Broken Pencils and Crouching Dictators: Issues of Censorship in Contemporary Argentine Theatre

Autocensura [self-censorship] continues to be as dirty a word for the Argentine artist as it was during the 1976-83 military dictatorship. When asked about the subject, artists commonly respond much as the writer Héctor Lastra did in 1986: "I have always insisted that self-censorship does not exist. What exists is censorship. To speak of self-censorship is a way of being reactionary, because you're attacking the individual." ¹

Is the line between censorship and self-censorship in recent Argentine cultural production as easily drawn as Lastra would have us believe? Argentine cultural critic Andrés Avellaneda has written that cultural control inextricably links together Power and Text: "The history of culture is also the history of censorship." ² Censorship undeniably played a role in Buenos Aires theatre produced during the first years of the military dictatorship. Nevertheless, even under repressive conditions, theatre practitioners successfully staged plays that carried strong sociopolitical messages. Although there are documented cases of theatres and playwrights having been censored, it is not always easy to track the effects of censorship. It is even more difficult to trace the extent of censorship's internalized counterpart, self-censorship, on the individual artist. Many Argentinean theatre practitioners, echoing Lastra, have been loath to entertain the idea of a self-silencing or a self-editing as a conditioning factor in their efforts to (re)present extratheatrical reality on stage. In cases where the presence of the internal self-censor has been acknowledged, it has been cast in an oppositional relation: external censorship at the hands of victimizing military/government forces versus the conscious or repressed self-censoring acts on the part of victimized artists. The practices of censorship and self-censorship, often presented as mutually exclusive, do not appear therefore to explain the many resisting texts produced under dictatorship. How can we account for artistic agency in the face of (self)censorship?

I believe that the relationship between censorship and self-censorship is not nearly as oppositional as it might seem. In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler argues that the process of censorship always remains incomplete because the censored object or act "takes on new life as part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship." ³ Diana Taylor complicates the relationship between censor and censored in her analysis of the "underside of [Argentinean] social spectacle" in which she argues that the military and resisting movements such as the Madres shared the same cultural discourse. ⁴ Building upon these authors' work, as well as upon theories proposed by certain Chilean critics to account for censorship-evasive strategies in their nation's theatre, I argue that a third element, counter-censorship, is also present in acts of social resistance in the face of external censorship and internal self-censorship. Through theorizing various theatrical responses to censorship, I seek to open up the oppositional paradigm that, in my opinion, has contributed to the current crisis in Argentine theatre and cultural production.

Censorship and self-censorship in an Argentine theatre under dictatorship ⁵

Argentina was no stranger to state repression or organized violence when the coup hit in 1976, but, with the military's National Reorganization Process [Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, often referred to as the Proceso], terrorism became institutionalized in a project designed to impose "national values" along with "national security." Popular statistics place the number of people "disappeared" during the eight-year Junta rule at 30,000, and most of these disappearances occurred during the dictatorship's first years. During those early years, Argentines experienced an overwhelming sensation of insecurity and powerlessness, as the military regime carried out its systematic campaign to "re-organize" national life. Telephones were tapped; all news was filtered through the Secretary for State Information; and National Security Law 0840, Article 3, specified that any unauthorized report of an attack on social order was punishable by incarceration. The Postal...