SPANISH AMERICAN WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: TRADITION, MEMORY, AND REWRITING THE THEATRICAL CANON
For much of the history of Spanish American theater, playwriting by women has occupied a marginal place in official accounts of the stage. Anthologies, theater histories, and academic syllabi tend to mention them as exceptions rather than as a constitutive part of the continent’s dramatic tradition. However, from the nineteenth century to the present, women playwrights from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and the Caribbean have produced a vast and diverse body of work that interrogates hegemonic narratives about the nation, the body, memory, and violence. This symposium proposes to bring together research that makes this production visible and that discusses, from various methodological perspectives, its place within tradition as well as its potential for innovation.
In keeping with the Congress’s theme, “Tradition and Innovation: The Memories of the Americas,” we are interested in exploring how playwriting by women authors puts tension on both terms. These works engage with an inherited dramatic tradition and appropriate it, while at the same time transforming it from experiences, bodies, and memories that the patriarchal canon has displaced.
Some of the questions that may be raised when considering the corpus of interest are: Why do playwrights who exceed the canon of their time endure? Why did they dare to address other subjects, other forms for representing life? Could it be that a certain rebelliousness toward literary rules and patriarchal norms operates within them?
The symposium invites participants to present papers around various themes, which may engage in dialogue with one another. We are especially interested in an axis on writings of the body and memory: how these works represent gender violence, motherhood, desire, or aging as political territories, and how these representations engage with –or break from– the conventions of the drama that precedes them. We also welcome papers on the genealogies and archives of playwriting by women, from nineteenth-century pioneers to contemporary authors, addressing the criteria that have determined their inclusion in or exclusion from the canon. Also welcome are works on intercultural, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant playwriting; on the circulation, translation, and staging of these works within and beyond their countries of origin; and on the relationship between playwriting, human rights, and historical memory, understanding theater written by women as a form of testimony against official narratives.
Those working in theater studies, gender studies, cultural history, or literary criticism are invited to present papers dealing with specific authors and works, as well as theoretical or comparative reflections on the corpus of women’s playwriting in Spanish America. With this symposium we seek to create a space for encounter among researchers from different countries, enabling dialogue between academic traditions and diverse methodological approaches. We hope that the papers will contribute to a more plural theatrical historiography, one that accounts both for the voices that tradition has silenced and for the innovations that these voices themselves have generated on the contemporary stage.
