Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina by Noe Montez (review)

Noe Montez's monograph joins the growing archive of English-language studies of contemporary Argentine theatre and performance. It is an apt project that capitalizes on certain Argentine theatre artists' international prominence as well as current academic interest in what is commonly termed "memory studies." Montez focuses his account of 1990s and early twenty-first century Buenos Aires theatre through the combined concepts of individual memory narratives and governmental transitional justice. The approach is suitable to a study of theatrical activities during the Menem and Kirchner presidencies in that it allows the author to consider theatrical practice as both informed by and informing individual experience as well as state policy. Each of the four chapters looks at one facet of this relationship through multiple plays, the majority created by artists coming to the fore at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Chapter one examines how Menemism's "narratives of reconciliation and forgetting" were countered by resistant narratives in plays and productions by El Periférico de Objetos, Javier Daulte, Marcelo Bertuccio, and Luis Cano. Chapter two's focus on Teatroxlaidentidad's inaugural 2000 festival begins with Patricia Zangaro's catalytic A propósito de la duda before moving to a consideration of identity narratives and artistic collaboration with the Grandmothers of the desaparecidos' children through plays by Héctor Levy-Daniel and Mariana Eva Pérez. Chapter three, through an analysis of productions by Damiana Poggi and Virginia Jáuregui, Federico León, Mariano Pensotti, and Lola Arias (her much-studied Mi vida después), surveys the postdictatorship generation's own "memory construction" projects against the backdrop of the tandem presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and renewed governmental inquiry into period abuses. Finally, chapter four analyzes the still-contested legacy and memory of the Malvinas/Falklands War running through plays by Julio Cardoso, Patricio Abadi, Mariana Masover, and Lisandro Fiks. The study concludes with conjectures regarding artistic memory construction under Mauricio Macri's administration.

This reviewer welcomes Montez's sustained analysis of individual plays, particularly those that have not received much English-language scholarly attention, as well as the various forms of transitional justice that have been attempted in postdictatorship Argentina, which are carefully traced. However, the book is marred by a recurring lack of specificity, completeness, and accuracy. Missing diacritics weaken dozens of endnotes, while source names and titles are misspelled and contributions are misattributed (e.g., in note 36 of chapter 1, I am credited with developing the idea of allegory under dictatorship, when in fact it is exclusively Ana Elena Puga's application). In the text, production dates are sometimes given incorrectly, supporting details are missing (e.g., the author mentions that "several politically charged performances questioned the [military] government's intrusion into public life" [3] but never specifies which performances), and important publications are left uncited, among them Irene Villagra's 2015 study of Teatro Abierto and Florian Becker, Paola Hernández, and Brenda Werth's 2013 collection, Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater, which corresponds to Montez's project and brings together multiple essays on Latin America, including Werth's own essay on postdictatorship Southern Cone theatre. The stakes involved in accurate and complete critical representation are larger than they may appear; to do anything less is to weaken the field of contemporary Argentinean theatre and performance studies. This contribution should therefore be read alongside and within the context of important studies already published.