¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence

Diana Taylor

Published by Duke University Press 2020

¡Presente!

The Politics of Presence

Diana Taylor

In the series Dissident Acts

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478008897

Overview
Contents

About this book

Diana Taylor offers the theory of presente as a model of standing by and with victims of structural and endemic violence by being physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done.

Author / Editor information

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Performance; The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas; and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War,” all also published by Duke University Press. Taylor was founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2020. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

“Diana Taylor advances a timely and necessary theorization of the politics of performance, delivering nuanced and heartfelt analysis of the creative strategies of artists and activists who labor to intervene in historical and contemporary injustices across the Americas. Showcasing Taylor as a scholar, activist, and accomplice present at the site of performance, ¡Presente! is an intellectually brilliant and crucial model of politically engaged theory.”

-- Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, coeditor of Blacktino Queer Performance

“A major project drawn from a life's work of travel, searching, introspection, and unceasing political commitment to and collaborations with artists and activists, ¡Presente! is a work of great power, poetics, and political impact.”

-- Josh Kun, University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication

"For a work so theoretically rigorous, ¡Presente! stands out for its wide legibility. By foregoing unnecessary academic jargon and taking pains to explain her own ethical entanglements in plain English, Taylor’s scholarship makes for a surprisingly smooth read, though it is at times heartbreaking: she does not minimize the grimmer aspects of her subject matter, which include devastating accounts of kidnappings, torture, and genocide. The uninitiated reader will find her writing clear and unpretentious, and may discover that her gloss of the postcolonial canon does much to demystify."

-- Sam Adrien Smith Full Stop

"A valuable meditation on what it means to practice the responsibility of writing through social relations, on creating new ways of doing and being in academia, performance, and life."

-- Analola Santana Theatre Survey

"A call for a new spirit of militancy to see what is missing, learn to unlearn, and energize the fight."

-- Angela Marino Performance Research

"¡Presente! will quickly, and aptly, be assigned in classrooms and discussed by students, artists, and activists who will take up the politics of presence in their practices. Taylor challenges us to reexamine what we believe we know, how we know, and the obligations and responsibilities that accompany such knowledge."

-- Kimberly Skye Richards TDR

"Taylor writes an excellent study that encourages the reader to take a walk with her. . . . This book collects past Encuentros and invites all of us to be ¡presente!"

-- Paola S. Hernández Theatre Journal

"¡Presente! is a vital and timely text that speaks critically to our current national rhetoric."

-- Karina Gutiérrez Modern Drama

"Taylor gives us a deeply captivating book that takes us on a journey across a substantial period, across sites, archives and personal memories. This book is lucidly written and is highly accessible, providing a rich treasure trove of stories and concepts for scholars in performance studies, Latin American and hemispheric studies, Native Studies, Latinx, Chicana/o studies, de- and anticolonial studies, memory, affect, trauma, gender, queer and trans studies. The readers will appreciate and find particularly instructive its method for writing presences, conceptual interventions as well as provocations."

-- Adwaita Banerjee Space and Polity

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Prologue Jumping the Fence Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
One ¡Presente! Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Two Enacting Refusal Political Animatives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Three Camino Largo The Zapatistas’ Long Road toward Autonomy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
Four Making Presence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
Five Traumatic Memes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Six We Have Always Been Queer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Seven Tortuous Routes Four Walks through Villa Grimaldi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Eight Dead Capital Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
Nine The Decision Dilemma Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	226
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	299
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 352

eBook

Published: July 17, 2020
ISBN: 9781478008897