Imagining a Continent: Recent Research on Latin American Theater and the Performing Arts
Scholarly books on Latin American theater and the performing arts not only have bloomed in recent years, but their range has been enormously diverse. As a group, the books under review here present multitextured trends that reflect some of the changes, transformation, and shifting emphasis in theoretical ideas, as well as practical salient issues involving the cultural, social, and political life of Latin Americans from all over the [End Page 196] region. The large number of books received by Latin American Research Review gives testimony to the explosion of research in the field, generated from both U.S.-based institutions and their Latin American counterparts. Using a variety of disciplinary lenses, the books also indicate the significant overlap of theories, disciplines, and fields that has taken place at the heart of theater and performance studies. As a consequence of this blurring of boundaries between disciplines, some of the publications reviewed here can be considered valuable additions in the humanities as well as in the social sciences fields.
From the general to the particular, we have experienced a proliferation of works on the topic. Impressive reference material has seen the light recently, such as the Encyclopedia of Latin American Theater (2003), edited by Eladio Cortés and Mirta Barrao-Marlys; the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 305: Latin American Dramatists (2005), edited by Adam Versényi, which contains articles on thirty-one playwrights; the inspiring Historia multicultural del teatro y las teatralidades en América Latina (2005), by Juan Villegas; and the locally-focused Teatros y teatralidades en México Siglo XX (2004), by Domingo Adame. Country-specific studies have appeared throughout Latin America and the United States, including anthologies of plays with introductory essays that are sources of important data and thoughtful analysis.1
To mention but two of the countries not represented in this review in book form, Argentina and Cuba, both have seen a proliferation of important recent works dealing with theater. In Argentina, Osvaldo Pellettieri presents one of his latest renditions of the state of the field in the aftermath of the collapse of the Argentine economy in December 2001 and the psychological defeat it created, as seen from the stage, in a collection of essays and surveys with and by prominent scholars in Teatro argentino y crisis (2001–2003) (2004).2 In contrast to Lola Proaño-Gomez's recent edifying [End Page 197] study on the "Revolución Argentina" (1966–1973), Poética, política y ruptura: Argentina 1966–73: Teatro e identidad (2002), in which she...
