Overview

Stevens illuminates the link between the pervasive image of the family in the theater and the struggle for national and cultural identity in Cuba and Puerto Rico. By focusing on two key periods of family drama productions - the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s - she traces the historical articulation of the concepts of family and nation in the theater. Through the close readings of 16 plays, Stevens demonstrates how onstage family quarrels between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings allegorize divergent views of national experience and provide insight into how and by whom communities are defined, as well as how visions of national culture change over time. While it has become commonplace to expect any cultural history of Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean to identify the role of writing in the project of constructing and defining nationhood, the place of performance in the cultural politics of representing the nation has been less rigorously investigated. Stevens's genealogy of modern Cuban and Puerto Rican drama reveals theater and performance to be a special site and activity for imagining communities.

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9780813027074

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Reviews

With clarity and keen critical insight, Stevens analyzes how the house and the family, the state and its citizenry, are imbricated in the failed foundational narratives of these two Caribbean islands, as well as in the Marxist discourse of revolutionary Cuba and in more recent ones which rebel against the pater familia of the house and state. - Kirsten Nigro, University of Cincinnati

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