NEH Summer Seminar in Buenos Aires

Some of the participants will participate in

LASA at 50

Latin American Studies Association

New York, New York, May 27 - 30, 2016

The 2016 meeting in New York City will celebrate LASA’s 50th anniversary, marking the milestone by returning to the great hemispheric metropolis that witnessed LASA’s inaugural congress in 1966. The Program Committee seeks to promote a distinctive event that simultaneously looks backward and forward. “LASA at 50” will assess the evolution of Latin American studies over the past halfcentury, paying special attention to how the locus of the field has changed in terms of transnational actors and flows and the shaping of new identities. At the same time, the event will also explore the challenges of creating a more participatory, diverse, and socially just future for the region and its interlocutors.

The New York Congress thus has two interrelated dimensions. First, we hope to take stock of the global and regional trends that have affected LASA’s creation and evolution over its first five decades. This calls upon us to explore the major shift from a Cold War context—with its always exaggerated emphasis on a bipolar world—to an indisputably multipolar context that has been shaped by recent transformations in the global geography of trade and investment and the social, cultural, and political phenomena that have both produced and responded to such transformations. Part and parcel of such hemispheric and global change is the significant transformation in the growth and structure of LASA’s membership and its implications for the organization’s role in shaping Latin American studies, both within the hemisphere and beyond. As of 2014, LASA had grown to over 9,000 members, almost 40 percent of whom are from Latin America and the Caribbean. Of course, major political, economic, and cultural shifts in the region over the last several decades, as well as the changing face of US-Latin American relations— and that of broader North-South and South-South interactions—are vital for an understanding of how academic production on Latin America has changed in the hemisphere and the world.

Second, we hope that “LASA at 50” will advance a broadly inclusive, critical discussion about the future of area studies and Latin American studies. We seek to promote a discussion of the ways LASA engages with the continuing evolution of cross-regional interactions that dynamically shape transnational processes, not least South-South relations. The historic 50th Congress will encourage a cross-fertilization of area studies, bringing Latin Americanists into dialogue with scholars and activists from other regional associations. Part of this task might involve an examination of the notions of “area” and “region” (particularly their importance in terms of identity projects), and an interrogation of how collective spatial identities are transformed in the context of shifting modes of hegemonic power. For example, who are the area or region builders in the twenty-first century? And what is the coherence of Latin America as a unit of political, cultural, or scholarly analysis in this century, whose early years have witnessed formidable obstacles and challenges to the future of area studies as an enterprise (in relation, say, to the burgeoning presence of “global” and “security” studies)? These issues can be engaged at a theoretical level, but they also map onto LASA’s long-standing commitment to forge a regional future that reflects greater participation, diversity, and social justice. The New York Congress’s collective deliberations on the occasion of LASA turning 50 at a critical worldhistorical moment would thereby underscore our association’s decades-long enterprise of crossing borders, integrating knowledge and practice, and building communities.

PANEL 1
Staging Reparation, Its Impossibility and the Diminutive in 20th century Latin American Theater
Fri, May 27, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA
Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract
In this panel we will look at the ways theater has long dealt with the effects of violence in Latin American societies, staging trauma and memory, while using techniques of embodiment and disguise. Responses to violence, state terrorism and political repression in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia took different forms since the second half of the 20th century, when different facets of theater of protest began to develop. This explicitly political theater, although still present, has been slowly replaced by another type of contestation in response to a new type of unease with the neoliberal political climate and globalization. The papers in this panel will variously investigate the transformation of Latin American theatre’s political engagement since the 90s, through an exploration of both its topics and its staging strategies. The different analysis will thus examine how the idea of symbolic reparation is explored as a flawed process, and the diminutive, the local and the personal become intense sites of exploration as well as contestation to Human Rights discourse.

Laurie Lomask, Bronx Community College
La másmínima (a)parte: Valorization of Smallness in Mauricio Kartun’sTerrenal
Fri, May 27, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA

Abstract
In his latest play, Terrenal (2014), Argentine writer and director Mauricio Kartun presents a modern-day rewriting of the myth of Cain and Abel. The elaboration of the Biblical story transforms into a critique of capitalism and industrialization, the source of the ambition and greed that provoke Cain’s ultimate fratricide. Throughout the work, the moral force and thematic universality of the play is filtered through details of smallness, from the scale of the staging (three actors, no set, and only a few props) to the dedicated labors of the two brothers (Cain, who cultivates red peppers, and Abel, who gathers beetles). Through an exploration of the aesthetics of the diminutive and the concentrate, drawn from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and other critics, this paper reflects on the ethics of neo-liberal market forces and the value of the local. It will highlight select differences in the means of theater production in Buenos Aires as compared to other cultural capitals, such as New York. It furthermore identifies a shift, specifically in Argentina, but more generally in contemporary Latin American theater, that is suspicious of global institutions and reminds the public of the importance of protecting even a small portion of oneself apart from the forces of globalization. This paper also invites reflection and debate on the economic conditions that foster or inhibit artistic production in the U.S. and Latin America.

