De Cortés al Mago de Oz: Estrategias posmodernas en el teatro latinoamericano: 1980-1992
This work analyzes nine postmodern Latin American plays written between 1980 and 1992. A series of strategies including the combination of elite and mass culture, the mixture of various literary and nonliterary genres, anachronism, ahistoricity, metafiction, transvestism and parody are used by the playwrights to question the traditional beliefs of history, genre, gender and art. By exploring these strategies, I demonstrate how the plays dismantle not only the traditions and conventions already established in different Latin American societies, but the very discourses that created them. These plays question the way in which a vision of reality and of human nature has been constructed. In chapter one, I analyze Sabina Berman's Aguila o sol (Mexico), Roberto Ramos-Perea's Mistiblu (Puerto Rico), and Marco Antonio de la Parra's La secreta obscenidad de cada dia (Chile). The concept of "historiographic metafiction" is used to study how each play uses different historical discourses to reveal the way in which history has been constructed, and its implications for the countries represented in these plays. Chapter two emphasizes the disappearance of the dividing lines between elite and mass culture. In Consuelo de Castro's Aviso Previo (Brazil), Rodolfo Santana's Santa Isabel del Video (Venezuela), and Mauricio Kartun's Chau Misterix (Argentina), I explore how the disappearance of these lines impugns the grand narratives, the centralized vision of power, and power relations respectively. Chapter three analyzes the way in which human genders are constructed by patriarchal societies in Latin America. Diana Raznovich's Casa Matriz (Argentina) dismantles the role of mothers in society. Susana Torres Molina's...Y a otra cosa mariposa (Argentina), uses the technique of transvestism to denaturalize the traditional definitions of gender. In chapter four, the study of Joel Cano's Timeball (Cuba) explains how the playwright proposes a new way of viewing the world where the ideas of margin and center are no longer able to exist. Barriers established by the theatrical conventions are also eliminated as he presents a different kind of drama, one that he will call "theatrical cartomancy."
Latin American literature, Theater, Caribbean literature
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