The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (review)

Reviews  119 la forma en que la crisis atravesaba a ciertos sujetos y conmovı́a su escritura, haciéndola ası́ más personal y abarcadora, más abierta a múltiples lecturas y a un público también más amplio’’ (12). Esta escritura personalizada permite, a su vez, dejar de lado los tecnicismos crı́ticos al mismo tiempo que se libera de la obsesión de ‘‘dar pruebas y legitimaciones de todo tipo’’, rasgos caracterı́sticos del ensayo académico (12). La propuesta, sin duda, es interesante y abre nuevas posibilidades de lectura y de escritura. Sin embargo, el problema con este acercamiento es que se debe mantener la calidad literaria de todos los ensayos seleccionados . Desgraciadamente, esto no se logra del todo en la edición de Ricci y Geirola: no todos los colaboradores seleccionados son capaces de escribir un ensayo literario que esté ya no digamos a la altura de los modelos que mencionan , sino que exprese la repercusión de la crisis desde la ambigüedad de una escritura personal que sea más que un discurso en primera persona. Y aquı́ está, en sı́ntesis, el problema de ¡Dale nomás! ¡Dale que va!, ya que el que lee los diecise ́is ensayos no puede dejar de notar una falta de equilibrio en la escritura de los ensayos literarios seleccionados. Se hace evidente, por lo tanto, un verdadero defase entre las intenciones editoriales y la selección incluida. Algunos de los ensayos incluidos son mayoritariamente descriptivos (Poderti, Zullo-Ruiz, Carrique , Foster), mientras que otros—aunque muy bien escritos—se acercan demasiado a ser esos ‘‘papers’’ antes rechazados (Niebylski, Reati). Esto no quiere decir que falte de ¡Dale nomás! ¡Dale que va! una escritura personalizada que puede trazar una pregunta o un problema—sin pruebas, sin tecnicismos, sin jerga—desde la complejidad de la sugerencia. LAURA DEMARÍA, University of Maryland, College Park taylor, diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 326 pages. Through the years, readers have become accustomed to the autobiographical dimensions of critical writing. In the introductory sections of many of our books we now share how our own past and personal experiences have led us to a particular field of work, and how these life experiences have influenced the way we focus what we observe and the way we interpret information. Not surprisingly, Diana Taylor takes recourse to this strategy as she examines the way in which cultural memory is performed in the Americas. The twist to this personal approach , in her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, published in 2003, is that the autobiographical is not limited to the introduction, it is not a token gesture that will give way to an objective examination of performance and performance studies. Instead, the personal permeates the entire text. As Taylor herself states: ‘‘Although the theoretical implications are no less pressing, the tone in the remaining chapters becomes increasingly personal’’ (xvi). Once this approach is revealed to the reader, it is her/his responsibility to discern how the emphasis on subjectivity and on the personal shed light on a discipline such as performance studies, described by Taylor as openended and multivocal (xvii), therefore noncanonical and nonarchival. 120  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.1 (2007) In this attempt to understand and (de)characterize performance and performance studies, Taylor confronts the reader with issues of transmission and preservation: ‘‘Is performance that which disappears, or that which persists, transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer that I came to call the repertoire ?’’ It is precisely the dynamics between the study of social memory and cultural identity in the Americas through the emphasis, on the one hand, on literary and historical documents, and on the other, through the lens of performed, embodied behavior, that Taylor attempts to reinterpret throughout her book. By questioning the privileged position that literary and historical documents have traditionally occupied—‘‘not everyone comes to ‘culture’ or modernity through writing’’ (xviii)—, Taylor calls our attention to embodied performances as a way to produce knowledge, and to the repertoire as a way to preserve it. Meanwhile, she underscores the...