Overview

Offering a nuanced understanding of the performing arts' relationship to politics Through careful readings of key political performances in Chile's transition from military dictatorship to neoliberal democracy, Jennifer Joan Thompson examines how the production and aesthetics of theater are intertwined in processes of democratization, enactments of citizenship, and the development of cultural policy. Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile: Cultural Policy and the Making of Political Dramaturgies reveals how artists performed changing models of democratic citizenship. Thompson traces the ways artists confronted and resisted the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, how they then reimagined the body politic during the early transitional period and challenged official constructions of history and memory as the transition to democracy progressed, how they critiqued Chile's neoliberal economic model and its violence, and, finally, how they have made claims for feminist and Indigenous citizen subjectivities throughout Chile's current social crisis. Incorporating archival and ethnographic research alongside readings of theatrical and political performances, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the performing arts' relationship to politics, one that accounts for the ways artists and the state collaborate in the production of the political imagination.

Full Product Details

9780810148482

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Excellently researched, well written, and timely, this is an important contribution to theater and performance history and Latin American cultural history, containing an important analysis of political theory within performance culture. I commend Jennifer Joan Thompson on the dexterity of her analysis and comprehensiveness I am deeply impressed by her work."" - Patricia Ybarra, Brown University

Author Information

Jennifer Joan Thompson is an assistant professor of theater studies at Southern Methodist University.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available