense environment where humor might not seem appropriate, Berman masterfully uses and critically examines it as a means to understand humor’s serious implications and its comic imperfections, as she subtly recurs to but also parodies some of the most recognized theories of humor. Berman’s use of incongruity …

An Account Of Señorita Maquiladora, Rosina Conde

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Performer and scholar Rosina Conde finds that Señorita Maquiladora is the performance piece that has gone through the most transformations, not in its script, but in its text, as it is constantly being rewritten to speak to contemporary social issues. She believes that Señorita Maquiladora has potential because it speaks to global themes that affect workers in the assembly plant industry, not only with respect to the questions of the environment and health, but also in terms of the patriarchial patterns that force these women to compete in an atmosphere of a vertical structure dominated by men, with all the …

On The Dark Side: Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" And Valenzuela's "La Palabra Asesino" , Donald L. Shaw

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Conrad’s famous “The Secret Sharer” and the short story “La palabra asesino” [“The Word ‘Killer’” in its English translation] by the Argentine Luisa Valenzuela both concern psychological self-exploration and self-discovery, through contact with a killer, a situation which challenges conventional moral standards. It is suggested that a comparison between the two stories may throw reciprocal light on both of them. In each story an act or acts of murder becomes a trigger which sets off a train of psychological events, somewhat different in the two cases. Discussion of the differences highlights the authors' priorities and the significance they attach to …

Bellmer's Argentine Doll: Alejandra Pizarnik And The Dis¬Articulation Of The Self , Melanie Nicholson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay argues that Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires, 1936-72), widely recognized as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century Spanish-American poetry, constructs a poetic self that bears a remarkable resemblance to the dolls of German surrealist sculptor and photographer Hans Bellmer. Both poet and artist portray the doll as a passive and melancholy figure, an object that is often dismembered and otherwise stripped of agency. I examine the distinct implications of such a figure for a male surrealist photographer and a female post-surrealist writer. By means of this comparison—admittedly complicated by vast differences in artistic medium and historical context—I …

Displaced Identities And Traveling Texts In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) , Laura R. Loustau

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Luisa Valenzuela's Black Novel (With Argentines) Roberta and Agustín, the main characters, cross geographic, physical, psychological, sexual and textual borders in order to regain their own writing space, one which would allow them to narrate their own past. Themes that include exile, memory, and literary and artistic creations are presented from a theatrical and deterritorialized space. In Black Novel the city of New York is the stage where the characters/actors create and mix together space and time coordinates. The intention is to (re)construct the individual memory of the characters, and in a more ample perspective, the collective memory of …

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fuentes, Carlos. Christopher Unborn by Asela Laguna

Faber, Sebastian. Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975 by Miguel González-Abellás

Haines, Brigid and Margaret Littler. Contemporary Women’s Writing in German: Changing the Subject by Anna K. Kuhn

Cate Arries, Francie. Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French by Carmen Moreno-Nuño

Tremblay, Rosaline. L’Écrivain imaginaire, Essai sur le roman québécois, 1960-1995 by Betty Louise McLane-Iles

Ponomareff, Constantin V. One Less Hope: Essays on Twentieth-Century Russian Poets by Maria Khotimsky

Corpses And Capital: Narratives Of Gendered Violence In Two Costa Rican Novels , Laura Barbas Rhoden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a region prone to violence and political corruption, Costa Rica has been touted as an ecological paradise, a stable democracy, and an egalitarian society. However, Costa Rican fiction from the late twentieth century contests this idyllic image and presents instead a world of intrigue, violence, and criminality. El año del laberinto (2000) by Tatiana Lobo and Cruz de olvido (1999) by Carlos Cortés are two novels that serve as an excellent introduction to developments in postwar fiction and scholarship from Central America. In my analysis, I first situate the novels in the context of Central American cultural and political …