The archive and the repertoire
Subtitle: performing cultural memory in the Americas
By: Diana Taylor.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 326
Subjects: Memory -- Social aspects -- America.; Performance art -- Political aspects -- America.; Performing arts -- Political aspects -- America.; North and south.; Postcolonialism -- America.; Postcolonialism and the arts -- America.; Ethnicity -- America.; Minorities -- America -- Social conditions.; America -- Civilization.; America -- Ethnic relations.
Description: Diana Taylor provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory--conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances--offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña's show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. -- Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [303]-320) and index.
"A John Hope Franklin Center book"--Half t.p.
Table of contents: title: Who, when, what, why; title: Acts of transfer; title: Scenarios of discovery : reflections on performance and ethnography; title: Cultural memory and identity : mestizaje, hybridity, transculturation; title: La raza cosmética : Walter Mercado performs Latino psychic space; title: False identifications : minority populations mourn Diana; title: "You are here" : hijos and the DNA of performance; title: Staging traumatic memory : Yuyachkani; title: Denise Stoklos : the politics of decipherability; title: Lost in the field of vision : witnessing 9/11; title: Hemispheric performances.