The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (review)

In her most recent book, Diana Taylor continues to enrich our understandings of the history, function, and political efficacy of performance in the Americas. This work builds on Taylor's previous scholarship by offering more than simply an expansion of the field's scope to include other parts of the Americas; here, she deploys methodological and theoretical tools from performance studies and Latin American studies in an effort to remap both disciplines into what she terms hemispheric studies. Taylor's prefatory remarks depict a few of the repertoires that shaped her development as a hemispheric performance scholar: mistranslations and indecipherable spectacles of political violence in her Mexican childhood hometown, the disciplining of her body in a Canadian boarding school, conversations around an academic department's conference table at NYU, and encuentros with other participants at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics that she organized. Her ensuing analyses underscore the myriad ways these moments of embodied practice stage histories, sustain state and colonial powers, and offer opportunities for enacting political interventions. Taylor's book provides valuable insights for scholars and students in performance and Latin American studies and for historians of all disciplines.

Taylor argues that performance is a "vital act of transfer" transmitting social knowledge, cultural memory, and identities in the Americas (2). Her assertions that performance functions as an episteme, a method, and an object of analysis echo the insights produced by other performance scholars (i.e., Dwight Conquergood, Peggy Phelan, Joseph Roach, Richard Schechner, and Victor Turner), whose work she engages throughout the book. But Taylor also productively complicates previously held ideas about performance by exposing the limits of the Aristotelian framework that shapes Turner's notion of social dramas and by tracking the particular ways performance persists – its hauntology, rather than the ontology of disappearance Phelan urges. As the book's title suggests, the roles of the archive and the repertoire in shaping cultural knowledge of and across the Americas are of central concern. For Taylor, both the archive (supposedly enduring materials, such as texts and other documents) and the repertoire (so-called ephemeral social practices, such as spoken language, gestures, and ritual) operate as valued sites of knowledge making and transmission. Taylor astutely recognizes and works against the ways that writing has come to stand in for and against embodiment and seeks to counter the historically imposed rift between archive and repertoire. Her intervention here is to validate the repertoire while refraining from characterizing it in dichotomous relationship to the archive. Instead, she seeks to explore the constant state of interaction between the two in the making of cultural meanings and social relations in the Americas.

Taylor attends to the methodological implications that arise from validating the repertoire by calling for a shift from interpreting cultural phenomena as narratives to recognizing them as scenarios or meaning making paradigms that structure social knowledge through formulaic yet adaptable performances. This is more than a semantic distinction: the "scenario" foregrounds the agency of cultural actors because it "predates the script and allows for many possible 'endings'" (28) and insists on placing spectators within its frame, thus "implicating us in its ethics and politics" (33). Taylor's reimagination of performance scenarios in the Americas encourages new understandings of the mechanisms of colonial violence and reshapes the contours of performance studies and theatre historiography.

The chapters of the book are organized around case studies that provide compelling examples of how performance stores colonial histories, transfers traumatic memory, and mobilizes cultural identities across the Americas. The impressively wide scope of Taylor's case studies offers a hemispheric view of performance that includes analyses of work by United-States-based Latina/o performance artists Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco; Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido; Latin American televisionary Walter Mercado; U.S. communities of color mourning Princess Diana; children of the disappeared in Buenos Aires; Peruvian theatre collective Yuyachkani; and Brazilian performance artist Denise Stoklos. While each...