A robust body of theater and performance studies scholarship examines the interplay between human rights, activism, and performance. These works tend to focus on gross human rights violations and highlight the interplay between political action and artistic works in grappling with histories of violence such as crimes against humanity. The studies range from investigations of the protests against the “disappearance” of dissidents during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, the performative dimensions of the South African Truth Commission, water rights of Ghanaians, and communal courts trying crimes of genocide in Rwanda, to artistic works addressing Japanese military sexual slavery, among others. Central to these discussions are questions around the politics of space, embodiment, the performativity of violence and identity, the politics of memory, and the ethics of research.
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Human Rights and Activism in Theater and Performance Studies
Elizabeth W. Son
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Warfare and Latina/o Social Movements
Belinda Linn Rincón
Despite receiving little to no attention in mainstream academic scholarship about US antiwar movements, Latina/o communities have a long history of protesting wars and military interventions throughout the second half of the 20th century. The wide-scale mobilization of Latina/o protestors against the US war in Vietnam marks an important development in Latina/o social movement history. Another important moment of Latina/o mobilization came in the 1980s and 1990s in response to the mass influx of refugees fleeing war in Central America that resulted in large part from US interventions in Central American civil wars. The historical context, political struggles, and modes of activism of the Central American solidarity movement distinguish it from the Vietnam antiwar movements. Yet, like earlier Chicana/o and Puerto Rican antiwar movements, there remained a concerted focus on transnational solidarity. Notably, each movement accompanied a literary and cultural renaissance in which authors and activists—and, in many cases, author-activists—joined forces to protest the political, economic, and social consequences of warfare. Some even joined revolutionary movements as internationalist volunteers. Latina/o activists and authors have drawn on rich oral, musical, and folkloric traditions and tropes to create new modes of expression and political speech. To fully account for the multiple forms of Latina/o antiwar expression, it is necessary to look beyond traditional literary genres and include protest speeches, agit-prop theater, movement manifestos and newspapers, conference resolutions, handbills, political pamphlets, corridos (ballads), oral histories, induction refusals, and testimonios, among other documents. Through alternative print cultures, Latina/o antiwar activists and authors created a space to summon and address a Latina/o readership whose concerns over war were largely ignored in mainstream publics. Latina/o authors also insisted on creative autonomy and aesthetic sophistication while remaining resolutely committed to producing socially relevant literature whose resonance extended far beyond the page. Such characteristics define a diverse body of Latina/o writing that helped galvanize Latina/o antiwar movements.
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North American Documentary Poetry and Poetics
Sarah Ehlers and Niki Herd
The terms documentary poetry and documentary poetics have been used to describe a diverse range of poetic projects that either make use of historical materials or narrate historical events. In the Anglophone context, the documentary poetry tradition emerged in the late 1920s and coalesced in the 1930s in conjunction with advancements in documentary film and the heightened cultural relevance of documentary photography. The term documentary was first used in an arts context by the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson in his 1926 review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana, and Grierson’s subsequent theorizations of documentary filmmaking depended on ideas about poetry and the poetic. While, as several critics have pointed out, documentary poetry constitutes a long tradition that goes as far back as the poems of Lucretius, Ovid, and Virgil, documentary poetry is largely a 20th-century construction, one that has shifted in relation to major technological changes that transformed the landscape of poetic composition and circulation, ongoing debates over the status of the poetic lyric, and developing ideas about the relationship of poetry writing to capitalist crisis and left political activism. The long-standing critical concern with defining documentary poetry and poetics indexes changing
ideas about the relationship between poetry and other historical and political registers. Such critical concerns, however, have often treated documentary poems as if they lack generic distinction or unique formal qualities outside of the incorporation of historical documents or materials. Across the 20th and 21st centuries, documentary poets have innovated in specific modes (e.g., as Jill Magi points out using Bill Nichols’s film theory, the expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive) and forms (especially the paratactical, collage, curatorial, and restricted). Engaging with the terrains of labor precarity, ecological collapse, and widening racial inequities and violence, such forms work in tandem with socially engaged content to address historical and political realities. In the contemporary moment, major contributions to documentary poetic traditions have been from Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) writers who innovate with documentary practices and forms to imagine new spheres of social engagement and world-building in lieu of a singular focus on institutional critique. Contemporary poets addressing the exigencies of the 21st century have also emphasized the long-standing relationship between documentary poetry and social engagement, pointing to social activism and radical pedagogy as defining features of documentary poetry and poetics.
