Transculturating Transculturation - Diana Taylor
Transculturating Transculturation - Diana Taylor
Transculturating Transculturation - Diana Taylor
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Diana Taylor
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II
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The 1960s was a period of revolutionary zeal. The Latin American rev-
olutionary movement was linked to a larger, polyphonic revolutionary
discourse the world over. The Cuban revolution of 1959 directly con-
tributed to other liberation movements, not only the civil rights movement
and the feminist movement in the U.S. but also to resistance in South
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Although Triana won Cuba's prestigious Casa de las Americas prize (the
judges come from Latin America and Spain), over the next two or three
years, he was completely marginalized from all intellectual activity in Cuba
and eventually he went into exile. Does the play have nothing to do with
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revolution or against it? Triana's play, then, did reflect on the revolution
but not in a way that made sense either to commentators outside or inside
Cuba. Yet it was not "absurdist," unless by that we mean that it was
dialectically opposed to the "reasonable" path of those in command.
Griselda Gambaro's "theatre of the absurd," on the other hand, is an
invention of the critics. From 1963 onwards, she in fact was warning her
audience about the escalating nature of political violence in Argentina by
depicting the abductions (The Walls, 1963) and death camps (The Camp,
1967) that actually did come into being a decade later, as a result of
Argentina's increasingly fascist politics. Moreover, from her first play on,
it was evident that Gambaro's universe had nothing to do with Ionesco's
ideas of art as "an autonomous creation, an independent universe with its
own life and its own laws." As early as her first play it is clear she sees
art as inexorably linked to the criminalized society she lived in. In The
Walls, her first play, she depicts a young man who had been abducted
and is being held hostage because his "host" thinks he is Ruperto de
Hentzau or Hantcau from The Prisoner of Zenda. The young man clings
to the illusion that life is separate from fiction (art is an autonomous
universe), and reassures himself that he is not in fact a villain in a novel.
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NOTE
1. In referring to Latin America, I feel obliged to use terms like "Third World
"non-Western," for lack of better ones, although I feel the terms are misleadin
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WORKS CITED
Sten, Maria. Vida y muerte del teatro Ndhuatl. Xalapa: Editorial Universidad Vera-
cruzana, 1982.
Triana, Josd. La noche de los asesinos. Trans. as The Criminals by Pablo Armando
Fernandez and Michael Kustow. Adaptation by Adrian Mitchell. The Modern Stage
in Latin America, ed. by George Woodyard. New York: Dutton, 1971.
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