Author Noe Montez considers how theatre, as a site of activism, produces memory narratives that change public reception to a government’s transitional justice policies. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and transitional justice, Montez examines the Argentine theatre’s responses to the country’s transitional justice policies—truth and reconciliation hearings, trials, amnesties and pardons, and memorial events and spaces—that have taken place in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
 
Montez explores how the sociohistorical phenomenon of the Teatroxlaidentidad—an annual showcase staged with the support of Argentina’s Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—acted as a vehicle for drawing attention to the hundreds of children kidnapped from their families during the dictatorship and looks at why the memory narratives regarding the Malvinas Islands (also known as the Falklands) range from ideological appropriations of the islands, to absurdist commentaries about the failed war that signaled the dictatorship’s end, to the islands’ heavily contested status today.
 
Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina explores the vibrant role of theatrical engagement in postdictatorship Argentina, analyzes plays by artists long neglected in English-language articles and books, and explores the practicalities of staging performances in Latin America.
 

Noe Montez is an associate professor and the director of graduate studies in drama and dance at Tufts University. His essays have been published in Theatre Topics, Latin American Theatre Review, Texas Theatre Journal, New England Theatre Journal, the Journal of Religion and Theatre, Theatre History Studies,American Theatre and the edited collection Public Theatres and Theatre Publics.

"...this volume provides an excellent example of how to conduct and interweave an array of investigations into a cohesive and probing commentary on complex sociopolitical contexts. As such, this book deserves a home on the shelves of students and scholars of Argentine theatre, theatre history, and Latin American performance and politics alike."— Kaitlin M. Murphy, author of Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics

"This book offers an important update to studies on Argentina’s postdictatorship theatre, documenting the ways it has registered contested approaches to transitional justice strategies, which themselves embed changing understandings of the role of individual and collective memory.”—Tamara L. Underiner, author of Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico: Death-Defying Acts