Editorial Comment: The Theatre Scholar as Coyote

In a recent book on the ways in which Latin American and Latina/o literatures enter the US classroom and the literary canon, Delia Poey reminds scholars that we carry "dangerous cargo":

Like the coyotes who transport undocumented workers across the U.S./Mexico border for profit, U.S. academics are transporting texts across borders, disciplinary and otherwise. Like coyotes, we control the route to be taken and the point of entry, and play a role in how our contraband is put to use for our own benefit and in service of the powerful. ¹

Poey calls upon us to embrace both the negative and the positive qualities of her analogy, referring to the coyote in its multiple associations: the mythical archetype, the wolf-related Canis latrans, and the human border crosser. Poey's image of the coyote-scholar kept returning to me as I prepared this general issue for publication. Our scholarly self-identification as coyotes might indeed be as transformative as the shape shifting performed by the trickster figure of indigenous western US and Mexican cultures. The pesty North-American native Canis latrans's disregard for property and boundaries, while potentially liberating, can also function to caution us to "accept a certain degree of responsibility in how and to what ends we transport texts across borders and boundaries." ² Most significantly, the coyote-scholar does not perform academic tourism any more than the coyote-transporter leads tourists: each serves as a guide "in a dangerous and high-stakes journey." ³ Coyote-scholars provide multiple perspectives and voices (by ignoring arbitrary, exclusionary barriers and introducing into the curriculum hitherto ignored texts); they disrupt the relationship between center and periphery (by, for example, placing a "border crossing or border dwelling text" first on the syllabus and in the process suggesting its reading as the course's foundational text); and they meticulously contextualize their objects of study, in relation not only to other texts but also to their own histories (through differentiation and definition, and through the avoidance of such overgeneralizing categorizations as "marginalization" or "oppression").

I carefully invoke the word "border" here. Michal Kobialka—introducing his edited collection of essays on theatre history, practice, and theory united under the title Of Borders and Thresholds—underscores how, in the humanities and social sciences, the term has become thematically privileged, along with race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation. ⁴ For both Poey and Kobialka, however, a border is not such an easily fixed disciplinary space. Contemporary Border Theory has "subverted the notion of the border as the limit that defines and contains the nation, and transformed it rather into a space that not only allows for but necessitates global connectedness." ⁵ The border has become a condition, a changing site of multiple duplications and movements, its thematic privileging and jargonistic overuse notwithstanding. Consequently, and despite theatre history and practice's "very specific reading of borders and border crossings," ⁶ there is nothing necessarily stable about the borders crossed in our disciplinary practices. Kobialka makes the theatre historian's project clear: "Theatre history draws attention to the multiple shifts and transformations in the relationships among ideology, power, culture, and thought, and, in particular, to this thought, or its material presence, which ceases to support or move in the element of historico-political identity." ⁷ Theatre studies is thus not exempt but rather benefits from the perturbations, disruptions, and disturbances of its many border crossing coyote-scholars.

Poey's and Kobialka's words resonate with my own academic and artistic practices. As a US scholar and translator working in Argentinean theatre but often writing for a non-Argentinean audience, I am constantly made aware of the risks and responsibilities in negotiating the various cultural exigencies of the borders in which I dwell. The term "coyote-scholar" in many ways adequately captures my pedagogical and critical projects even as it poses an ongoing challenge to me as a theatre scholar and practitioner transporting "dangerous cargo." And as I read and reread the...