Latin American Theater and Performance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Lane
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Theater Studies ◽  
Latin American Theater ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Theatrical practice in Latin America predates the European conquest, and since the conquest has been a site for the expression of new cultural formations, often enacting or contesting prevailing systems of power. As in the field of theater studies generally, the term “theater” encompasses a range of performance practices, and overlaps in key periods with religious rites, political spectacle, festival, social and modern dance, performance art, and popular culture forms. Major concerns of the field include asking how European-based dramatic forms have been reinvented through their continuous interaction with indigenous and African cultural forms, and vice versa; what are the meanings of modernist and post-modernist dramatic forms in societies where modernity is an unstable context; how theater practitioners have transformed traditional forms of theater into an activist “Theatre of the Oppressed”; and what role theater plays in the contemporary neoliberal moment. While scholarship on theater in Latin America dates to the early 20th century, the field of Latin American theater studies—which defines its object of study as theater from the entire region—emerged alongside Popular Theater practice of the 1960s and 1970s, which similarly understood itself as a continental project. Both practice and scholarship, forged in the context of the Cold War, embraced a socially critical stance in favor of the working classes (the “popular” classes), understood theater as a vehicle for social change, and believed that shared Latin American aesthetics and methods were emerging. The field has retained this fundamental interest in the social and political dimensions of theater and has responded to the changing geopolitics of the region. A significant development in the field was the shift in the 1990s from a continental to a hemispheric frame. The hemispheric orientation sought, on one hand, to reshape disciplinary boundaries that rendered the formative, and often repressive, relation between the United States and its southern neighbors invisible; on the other, it affirms shared histories, culture, and aesthetics between US Latinx and Latin American communities and artists. This bibliography addresses the history, theories, and practices of Latin American theater studies and maps its changing disciplinary boundaries and thematic concerns over time. The periodization is intentionally loose. For example, works related to revolutionary aesthetics and the politics of the body are concentrated in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, but these represent threads in both practice and scholarship that continue well past those dates.

The Latin American Publishing Circuit in the 21st Century: Following the Trajectory of César Aira

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 056-064
Author(s):  
María Belén Riveiro ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
César Aira ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Cesar Aira ◽  
The 1960S

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.

The Political Sociology of a Concept: Corporatism and the “Distinct Tradition”

2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Howard J. Wiarda
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Latin American Studies ◽  
University Of Florida ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Third World Development ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
World Development

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.

Military Governments and the Transition to Civilian Rule: The Colombian Experience of 1957-1958

1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hartlyn
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Civilian Regimes ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Coups D'etat ◽  
Shed Light

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars interested in studying Latin American politics inevitably were drawn to the study of military coups d'etat and their causes. In the 1980s, a number of the countries in Latin America whose civilian political regimes were overthrown by military regimes may undergo or attempt to consolidate processes of democratization or redemocratization. Thus scholarly interest has tended to shift away from seeking to understand the causes for military overthrows of civilian regimes toward the study of prospects and processes of democratization or redemocratization in Latin America. In this context, the reexamination of earlier examples of durable transitions from authoritarian military regimes to civilian regimes may shed light on the relative importance of different factors in determining particular outcomes. This article carries out such a re-examination for the case of Colombia, analyzing the transition from rule by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) through the crucial period of the interim military junta (1957-1958) to the consociational National Front political regime.

scholarly journals The Interdisciplinary Project of Chicana History

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miroslava ChÁvez-GarcÍa
Keyword(s):  
Mexican American ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chicano History ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Gender Culture ◽  
Interdisciplinary Project ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chicana history has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. While initially a neglected area of study limited to issues of labor and class, today scholars in history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, among others, study topics of gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as youth culture, reproductive rights, migration, and immigration. In the process, these scholars contribute to the collective project of Mexican and Mexican American women’s history in the United States, making it diverse in its analytical themes, methodologies, and sources. Indeed, Chicana history is not confined by disciplinary boundaries. Rather, its cross-disciplinary nature gives it life. This article charts that interdisciplinarity and demonstrates its significance in expanding and recasting Chicano history more broadly.

scholarly journals Latin America through the Literary Looking-Glass, And What Bolaño Found There

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
Arnoldas Stramskas
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Effective Form ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Roberto Bolano

Abstract This article provides a broad overview of social, economic, and cultural politics in Latin America, especially concentrating on what became known as the Latin American literary “boom” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the region’s political context - colonial past, neocolonial/neoliberal present, the role of intellectuals within the state and cultural affairs. The second part focuses on Roberto Bolaño - the writer who put Latin American literature on the world map which has not been seen since the boom years - and his novel The Savage Detectives. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that literature not only shares common elements and possible intentions with social and political critique, but that it can also be an effective form of social and political criticism. In such a case, Bolaño’s work may be read not as inferior fictional account but as a complex, intersectional investigation of socioeconomic as well as ontological condition in Latin America that other modes of inquiry may overlook.

Miguel Ángel Estrella

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dirty War ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Latin American Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the place of Argentine pianist Miguel Ángel Estrella in the politics of Latin American music, focusing on the Dirty War, the wave of repression and violence by military regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Estrella’s recital in September 1987 as a tribute to Nadia Boulanger, who died in October 1979 and was one protagonist in Estrella’s story. It then considers Estrella’s political activities in Argentina and his being formally charged with subversion, sedition, and terrorist activities, as well as his promotion of the masterworks of the Western canon. It also contextualizes Estrella’s experience in light of a number of broader issues, relating Estrella and his traditionalist repertory to the ongoing debate among composers and critics over socially engaged music (música comprometida); the historical antecedents of this debate and how they inform present-day reactions to the status of either the avant-garde or the Western canon in música comprometida; and how scholars in the United States might understand Estrella’s story.

Cultural Divergence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter offers a periodization of the literatures of the Americas from the late nineteenth century through the postwar period. After acknowledging the emergence of a brief “transamerican literary imagination” forged in the early nineteenth century, I chart the gradual breakdown of this shared literary imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of two distinct modes of literary production in the hemisphere: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. I track the emergence of these systems: in the United States, through the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” the late nineteenth-century “age of realism,” the interwar “modernist” period, and the “postmodern” era of the second half of the century; in Latin America, through the modernismo of the turn of the twentieth century, the vanguardia movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s.

From the Cold War to the Cruelty of Violence: Jean Franco's Critical Trajectory from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City to Cruel Modernity

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Lettered City ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

Latinos Reject America’s Definition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Hayes-Bautista
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of

The Chicano Generation, largely the grandchildren of refugees who fled the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1930, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s and rejected the nativist definition of Latinos by consciously embracing their Mexican and Latin American cultural heritage. When they traveled to Mexico, however, they discovered they were considered to be American rather than Mexican, and they often wound up feeling that they did not truly belong to either identity. New immigrants from Mexico and Latin America arrived and settled in without placing much attention on their cultural heritage.

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