Corpus delecti : performance of the Americas /

This book focuses on the hybridity of body politics and "body actions" that discover pleasure amid social constraint, physical pain, and other limit situations. The contributors seek to redress a performance history that until recently has largely excluded Latinas, gay and transvestite Latin males and females, and mulattas. The essays describe illogical and disruptive acts, including cannibalism and self-mutilation, the on-stage killing of live chickens, lying down in traffic, electronic civil disobedience, and "hacktivism"--empathic community acts that subvert traditional power relations and hierarchies. Physical memory replaces institutional memory, and the family's reputation as a source of totalist oppression is jettisoned and its importance to identity formation is reasserted. The performances that are summarized, sampled, described, and photographed stress objects and audiences as participatory presences in newly syncretic, democratized events representative of a new world order that seems to have pushed through the societal skin. The 33 performance and interdisciplinary artists, scholars, and critics who have contributed to this book span the Americas and beyond in terms of their nationalities and bases of operations. The reader gains a visceral sense of a corporeal, very human landscape, a vernacular theatricality, and latinidad or different modes of Latin(a) performativity. A vivid, useful, tonally various and sometimes confrontational introduction. All academic collections. S. Golub; Brown University