ABOUT THIS BOOK

Offering a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics

Through careful readings of key political performances in Chile's transition from military dictatorship to neoliberal democracy, Jennifer Joan Thompson examines how the production and aesthetics of theater are intertwined in processes of democratization, enactments of citizenship, and the development of cultural policy. Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile: Cultural Policy and the Making of Political Dramaturgies reveals how artists performed changing models of democratic citizenship. Thompson traces the ways artists confronted and resisted the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, how they then reimagined the body politic during the early transitional period and challenged official constructions of history and memory as the transition to democracy progressed, how they critiqued Chile’s neoliberal economic model and its violence, and, finally, how they have made claims for feminist and Indigenous citizen subjectivities throughout Chile’s current social crisis. Incorporating archival and ethnographic research alongside readings of theatrical and political performances, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics, one that accounts for the ways artists and the state collaborate in the production of the political imagination.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

JENNIFER JOAN THOMPSON is an assistant professor of theater studies at Southern Methodist University.

REVIEWS

“Thompson’s book is urgent reading for researchers, educators, and artists in times of uncertainty, when political narratives are being altered in vertiginous ways, in order to anchor the democratic and solidarity practices of the collective in histories that are yet to be written.” —Theatre Journal

“Excellently researched, well written, and timely, this is an important contribution to theater and performance history and Latin American cultural history, containing an important analysis of political theory within performance culture. I commend Jennifer Joan Thompson on the dexterity of her analysis and comprehensiveness; I am deeply impressed by her work.” —Patricia Ybarra, Brown University

“Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile offers a sharp parallel between systems of governance, cultural policy, and cultural production. Jennifer Joan Thompson provides an insightful and compelling case study that is also timely, as the world grapples with the true meaning and practice of democracy. This is a fantastic and exciting work of scholarship.” —Marcela A. Fuentes, Northwestern University

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Artists & Citizens
Chapter 1. Dramaturgies of Resistance: CADA and Artistic Countercultures against the Dictatorship
Chapter 2. Dramaturgies of Reencounter: Andrés Pérez, Convivencia, and the New Body Politic
Chapter 3. Dramaturgies of Revision: Teatro de Chile’s Anachronistic Reimagination of History
Chapter 4. Dramaturgies of Rebellion: Guillermo Calderón and the Paradoxes of Political Theater
Chapter 5. Dramaturgies of Revolution: KIMVN Teatro, LASTESIS, and the Solidary State
Epilogue: Dramaturgies of Defeat and Political Futures

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