From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico by Leo Cabranes-Grant (review)

Leo Cabranes-Grant’s From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico rethinks Mexican colonial performance in order to understand the poesis of identities-in-becoming through the prism of labour – particularly the networks of labour that sustained the colonial project in the viceroyalty of New Spain from the 1560s to the end of the seventeenth century. Using Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory, Cabranes-Grant concentrates on the incorporation and enactment of drums, feathers, pottery, and bones within performances by humans, seeing these objects as “participants in the becoming of networks” rather than as props or symbols used to make meaning semiotically (21). Cabranes-Grant thus steps away from the large body of scholarship that concentrates on analysing how colonial performance made meaning semiotically through the restaging of scenarios of conquest to coerce and sustain colonial power – although he argues that these networks may eventually create semiotic meaning. More specifically, as the title of the book suggests, From Scenarios to Networks clearly engages Diana Taylor’s paradigmatic The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), complicating her conception of the scenario while transforming her “acts of transfer” into “figures of relay” in chapter two.

In addition to his engagement with material objects in performance, Cabranes-Grant also spends considerable time examining music–dance forms such as the mitote and the tocotín, which incorporated indigenous practice into Catholic worship in complex ways that belie simplistic ideas of cultural mixing or syncretism. Complementing recent work by Paul Scolieri, he argues instead that these dance performances often mark vectors of affective energy and demonstrate intercultural reflexivity. More forcefully, Cabranes-Grant challenges the dependence of Latin American cultural and literary studies on mestizaje as the primary theorization of hybridity (rightfully so, as mestizaje is arguably always a state-sponsored discourse that is anachronistically applied). He thus complicates notions of hybridity that ignore the already hybrid nature of Meso-American and European societies. What is particularly ambitious about this study, in addition to its theoretical innovations, is the author’s attempt to reassemble the networks he studies through the archive rather than through the co-present participant observation and face-to-face interactions upon which the theorists he engages (such as Pierre Bourdieu and Latour) rely. Consequently, it is crucial to acknowledge the methodological intervention into archival practices that this book proposes and its utility for scholars of colonial performance.

The necessarily long introduction to Scenarios to Networks walks the reader through the many conceptual frameworks that the book employs, which include literary criticism, philosophies of science, performance studies, and Latin American cultural theory. Substantial space is given to the author’s modification of those frameworks and his engagement with actor–network theory, which allows him to return to his hybrid theoretical tools more efficiently in the body chapters.

Chapter one, which best exemplifies the importance of the economic materiality of objects in networked colonial performance, concentrates on a masquerade given for Martín Cortes by the Avila Brothers in 1566. Cabranes-Grant analyses the incorporation of locally made pottery and sourced feathers into the celebration, revealing the economic and labour networks within which the celebrants were embedded. Thus, the mitote that restaged the conquest which they enjoyed did not simply replay the Spanish conquest to coerce indigenous people into submission to the Crown or the Church or to bolster Spanish pride in previous acts; instead, it created and displayed the deep systems of accumulation enacted by powerful men two decades after the Conquest. An emergent moment of identity was produced by these spectacles in a manner that Cabranes-Grant frames as “prepositional,” meaning that the objects incorporated into them “locate the flows of exchange that mobilize a network” (50).

Chapter two, “Reassembling the Bones,” considers the display of saintly relics by the newly arrived Jesuits in 1572 alongside Triumph of the Saints, a play that demonstrates the linguistic hybridity of Nahuatl and Spanish languages...