Description
Book SynopsisProvides an understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. This title shows how the repertoire of embodied memory - conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances - offers alternative perspectives to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact.
Trade Review“Diana Taylor is perhaps the most lucid and original Latin American performance theorist. In her new book, she tackles a very complex topic: the relationship between writing, performance, and historical memory on our continent. Her interdisciplinary approach provides us with new bridges and pathways between cultures, metiers, and disciplines. My colleagues and I have long been waiting for such a book.”—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, performance artist and writer
“Diana Taylor is that rare scholar—a master of theory who speaks from experience and writes with passion. She tells us that as a child she ‘learned that the Americas were one.’ In this extraordinary book Taylor explores—from the pre-Columbian to the postmodern—America’s oneness of contradictions, revelations, wounds, celebrations, rituals, and arts.”—Richard Schechner, University Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and author of
Performance Studies: An Introduction“Diana Taylor’s ideas, carefully etched out here to great effect, provide a new vocabulary to understand the work that performance does in culture and broadens our sense of how performance achieves its effect. Full of insight and information,
The Archive and the Repertoire should finally unsettle the hegemony of narrative in Latin American literary and cultural studies.”—David Román, author of
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS“The Archive and the Repertoire is an original and brilliant contribution. It will take the study of Latin American performance to a new level with its attention not only to politics and to history and its consequences, but also to memory, the media, and aesthetic/political practices that take into account the hemispheric and the global.”—Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, author of
The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga"A timely collection of essays. . . .Taylor weaves together insights, examples, and critical strategies from [performance studies and Latina/o American studies] and her exemplary book makes a major contribution to both." -- Marvin Carlson * TDR: The Drama Review *
"Persuasively argued and elegantly theorized,
The Archive and the Repertoire constitutes a necessary intervention in performance scholarship." -- Lisa Wolford Wylam * Theatre Research International *
"Taylor's work is an important step in acknowledging marginalized expressions of cultural memory. Its most notable contribution is undoubtedly a defense of the growing field of performance studies as a tool of decolonization." -- Katherine M. Hedeen * Latin American Research Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Who, When, What, Why xiii
1. Acts of Transfer 1
2. Scenarios of Discovery: Reflections on Performance and Ethnography 53
3. Memory as Cultural Practice: Mestizaje, Hybridity, Transculturation 79
4. La Raza Cosmetica: Walter Mercado Performs Latino Psychic Space 110
5. False Identifications: Minority Populations Mourn Diana 133
6. "You Are Here": H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance 161
7. Staging Traumatic Memory: Yuyachkani 190
8. Denise Stoklos: The Politics of Decipherability 212
9. Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11 237
10. Hemispheric Performances 266
Notes 279
Bibliography 303
Index 321
