| Summary: | Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America invites readers into an exploration of the emergent forms of collective political action launched in the mid-nineties by the Zapatistas and developed by transnational protesters into what we know as hashtag campaigns, memes, and performative protests. The book focuses on insurgent protest performances in contexts such as the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, the 2011 Chilean student movement, the 2014-2015 mobilizations for the disappeared Ayotzinapa students, and the 2018 transnational reproductive rights movement. Using the concept of performance constellations as a critical lens to map transnational protest movements the book tracks the dynamics of networked expressive behavior that articulate protesters' cooperation in the streets and online. Each chapter follows the collective, multi-platform movement of those struggling to make their voices heard and to effect long term social justice within conditions of transnational exploitation and oppression. The book analyzes uses of space, time, media communication, and corporeality in protest performances such as virtual sit-ins, online pots-and-pans, flash mobs, scarfazos, and hashtag campaigns, arguing that these protests are not only antagonistic to hegemonic power but also socially transformative. Whereas other studies focus either on digital activism or street protests, Performance Constellationsshows that contemporary demonstrations are integrally entwined. Fuentes shows that these intertwinement between on- and offline social mobilization is facilitated by updated versions of liveness, affective engagement, and cooperation that are crucial to participants' experiences. The book demonstrates that contemporary protests re-energize the politics of aesthetic performance as a face-to-face, situated, and live event, involving spectators in acts of citizen participation that are of extreme importance during the current era of rights' erasure and compromised democracies. Zooming in on protest movements and art-activism in Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, and putting contemporary insurgent actions in dialogue with their historical precedents, Performance Constellationsteaches readers how, even in moments of extreme duress, social actors in Latin America have taken up public and virtual space to intervene politically and to contest dominant powers. This study provides innovative analytic methods of hashtags and other networked tools as performative tactics while assessing their political efficacy vis-a-vis contemporary debates about social media manipulations and street protests' irrelevance.
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