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

To engage with Latin American theatre and performance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is often to engage with dictatorship and its aftershocks. Noe Montez’s Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina is the latest entry in this rich field, which explores the complex responses of theatre artists to the privations and abuses sustained under authoritarian regimes, and the inevitably chaotic processes of re-democratization that follow. Montez calls transitional justice the “practice of responding to human rights violations and state-sanctioned violence through governmental action” (5). He positions himself in a genealogy of scholars of Latin American performance, including Catherine Boyle, Ana Elena Puga, Diana Taylor, and Jean Graham-Jones, whose seminal Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre under Dictatorship is perhaps the clearest precursor to his study. While Graham-Jones’s monograph (and the majority of recent scholarship on Argentine performance) focuses on theatre in Buenos Aires during the years of “the Process” (1976–83) and its immediate aftermath, Montez’s looks exclusively at “the works of playwrights who began their careers in the 1990s or later . . . trac[ing] the artistic lineage of Argentine playwriting practices and explor[ing] the ways the dictatorial past continues to inform and shape the theatrical creation of artists who have come of age and built their careers in a time of transitional justice” (13). Montez examines specific performances and theatre-makers, but his goal is to demonstrate the processual nature of memory work and its imbricative relationship with theatre: “neither transitional justice policies nor memory narratives remain static, but . . . they continually evolve, and theatrical performances can intervene in the process of creating social and political change” (16).

Montez’s theoretical framework is largely semiotic, assessing “specific choices in directing, design, and performance, in addition to the text” (13), as well as venue, to gain as complete a picture as possible of each performance event. He contrasts this approach with several recent studies by Spanish language and literature scholars that often ignore the material realities of production in favor of the text. Yet, Montez takes pains to historicize the performances as well to help the reader understand how they respond to “government-enacted memory narratives” (9). He acknowledges that this approach risks exaggerating the political impetus for each production, but deems it necessary to make his study accessible to a wide readership not necessarily familiar with Argentine political and social history.

Chapter 1, “Resisting the Menem Administration’s Narratives of Reconciliation and Forgetting,” looks at four deconstructive ripostes, inspired by the European avant-garde, to official state actions of memory and reparation during the 1990s and early 2000s: El Periférico de Objetos’s Máquina Hamlet, adapted from Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine; Martha Stutz by Javier Daulte; Marcelo Bertuccio’s Señora, esposa, niña y joven desde lejos; and Los murmullos by Luis Cano. Although the works vary stylistically, from the extreme puppet violence of Máquina Hamlet to Bertuccio’s “static staging and linguistic aphasia” (46), they are united in their desire to not so much subvert the Menem administration’s strategies of transitional justice (for example, pardons for officers of the regime) as to oppose “the very nature of state-sanctioned political discourses and the political capital that must be exerted to uphold them” (24).

Chapter 2 considers plays that premiered as part of Teatroxlaidentidad (Theatre for identity), which began as a single performance event sponsored by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 2000, but has grown into a major festival and performance workshop. The Grandmothers enact cultural productions to educate the public about the importance of transitional justice policies based on blood relationships instead of presidential pardon. This work grows directly out of their primary mission, using forensic science and DNA testing to reunite biological families with their children who were taken from their “disappeared” mothers as newborns during the Dirty War to be raised by families sympathetic to the...