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Latin American Performance Studies: Random Acts or Critical Moves?

What has this to do with Latin American theatre? A great deal. Latin American immigrants and migrants—or “nomads”—are moving north, and bringing theatre and performance along with them. Telling the story of theatre in the Americas—Latin American or American—will demand a reckoning with the history that produced these vibrant forms and their dislocation and reinvention in new contexts. Anglophone or Francophone postcolonial writing may model a useful precedent: postcolonial critiques have pressed the canons of English and French literatures to take account of their own disciplinary complicity in the colonial spread of European languages and cultures. Postcolonial critique does not simply advocate inclusion in the existing field of art or literature; rather, that critique aims to remap the contours and aims of the discipline itself. So too does transnational and hemispheric work in the study of performance in the Americas insist on a reckoning with the real, material discipline that American institutions, scholarly and otherwise, have exercised across the hemisphere—politically, socially, culturally, and even, yes, theatrically. Such a reckoning will mean, among other things, acknowledging that Latin American performance and theatre marks a vast range of social and aesthetic practices that do not neatly coincide with the regional, linguistic, or “non-Western” coordinates often associated with the name; that Latin American theatre is often located north of the border, and that it speaks Spanish and sometimes English, and other languages as well; that this theatre draws on a range of performance languages with genealogies that have rarely been engaged by our theatre histories on either side of the border; and, not least, that many of these performance practices have been the only or primary means of keeping and sharing social memory for those outside networks of power.