Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America by Marcela A. Fuentes (review)

Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America is a book for our times. Marcela Fuentes’s excellent study of how digital activism and street protest engage and transform each other expands our notions of performance and efficacy. The book also speaks formidably, if unintentionally, to a post-pandemic moment. Fuentes’s interest in the tactics used by internet users to “reproduce the affective appeal of street protests to actively engage audiences” (53) reverberates in vital ways only months after the book’s publication. As theatre and performance artists have adapted to hybrid styles that blur the line between the digital and the live, Performance Constellations offers a theoretical lens to push beyond traditional notions of liveness into the nowness and eventness that underlie Fuentes’s arguments.

Quite elegantly, Fuentes builds on the work of Steve Dixon, Diana Taylor, Philip Auslander, Judith Butler, and other key performance theorists interested in the complex limits of performance. Fuentes brings them into conversation with scholars in new media studies and digital activism. This allows for an expansive and productive understanding of performance, as both a tool for activism and an ever-changing network of practices. Her notion of “performance constellations” provides a theoretical model for approaching “tactics of disruption and worldmaking” that result from the interface between street protests and digital networking (3). The “entanglement” makes body-based and digital performances “cocreators of insurgent collective actions” (2). These actions must be understood not as finite events constrained by time and space, but rather as “dispersed, multisited, and asynchronous forms of collective action” (108). Working with Michel de Certeau’s notion of “tactics,” Fuentes notes how the interaction between embodied and digital protests generates strength and “counterpower protocols to navigate the challenges brought about by technologies of pervasive surveillance, control, and manipulation” (114).

Fuentes presents five compelling case studies in chronological arrangement. They illustrate how changing technologies enrich the possibilities of performance constellations, and the various ways in which constellations may operate. After building her theoretical framework in the introduction, Fuentes devotes her first chapter to the electronic civil disobedience of the US-based Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Fuentes explores how EDT’s virtual sit-ins and conceptual HTML performances in the late 1990s supported and built on the Zapatista movement in Mexico. The Zapatista “investment in autonomous, bottom-up consensus-based structures of governance” found new shape and was amplified by EDT’s efforts (26). EDT exemplifies an early experiment in transforming disjointed participation in a common cause into a felt convergence through digital participation.

In her second chapter, Fuentes considers “stream-out performance constellations” through which local resistance becomes global resistance (44). Her focus here is on Argentina in the early 2000s. Against the backdrop of economic collapse, Fuentes traces how online movements such as the digital cacerolazo, which operated synergistically with on-the-ground activism, united otherwise distant protests to defy the increasingly disembodied mechanisms of neoliberalism. Chapter 3 brings readers to Chile in 2011 and introduces two student protests that heavily depended on and were forged from social media mobilization. The projects comprised both street and digital components, inseparable in content and form. These “performance constellations of asynchronic cooperation” demonstrate that social media technologies are more than tools (67). Fuentes concludes that the multiplatform performances actively “challenged neoliberal logics of individual progress and generated conditions for alternative civic engagement” (21).

Fuentes returns to Mexico in her fourth chapter to consider the power of hashtags and what she deems “pulsating performance constellations” (91). Focusing on the deadly detention and abduction of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, the chapter explores how digital activists counteracted a repressive government narrative and successfully linked the tragic incident to a broader network of violence. Fuentes shows how the technical, symbolic, and ultimately performative nature of hashtags generate “worldmaking effects” (105). A short coda describes the 2018 proabortion protests in Argentina. Fuentes explains how...