Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Performance: From Hegemonic Nationalisms to Social Critique

The Latin American and Caribbean region prides itself for being rich in performance art traditions of various kinds. However, despite (or maybe because of) a modern emphasis on and proliferation of folkloric forms, the domain of performatic public culture in the region has become a highly contested terrain. Performance practice today is a privileged stage upon which social tensions are displayed, disputed and given shape. Historically, the construction of national identity in particular has been intimately tied to the politics of performance in Latin America and the Caribbean at least since the consolidation of modern nation-states in the 1930s. In fact, such consolidation has relied heavily on the folklorization of indigenous art, giving rise to the political use of local cultural forms as metonyms for the nation. In recent years, this tendency has been extensively debated in the anthropological literature. Moreover, the contemporary emphasis on identity politics and cosmopolitanism in the region has radically shifted the Latin American performance art landscape. Multiple social actors have used performative strategies to advance diverse political, cultural and human rights causes, such as racial identity politics, indigenous environmental rights, land entitlement, claims to religious authenticity, gender and sexual minority rights, and human and political rights in the wake of democratic transitions. In cosmopolitan fashion, history has been recostructed, recast and redressed in Nueva Trova song, guerrilla dance public interventions, dérive happenings, and T-shirt spray paintings at political rallies. By drawing on ethnographic examples from across the region, this symposium seeks to explore the ways in which performative practices in Latin America and the Caribbean become entangled with the production of indigeneity and/or cosmopolitanism as identity markers in the global world order. Moreover, we seek to understand the political role of performance art in projects of both hegemony-building, and social and cultural critique.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 800 characters (approximately 100 words) to both Natasha Pravaz (npravaz@wlu.ca) and Alberto Guevara (aguevara@yorku.ca) before February 9, 2007. For more information, access the following website: http://www.casca-aes2007.anthropologica.ca/