Avant-Pop Antihero: Minoritarian dramatics and its pop culture afterlives in Argentina

• In Event: The New Otherwise: Reconceptualizing the Argentine Avant-Garde and its Experimental Legacies

Abstract

My paper will theorize the multiple intersections of the avant-garde and the popular in Argentine theater of the 1920s and 30s via the category of the “minoritarian,” which is conceived as defining a particular orientation of playwrights and theatrical forms that have been historically excluded from canons of national theater on the basis of a putative identity (ethnic, linguistic, religious, racial, gender) beyond (or below) the “national.”

I combine a comparative close reading of minoritarian antiheroes by Roberto Arlt, Salvadora Medina Onrubia, Maurice Schwartz and others with an analysis of their reception and performance context. In this way, I will work toward articulating a productive relationship between the “popular” and “avant-garde” as historical and theoretical notions. Finally, I will look at contemporary echoes and avatars of these antiheroes, assessing how their moody ambivalence has been simplified to promote transhistorical oversimplifications of minority identity, representation and authorship.

Author

• Claire T Solomon, Oberlin College