Alejandra Marin Pineda, University of Illinois at Chicago
Beyond reparation: A response to the label “Theatre of Human Rights” in Colombia
Fri, May 27, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA

Abstract
Colombian theatre gained some relevance since the second half of the 20th century through a successful insertion in the “Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano”. This Nuevo Teatro was defined as essentially political, meaning an explicit engagement with social reality expressed in denouncing social injustices, uncovering the truth of State violence, reconstructing the memory of the acts of State terror, and calling their audiences to a public debate about the transformation of an unjust social order. In this paper, I propose that, since the 90s, face to the consolidation of neoliberalism and a long and deteriorated armed conflict in the country, this political commitment seems to have given way to a different kind of engagement: In the absence of effective State policies of truth, justice, and reparation, “Theatre of Human Rights”, as termed by the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro, would work as a cultural medium for symbolic reparation. Thus conceived, the political task of theatre would be to restitute the victims’ name, their dignity, their place in the social contract that binds the nation together, and of course, the humanity they have been stripped of by violent acts. I aim at interrogating this humanitarian approach, first by examining it in the light of a critique of Human Rights discourse, and second, by contrasting it with two contemporary plays that reflexively address the experience of violence and dehumanization beyond the idea of reparation: La técnica del hombre blanco by Víctor Viviescas and Donde se descomponen las colas de los burros, by Carolina Vivas.

Isadora Grevan de Carvalho, Oberlin College
Inconsolable Fragmented Memories in Vicente’s O Assalto and Tolcachir’ Tercer Cuerpo
Fri, May 27, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA

Abstract
The theaters of Brazil and Argentina have responded vigorously to the dictatorships and their socioeconomic effects. After the fall of these repressive military regimes, remembrance and reparation have become tightly interwoven, especially since the process of uncovering truths and the names of those responsible for the “disappearance”, imprisonment, and torture of their victims has been arduous. The figure of the patriarchal authoritarian father soon became associated with the military regime, creating a tension between the traditional family structure and the emergence of new definitions of the family and the role of its members in society, pushing gender and racial boundaries through embodiments on stage. In Brazil in particular, the so-called Brazilian (economic) miracle (1964-1973) paradoxically occurred during what is considered the worst period of torture and political and social repression in its history, which led a series of playwrights to explore the effects of these neoliberal practices through strategies of disguise. In this paper, I will explore and create connections between an Argentinian play by Claudio Tolcachir and one by the Brazilian playwright Jose Vicente. Vicente’s play O Assalto (1969) deals with a forced personal encounter between two individuals representing completely different social backgrounds, in an apparently therapeutical and cathartical process of coming out through language and their sexualities. While in Tolcachir’sTercerCuerpo (2008), a similar encounter results in a dissolution of boundaries, not just between the protagonists, but also in stage direction in which the individual’s personal, social, and economic frustrations are revealed to resemble a psychoanalytic session. In both plays, memory becomes a reconstructive, reparative and, at the same, flawed process wherein the violence of the past repressive regimes are internalized and conceptualized as personal alienation and a search for a fragmented dystopic personal/national identity.

PANEL 2
Latin American Theater Praxis: Classroom, Stage, Street, and Academic Field (panel II)
Mon, May 30, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA
Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract
Our panels seek to define, invigorate, and create momentum for our field at a crucial moment when the humanities are at a crossroads in higher education. Through our presence in two joint panels at LASA we hope to promote the field of theater and performance in Latin America and create a network of scholars and practitioners who are actively driving scholarship and interest in the field. We are defining praxis as theory in practice, so this refers to the classroom, the stage, the street, and the future of our discipline. We include pedagogy, staging, research, and activism, among the broad areas of focus.

Shannon April Sweeney, Colgate University
Guillermo Cacace’s  Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento and the praxis of forcework
Mon, May 30, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract
Guillermo Cacace’s Mi hijo solo camina un poco más lento by the Croatian playwright Ivor Martinić has been one of the most successful and striking stage productions of the 2014-2015 theater season in Buenos Aires. Since its opening as part of the 2014 Festival Internacional de Dramaturgia Europa + América it has been sold out and continues to be so through October 2016. Although this new festival had very little publicity and no budget, the production seems to have evoked a powerful response. There is something uniquely Argentine happening here. A sensibility: not only in how the work translates into a specific cultural space, but how the theatrical praxis creates a specific type of work in the making.
I propose to exam Cacace’s production, exploring both his directorial choices and the acting style and technique. In doing so, I will examine theater’s unique capacity to present a concentrated form of what Krzysztof Ziarek has called art’s forcework. By analyzing the praxis of the performer in relation to the event as a whole, I will investigate the dual nature of theater’s transformative forcework.