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Latino Gay Literature
Daniel Contreras
Who are we when we read queer Latinx literature? It may be helpful in approaching this topic to think about what we mean by America along with what we mean by Latinx, or Latina/o, and Latin American. Some Latin Americans, for example, become irritated by US citizens referring to their own country as America when in fact that term refers to two enormous continents. Another issue to consider is what dynamic exists between Latino/a and Latin American as terms identifying groups of people. We should add Caribbean to this discussion, which also complicates matters since Puerto Ricans are US citizens with histories tied to the Caribbean. Mexican Americans (or Chican/aos) live in a country that borders the other “half” of their designation. Both these cases introduce vexed questions about immigration and belonging. Queer itself is not a word that escapes controversy. It can be used as a provocation, to challenge hate language by neutralizing it. But does that work? How do we know when it does? And when do we know when we have succeeded and can drop its usage entirely? And does queer automatically mean gay? In its usage as an umbrella terms what happens to the specificity of same-sex desire? And finally, literature is itself a contested term as there is no critical consensus on what exactly designates written expression as literature as opposed to simply writing. Therefore I would argue that any attempt to be comprehensive about Queer Latinx literature can only be provisional. But any such attempt that is based on critical rigor and empathy should be welcomed.
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War and Its Impact on Central American–American Literature
Tatiana Argüello
The literature of Central American–Americans is a diverse and emerging corpus of writing that testifies to the different phases and evolutions of warfare, locally and globally. This literature includes narratives about exiles and immigrants who left war zones, interdisciplinary poetry against U.S. militarized violence in different geographies, narratives about global wars and their aftermath, detective writings, and soldiers’ memoirs. War and violence have taken new shapes, and the inhumanity of war is expanded beyond the battlefield. A survey of the most representative Central American–American writers depicting these catastrophic events provides insights into the trauma of war individually and collectively and denounces its violence and causes. There are writers that propose a process of healing this history of violence and engagement with new struggles. Some of the authors in this survey make rational arguments, refuting Western-centric perspectives that justify war as a necessary and logical event. Other writers present a strong pacifist agenda as the result of having participated directly in this traumatic experience. Writers often reflect on ameliorative justice and the exile experience. Through history, they change their representation of war in Central America; later authors connect these catastrophes with violence in the United States and elsewhere. War becomes imbricated with gender violence, policing, urban policing, racism, and class discrimination. Immigrants become the main characters in many contemporary writings, and the search for identity, connected with the past of war, is common in the poetic discourse of the younger generation.
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Queer South Asian Diasporas
Kareem Khubchandani
Queer South Asian Diasporas can refer to the individuals and communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people who trace their ancestry to the South Asian subcontinent, but have lived beyond its borders. These communities and individuals generate vibrant forms of cultural production: writing, activism, filmmaking, performance art, and creative manipulations of everyday practice. Additionally, queer diaspora can refer to a particular way of analyzing South Asian public cultures and discourse through a transnational lens with an eye toward the ways that normative genders and sexualities are managed and manipulated to secure and undo nationalist projects. Given the dislocation rendered by pushes and pulls from multiple nations and communities, a common theme in the theorization of queer diaspora and the representation of LGBTQ South Asian life is the struggle over and production of “home” as physical space, affective landscape, and shared embodiment. Theories of queer diaspora help scholars understand how some practices that are not particularly associated with mainstream queer identities can be interpreted as queer, especially when read in the context of South Asian histories. The homosociality of South Asian domestic life, filmic conventions, and ritual practices lend themselves to queer interpretations. While these intimacies do not read as queer to everyone, LGBTQ South Asians precisely apprehend these queer possibilities as alternatives to white and Western gay habitus. Also, queer diaspora explains that migrant, postcolonial subjects are often perceived as having non-normative genders and sexualities given the ways that imperial projects have managed those aspects of human life. This framework is reflected in the narratives of LGBTQ South Asians who name how their (un)desirability is based on race, including the hair on their body, their ethnic heritage, and the stereotypes they are associated with.
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Radio and the (Re) Construction of Maya Identity in the Diaspora
Alicia Ivonne Estrada
Founded in 2003 by Maya immigrants in Los Angeles, California, the radio program Contacto Ancestral, which airs weekly on the community station KPFK and online, creates a sense of community through the reaffirmation of indigenous cultural practices as well as the construction of a historical memory in the diaspora. This sense of community is particularly highlighted through the articulation of a Maya identity that is linked to indigenous hemispheric struggles and their resistance movements. Through the varied interviews with indigenous elders, activists, and community members on issues that range from the Guatemalan genocide, land, and environmental struggles to the multiple forms of violence faced by indigenous immigrants in the United States Contacto Ancestral creates, to use Ann Cvetkovich’s term, a “community-based archive.” This archive highlights a shared history between indigenous peoples as well as their differences and heterogeneity. In doing so, Contacto Ancestral produces an essential space to link and empower multiple generations of particularly Maya communities living in Mesoamerica, the diaspora, and elsewhere.
