Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism by Patricia A. Ybarra (review)

It's a tired truism, but I'll say it anyway: theatrical productions are both aesthetic and social events. Theatre's "simultaneous materiality and abstraction" (xii) both permit and disallow certain representational moves, which Patricia Ybarra interprets as giving rise to an aesthetic politics of embodying hemispheric neoliberalism—this all-encompassing system in which we dwell and of which many of us writing and reading here are beneficiaries—and its economic violence, meted out in human corpses and trafficked goods. Theatre's aesthetic and social facets meet and intertwine in the nuanced investigation in Latinx Theater and the Times of Neoliberalism. Ybarra's formalist critique shapes an understanding of the effects and affects of hemispheric neoliberalism, made material in plays by contemporary Latinx artists.

A politicized formalism is flowering in several fields, including literary studies (Levine 2017; Kramnick and Nersessian 2017) and queer of color critique (Amin, Musser, and Pérez 2017). Ybarra intervenes in theatre studies, foregrounding the politics of theatrical form—including character, dramaturgy, emplotment, and mise-en-scène. Her critique is grounded in the stage's material constraints and capacities: its inability to portray "the large-scale violence found in feature films and documentaries" (xii); bounded spatiality; phenomenology of repeated death; and objects whose semiotics can change (see also Roach 1996; States 1987). These components prove more productive for representing "the lived material experience of the neoliberal condition," despite "the near impossibility" of this task (ix), than a host of mainstream aesthetic approaches. Like Bertolt Brecht, Ybarra is both scholar and practitioner, and she considers crucial the link between the "problem of representing geopolitical economic violence onstage" and the process of "thinking about these problems offstage" (x). Yet more like José Esteban Muñoz (1999; 2009) than Brecht, gender and sexuality politics are central to Ybarra's formal analysis. Ybarra traces how Latinx theatre's expressive strategies—including innovative representations of character, queer temporality, overt theatricality, and antirealism—translate critiques of neoliberalism into aesthetic modes. Ybarra assesses Latinx theatre after the ebbing of Third-World solidarity projects and ethnic portrayals that characterized modes of theatre-making under cultural nationalism (3). The book highlights a new generation of Latinx theatre artists experimenting with play-craft to capture neoliberalism's economic violence, incarnated in indigeneity as a site of neoliberal refusal; the femicides of Ciudad Juárez; the US-Mexico border's ongoing narcoguerra; and Cuba's Special Period (specifically the Balseros, or Rafters Crisis). These plays reject the impulse to "document," literalize, or stage testimonials of violence that follow a humanistic line of inquiry into the shared experience of pain and trauma or forge audience bonds of empathy for a liberal hero (14–18).

Latinx Theater sets out goals and concepts entrenched in the history of the Latinx Americas and their (forced) march toward neoliberalization. Overarchingly, Ybarra aims to make "visible, audible, and perceivable [...] the relationship between particular neoliberal policies, disciplinary apparatuses, and physical, emotional, and epistemic violence," to help us "understand the complex trafficking of bodies, goods, and ideas as embodied and performative practices that interrogate modes of nationalism emergent in [...] neoliberal ideology and practice" so that we can place "particular mobilizations of neoliberal subjectification [...] within a hemispheric context" (9). This inquiry alters questions and inferences about neoliberalism by positioning the capitalist system within a framework that centers Mexico, Cuba, and their US-linked diasporas and borderlands as sites of critique. Neoliberalism as framed here precedes the Bretton Woods system; Ybarra locates the dawn of neoliberal regimes in the emergence of maquiladoras (multinational factories) on the US-Mexico border in the 1960s (3).

After framing neoliberalism, Ybarra commences with a view of the eschatological pan-Indigenism of Cherríe Moraga and, to a lesser extent, Luis Valdez—two dramatists long associated with Xicana/Chicano cultural nationalism—before turning to playwright and director Michael John Garcés, whose work differs greatly but who is invested in representing neoliberal indigenous...