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

At the beginning of this book, we find the author walking Mexico City's centro histórico in the midst of a political turmoil. As Leo Cabranes-Grant meets and speaks to demonstrators on the streets, he manages to locate the places where some of the events studied in his book happened: the 1566 Ávila-Cortés conspiracy and the 1578 Jesuit festival of the relics, for instance. Cabranes-Grant's book proposes an intercultural networking model to analyze such events along with indigenous songs, dances, and literary texts, such as Sor Juana's El divino Narciso. His contribution to the field of performance and literary studies proves not only relevant to understand how the past is represented and performed, but also to realize how much of the pre-Columbian and colonial past is still alive in contemporary Mexico.

The author's "quest for such a living past" (xi) takes him to put forward a critical model based on Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which provides the theoretical tools to analyze intercultural networks by reassembling them. What Cabranes-Grant presents as an "affective historiography" deals with four representations of the past that took place between 1566 and 1690. In the first chapter, a 1566 masquerade in honor of Martín Cortés—the conqueror's son—turns into an imitation of an Aztec mitote, a ceremony that in this particular case is put to the service of Spanish descendants frustrated with a political milieu that was actively seeking to diminish their privileges. Thus, what the intercultural networking analysis shows is a performance of a traditional indigenous ceremony set up by Alonso de Ávila to affirm the reproduction of economic, political, and social structures such as the encomienda and to maintain the Spanish hegemony via the conquistador's family tree.

Cabranes-Grant advances the concept of "intercultural scenarios" to explain how a performance, such as the Ávila-Cortés masquerade, can be seen beyond the idea of a mere recording of the past to a becoming of the past through different lenses. Chapter two studies religious festivals, specifically a festival organized by the Jesuits in 1578 to welcome relics sent from the Vatican. In this case, the intercultural relates to translation, or to the impossibility thereof. The author focuses on the singing of a poem in Spanish and Nahuatl in the context of "colonial transactions," that is, in a moment of the performance in which the song is neither Spanish nor Indigenous, but something else that only can exist within the performance itself. Something similar happens in Chapter three, where Cabranes-Grant studies a song from the Cantares Mexicanos in which geographical displacements lead to "circum-Atlantic networks." If in the 1578 festival what we see is a dialogue set up in a new, intercultural space, what we have in the Cantares Mexicanos is the indigenous world re-adjusted to the post-conquest world.

Performance, posits the author, is "the suspension bridge that links being to becoming" (85). The last chapter is perhaps where the reader will find this assertion employed to the greatest possible advantage. In Chapter four, Cabranes-Grant takes on sor Juana's liturgical drama El divino Narciso. With keen intelligence, he puts in dialogue philology and performance studies to read a literary text at the threshold "between its incarnation and its virtuality" (131). Cabranes-Grant's conclusion to this chapter could be applied to the whole study: performances of the past are not merely representations of such past, but bodies re-enacting time and space for the representation to become reproduction.