The sanctification of stardom Contemporary icons are drawn from popular culture - musicians, artists, actors, and other personalities we hear on radio or see on television, on screen, in print and in cyberspace. Today's 'gods' are media personalities, and cults surround stars and artists like Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Perón, and Selena. Because of transnational and global trends in importing and exporting cultural products, the paintings, music, and politics that these figures crafted accrue symbolic meaning in multiple formats. By viewing them through the lens of performance art we can begin to see how their polyvalent personas were first molded and perfected for the public through paintings, tangos, politics, and Tejano music. Once they fashioned their own complex images, these multi-layered icons continued to travel after death over international boundaries, gendered divisions, political borders, and language barriers. Their reincarnation on stage has allowed dramatists to affix and generate new associations, thus converting them into secular saints for contemporary audiences. SARAH M. MISEMER lectures in Hispanic Studies at TexasA&M University, College Station.
The economic crisis in Argentina in 2001-2002 that spilled over into Uruguay causing fiscal and political problems is the starting point for my research on space and theater, and it demonstrates why we must look at the River Plate in both global and local ways. Connections among monetary policies, industries, and legal, social, and political movements mean that national spaces like Uruguay’s are fraught with tensions that come from both within and outside of borders. Recent economic crises like the one that is occurring in Greece, further demonstrate how nation states and trade blocks must constantly negotiate power as they toggle between national and international pressures. Nation states are being prompted to reconceive perspectives on governance that fall away from the parameters of Westphalian autonomy and reconcile their views with trends that instead require thinking about power as a network with shifting centers. The introduction launches the study by addressing these political and economic trends, the spatial turn in theater and performance studies, the rise of multiculturalism, and also examines the Uruguayan historical context of the post-dictatorship and impunity laws that pit national sovereignty against international human rights laws. These crises are enacted on the Uruguayan stage and contextualized through networks and spatial topographies, intertextualties on the page, explorations of history and memory, and ultimately notions of identity in four areas: the postdramatic and economic realm (chapter one: Peveroni), cultural geography and pyschogeography (chapter two: Morena), midrash and questions of human rights and growing fascist trends (chapter three: Sanguinetti), and finally in mapmaking on the stage through mise-en-perf/performise and “wayfinding” through sites of contested power (chapter four: Calderón). The concluding chapter (Blanco) looks at the reinterpretation of Greek tragedy as a commentary on the messy process of democratization. Here, access to the polis and power are problematized through the lens of international sex trafficking and gendered roles that exclude portions of the populace from participation in the process of self-governance.
Many critical shifts in concepts of time and society's consciousness of modernity were derived from the railway and World Standard Time in the nineteenth century. These innovations restructred the way people viewed the world and dealt with "public" and "private" time. The forward, projectile motion along a linear track mimicked the passage of public chronological time. Conversely, the train also invoked a private, nostalgic view of tim as the traveler was yanked from his/her traditional view of the space/time continuum via the train's velocity. Travelers observed the landscape "disappear" in their backward glance from the window--although the landscape and interior compartment's space remained stagnant. This optical illusion caused passengers to perceive the world in new ways. Thus, the train unveils a conflictive blend of nostalgia and progress in the River Plate, as these countries move forward, but look back.
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