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Symposium @ CASCA /AES (Canadian Anthropology Society/ American Ethnological Society) conference, May 8-12, 2007, University of Toronto.

Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Performance: From Hegemonic Nationalisms to Social Critique

Latin American and Caribbean peoples pride themselves for having a rich tradition in performance art. Until recently, a modern emphasis on and proliferation of folkloric forms in the Latin American and Caribbean region prevailed. Today, however, the domain of performatic public culture in the region and beyond has become a highly contested terrain. Performance practice has become a privileged stage upon which social tensions are displayed, disputed and given shape. Historically, the construction of national identity in particular has been intimately tied to the politics of performance in Latin America and the Caribbean at least since the consolidation of modern nation-states in the 1930s. In fact, such consolidation has relied heavily on the folklorization of indigenous art, giving rise to the political use of local cultural forms as metonyms for the nation. In recent years, this tendency has been extensively debated in the anthropological literature. Moreover, the contempor!
 ary emphasis on identity politics and cosmopolitanism has radically shifted the performance art landscape in the region as well as transnationally. Multiple social actors have used performative strategies to advance diverse political, cultural and human rights causes, such as ethnic identity politics, indigenous environmental rights, land entitlement, claims to religious authenticity, gender and sexual minority rights, and human and political rights in the wake of democratic transitions. In cosmopolitan fashion, history has been recostructed, recast and redressed in Nueva Trova song, guerrilla dance public interventions, dérive happenings, and T-shirt spray paintings at political rallies. By drawing on ethnographic examples from across the globe, this symposium seeks to explore the ways in which Latin American and Caribbean performative practices become entangled with the production of indigeneity and/or cosmopolitanism as identity markers. Moreover, we seek to understand t!
 he political role of performance art both in hegemony-building!
  enterpr
ises, and in social and cultural critique.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 800 characters (approximately 100 words) to both Natasha Pravaz (npravaz AT wlu.ca) and Alberto Guevara (aguevara AT yorku.ca) before February 9, 2007. For more information, access the casca-aes website.

______________________

Natasha Pravaz, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University

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Received on Sun Feb 04 2007 - 13:31:37 EST