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Hemispheric America in Deep Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2010

JILL LANE
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Abstract

This article introduces hemispheric performance studies to suggest that performance in the Americas – and the very idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. The argument is illustrated in relation to three contemporary artists: the Los Angeles-based photographer and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto, and the visual and performance artists Susana Torres from Lima, Peru, and Liliana Angulo from Bogotá, Colombia.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , July 2010 , pp. 111 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2010

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References

NOTES

1 The series of photographs can be seen at Yonemoto, Bruce, ‘North South East West’, e-misférica, 5, 2 (2008)Google Scholar, available at http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/yonemoto-intro

2 Donald Pease, for one, has written extensively on the formation and the new directions of American studies. See, for example, Pease, Donald E. and Wiegman, Robyn, The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 Indeed, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, forged in the crucible of the early Cold War, provided direct federal funding to support university centres devoted to area studies of Latin America through its famed Title VI, which in subsequent years provided extensive funding for the study of Spanish and Portuguese. See Delpar, Helen, The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 153–83Google Scholar.

4 Lipsitz, George, ‘Their America and Ours’, in Belnap, Jeffrey Grant and Fernandez, Raul A., eds., Jose Marti's ‘Our America’: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 310Google Scholar. With regard to efforts to ‘transnationalize’ American studies, Priscilla Wald posed this question in 1998: ‘The current motivation to transnationalize American studies is coincident, as many scholars of the field have pointed out, with the emergence of the transnational corporation (TNC) and the (partly consequent) erosion of the state-form as the primary unit of economic, political, and cultural activity and analysis. To what extent, many ask, is the transnationalizing trend a critique of the limitations of a nation-based analysis, and to what extent does it participate in – and reinforce – the politics of the TNC?’ Patricia Wald, ‘Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and American Studies’, American Literary History, 10, 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 199–218, here p. 201.

5 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Roach, Joseph R., Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

6 Among the critical texts organized around a ‘hemispheric’ perspective are Fusco, Coco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (London: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar; Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; del Barrio, Museo, Cullen, Deborah and Bustamante, Maris, Arte [no es] vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960–2000 (New York: El Museo Del Barrio, 2008)Google Scholar.

7 Shannon Steen, Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre: The Black Atlantic, the Asian/Pacific and American Theatre, forthcoming from Palgrave McMillan, 2010.

8 Rifkin, Mark, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of US National Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Delany, Martin and Levine, Robert S., Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) pp. 160, 206–7, 255–8, 267Google Scholar.

10 Dimock, Wai-chee, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 2Google Scholar. I am partly indebted to Dimock for the use of ‘deep time’, although our objectives in posing the term are different. For Dimock, deep time is a way to re-chart both the geography and the temporality of US literature (which she calls ‘American’ throughout). Rather than destabilize the presumed dominant place of the US in a global context, her very elegant and innovative arguments end up recuperating its national primacy by ‘elongating’ its history into ancient time and extending its geography to a global scale.

11 Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 2.

12 See, among many other texts, Canclini, Néstor García, Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, Los Noventa, 50 (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1990)Google Scholar; and Glissant, Édouard and Wing, Betsy, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Beverley, John, Aronna, Michael and Oviedo, José, eds., The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Schelling, Vivian, Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, Critical Studies in Latin American and Iberian Cultures (New York: Verso, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 Lane, Jill and Godoy-Anativia, Marcial, ‘Race and Its Others’, e-misférica, 5, 2 (2008)Google Scholar, available at http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-52/editorialremarks

14 Coca Cola has since acquired the rights to distribute Inka Kola globally; thus after years of competition in the Peruvian market, they are now part of the same corporate structure.

15 For a modest overview of Liliana Angulo's work see ‘Liliana Angulo: Una performance afrocolombiana’, e-misférica, 5, 2 (2008), available at http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/liliana-angulo-intro