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Showing posts from October 27, 2009

Latino/a performance in the 1990's.

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Marrero, María Teresa. “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s”. TDR, Fall 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3, Pages 131-153. Marrero tries to reconstruct art histories of Latino performance in the 1990's, cautiously admitting this can only constitute a partial project. She argues that following Diana Taylor, we can assert that performance, both as art and political practice have the effect of transforming cultural repertoires, thus expanding possibilities for representation. Initially Latino/a theater was oriented towards the building of communities and much too often relegated issues of gender and sexuality, privileging and implicit male, heterosexual identity, while female roles were often limited to traditional and passive women. This prompted the emergence of new forms of theater and performance that subverted women's traditional identities, as well as made visible the diversity of sexual identities within Latino/a communities, which was

National romances: romantic love and nationalism.

Sommer, Doris. “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation”. Cultural Critique 16 (Autumn 1990), pp. 109–28. Through the analysis of national novels Sommer is set to tackle the relationship betweeen politics and erotics in Latin America. She argues that narratives of love have been central to the disciplining of subjects within national projects, marked by the conflicts and eventual coming together, reconciliation and amalgamation of different (class, race, region, religious, culture) sectors, producing the effect of: suggesting the productive (though transgressive and heroic) union of different actors in favor of a national project, and at the same time, creating the effect of (sexual, romantic or familial) intimacy among national subjects, resulting in a "passionate patriotism." While romantic love engenders the nation, nationalism is based on romantic love. She produces a dialogue between Foucault's "history of the bodies" and Anderson'