Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama
Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama

Author: Camilla Stevens

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 9780813027074

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Stevens illuminates the link between the pervasive image of the family in the theater and the struggle for national and cultural identity in Cuba and Puerto Rico. By focusing on two key periods of family drama productions - the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s - she traces the historical articulation of the concepts of family and nation in the theater. Through the close readings of 16 plays, Stevens demonstrates how onstage family quarrels between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings allegorize divergent views of national experience and provide insight into how and by whom communities are defined, as well as how visions of national culture change over time. America and the Hispanic Caribbean to identify the role of writing in the project of constructing and defining nationhood, the place of performance in the cultural politics of representing the nation has been less rigorously investigated. Stevens's genealogy of modern Cuban and Puerto Rican drama reveals theater and performance to be a special site and activity for imagining communities.

Home is where the (he)art is
Home is where the (he)art is

Author: Sharon Magnarelli

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780838757079

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sharon Magnarelli's contribution to the critical dialogue on Spanish-American literature offers fresh, new reading of plays that have already attracted significant critical attention as well as insightful analyses of others that have seldom been studied.

Translocas
Translocas

Author: Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-04-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0472126075

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul’s Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.

Aquí and Allá
Aquí and Allá

Author: Camilla Stevens

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0822987163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance explores how contemporary Dominican theater and performance artists portray a sense of collective belonging shaped by the transnational connections between the homeland and the diaspora. Through close readings of plays and performances produced in the Dominican Republic and the United States in dialogue with theories of theater and performance, migration theory, and literary, cultural, and historical studies, this book situates theater and performance in debates on Dominican history and culture and the impact of migration on the changing character of national identity from end of the twentieth century to the present. By addressing local audiences of island-based and diasporic Dominicans with stories of characters who are shaped by both places, the theatrical performances analyzed in this book operate as a democratizing force on conceptions of Dominican identity and challenge assumptions about citizenship and national belonging. Likewise, the artists’ bi-national perspectives and work methods challenge the paradigms that have traditionally framed Latin(o) American theater studies.

Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts
Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts

Author: Mauricio A. Font

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-02

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 1315524996

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First Published in 2016. If scholarship on Cuban studies after the 1959 revolution focused on the historical and cultural aspects of the construction of a socialist order, the post-1989 crisis of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe raised questions about the island’s state as a socialist model. The scholarly gaze gradually began to focus on possibilities for alternative transformations at various levels of social life rather than on the deepening of traditional twentieth-century state socialism. This volume explores the newly emergent themes and debates about Cuban society and history.

Cuban Studies 36
Cuban Studies 36

Author: Louis A. Perez, Jr.

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2005-12-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0822971003

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cuban Studies has been published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1985. Founded in 1970, it is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in both English and Spanish, a large book review section, and an exhaustive compilation of recent works in the field. This volume contains articles on economics, politics, racial and gender issues, and the exodus of Cuban Jewry in the early 1960s, among others.

Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater
Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater

Author: F. Becker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-12-27

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 113702710X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There is extraordinary diversity, depth, and complexity in the encounter between theatre, performance, and human rights. Through an examination of a rich repertoire of plays and performance practices from and about countries across six continents, the contributors open the way toward understanding the character and significance of this encounter.

Trans/acting
Trans/acting

Author: Jacqueline Eyring Bixler

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 083875726X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection offer a series of new essays authored by leading scholars of Latin American and U.S. Latino theater as well as the performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, written by Guillermo Gomez-Pena. The fourteen essays focus on contemporary Latin American and U.S. Latino plays and performances and challenge the meanings of genre, gender, race, cultural identity, and performance itself in the context of globalization and shifting borders. The concept of trans/acting, a term that connotes negotiation and/or exchange, provides the framework for essays that include such topics as tansculturation, transnationalism, transgender, transgenre, translation, and adaptation. These individual studies of contemporary theater and performance arts are complimented by trans/actor Gomez-Pena's Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, a striking transgressive script that underscores the performance nature of territorial and symbolic border crossings. Jacqueline Bixler is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech. Laurietz Seda is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Connecticut-Storrs.

Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture
Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture

Author: Luis H. Castañeda

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1443812781

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What are Hispanic alternative communities and how are they represented in literature, film, and popular music? This book studies the fictional representation of circles of artists and intellectuals, youth gangs, musical bands, packs of marginal urban dwellers, groups of immigrants, and other diverse associations that share the common trait of being small and subversive collectives, perhaps akin to secret societies plotting to take control of society. These groups usually exist within a larger and established community – typically, the nation-state – though maintaining with it complicated relations of rivalry, criticism, outright violence, and other forms of antagonism. Thus “alternative communities” represent the “other side” of official institutions, by constituting dystopias that condemn the status quo, or by building utopias that point to new social arrangements. In the Hispanic world – a broad, transatlantic space that includes Spain and Spanish America – alternative communities have existed since the 19th century, a time of nation-building for Spanish American countries, all the way to the 21st century, when hybrid, postnational, and cosmopolitan communities begin to appear. The seventeen chapters brought together in this volume, which constitutes the first systematic approach to Hispanic alternative communities, tackle this complex cultural phenomenon from diverse critical perspectives.