Teaching Latin America in the Theatre Classroom: A Praxis of Contextualization

• In Event: Latin American Theater Praxis: Classroom, Stage, Street, and Academic Field (panel II)

Abstract

As a Latin-Americanist teaching in a doctoral program in theatre, I taught my first seminar on my own research in performances of transitional justice and memory in the Southern Cone. During the course, I realized that my students’ limited knowledge of the region’s theatre was informed by Brockett’s small chapter in History of the Theatre or perhaps the writings of Griselda Gambaro, often featured as Latin America’s lone representative in oft-assigned anthologies taught throughout Theatre and Performance Studies programs. The experience of teaching a seminar that reinforced my (primarily Eurocentric) theatre history students’ perceptions of Latin American performance as largely connected to the politics of repression became an instructive moment for me in considering how I might scaffold Latin American theatre and performance into a graduate curriculum. This paper explores the process of curricular development for subsequent doctoral-level courses in a Drama department as a space in which I could enact a praxis of historiography and pedagogy that expresses the diverse richness of 20th and 21st century Latin American theatre. Taking inspiration from Jean Graham-Jones’s 2006 article in Theatre Studies, in which she notes the “critical gap between the disciplines of theatre studies and Latin American literary/cultural studies in the United States,” my essay engages in articulating the challenges involved in fostering an understanding of scripts and performances that awakens a critical engagement with and intellectual scrutiny of the region for my students in addition to refining and shaping my own theorizing of Latin American theatre and performance.

Author

• Noe W Montez, Tufts University