Fuentes, Marcela A. Michigan, 2019
Coming in the aftermath of large and sustained protests against neoliberal economic policies that sprang up across Latin America in October 2019 followed by the outbreak of the coronavirus in March 2020 that made such street protests impossible, Fuentes’s Performance Constellations could not be more timely. Through an examination of protest actions in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, Fuentes (performance studies, Northwestern Univ.) examines how online and offline mobilizations intertwine and reinforce each other in a common goal of counteracting neoliberal policies. She begins with a discussion of a “virtual sit-in” that the Electronic Disturbance Theater staged in 1998 in support of the Zapatista uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In subsequent chapters she analyzes how activists have effectively used symbolic performance across physical and digital platforms in response to the Argentine 2001 economic crisis, the 2011 Chilean student movement, the 2014 activist mobilization in response to the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students in Mexico, and the reproductive rights movement in Argentina. Fuentes convincingly presents performances that collectively take over public space as an effective activist tool and one of the most radical forms of political action.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.
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