Overview

Exploring cultural resistance by creating and archiving Latinx performance art Performance is often seen as ephemeral, a condition that seemingly reduces its activist possibilities. After all, not everyone can take part or bear witness. Beyond the Moment shows how Latinx artists have responded with a theater of dissent that endures—performance art that also documents and can itself be archived, creating opportunities for sustained solidarity and resistance. Through close readings of works such as Coco Fusco’s multi-genre performance A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Irene Mata theorizes what she calls “textual mentoring.” This method involves tracing previous moments of resistance, archiving the creative process itself, and transforming the performance into a pedagogical tool. By means of textual mentoring, a work like The Panza Monologues becomes a lesson in confronting systemic oppression through collaborative storytelling. Mata also shows how the 2012 No Papers, No Fear Ride for Justice, a multistate immigrant-rights action, relies on a vocabulary of refusal of movements of the past—like the Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights era—and continues its activism beyond its immediate performance context by digitally archiving its process. With an emphasis on intersectional critique, Beyond the Moment positions performance as a radical form of resistance that educates and inspires across generations and movements.

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9781477333563

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Reviews

Beyond the Moment imagines a provocative framework for the analysis of performance that situates the ephemeral act of performance in genealogies of resistance. Mata moves between past, present, and future--drawing on scripts and other documentation of performance--in an effort to honor and critique histories of resistance and to envision the archive of performance materials as a roadmap for future forms of engagement, resistance, and community action. Performance scholars have long wrestled with questions of ephemerality and the archive, and seldom have I had the pleasure of witnessing scholarship that approaches these questions so thoughtfully and courageously.--Brenda Werth, American University, coeditor of Bodies on the Front Lines: Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean

Beyond the Moment imagines a provocative framework for the analysis of performance that situates the ephemeral act of performance in genealogies of resistance. Mata moves between past, present, and future--drawing on scripts and other documentation of performance--in an effort to honor and critique histories of resistance and to envision the archive of performance materials as a roadmap for future forms of engagement, resistance, and community action. Performance scholars have long wrestled with questions of ephemerality and the archive, and seldom have I had the pleasure of witnessing scholarship that approaches these questions so thoughtfully and courageously.--Brenda Werth, American University, coeditor of Bodies on the Front Lines: Performance, Gender, Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author Information

Irene Mata is the director of the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities and professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Domestic Disturbances: Re-Imagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration.

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