A Forum on the State of Latin American Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States Today

In an effort to provide TJ readers with a broader view of contemporary Latin American theatre and performance studies, I invited scholars working in the United States to contribute brief personal essays setting forth their thoughts on the current state of Latin American theatre and performance studies. In my invitation, I posed several questions as possible points of departure, among them: the evolution of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the past twenty years, including the development of specific fields of scholarship within the larger context of Latin American theatre and performance studies; the success with which our field has engaged with other related disciplines; the intersections of Latin American and US Latino / a theatre and performance studies; the challenges facing the study of Latin American theatre and performance within today's US university, as well as those challenges specific to the study of our own field within the larger context of Latin American theatre and performance studies; and the future of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the US academy.

While the thirteen fascinating essays that resulted from this invitation do not pretend to supply an exhaustive overview of Latin American theatre and performance studies, they demonstrate--often polemically--how far our field has come and how far it still has to go.