Dr. Laura R. Dougherty Department of Theatre & Dance Considering a Hemispheric Perspective

What’s Up? South!

Blue Marble photograph (7 December, 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17) A stabilized view (phew!) What they say when they saw it

Upside- down Map (1943) Joaquín Torres-García

Joaquín Torres-García ( ) and The School of the South “There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we know what our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world would like to have it. From now on, the elongated tip of South America will point insistently at the South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline irremediably and forever toward the South, toward our pole. When ships sail from her traveling north, they will be traveling down, not up as before. Because the North is now below. ”

Not the Only America on the Block: or, Why I Use the Terms USAmerica and USAmerican “Even the name ‘America’ bespeaks the crisis ; conventionally used to designate the cultural identity of the United States, its implicit erasure of Latin American and Canada is now painfully apparent, leading Buell and other to suggest that one response to this global trend might be the ‘refashioning of American Studies as a hemispheric project ’” -Gretchen Murphy from Hemispheric Imaginings

Consider your perspective Exploring your subject area from a hemispheric perspective encourages connections and connectivity So that we are “exploring histories of the north and south as profoundly intertwined. It allows us to connect histories of conquest, colonialism, slavery, indigenous rights, imperialism, migration and globalization (to name some issues) throughout the Americas ”- Diana Taylor

“A hemispheric perspective stretches the spatial and temporal framework to recognize the interconnectedness of seemingly separate geographical and political areas and the degree to which our past continues to haunt our present.“ –Diana Taylor

“A hemispheric approach to the study of performance in the Americas illuminates the different tropes, genealogies, and cultural forms in the respective cultures of imperialism and their different enactments of national longing and anticolonial imagination. The hemispheric focus firmly shifts the frame of reference from Europe, to illuminate the shared historical experiences of North, South, and Central America-colonialism, slavery, independence wars, national formation and new transnational identities…” --Jill Lane

Suggested resource: the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics

Suggested resources: Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity by Néstor García Canclini The Idea of Latin America by Walter D. Mignolo Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire by Gretchen Murphy The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas By Diana Taylor

Works Cited Harmon, Katharine. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. NY: Princeton Architectural P, Print. Lane, Jill. “Keywords in Latin American Performance.” Theatre Journal (56:3) October 2004: Web. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham & London: Duke UP, Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham & London: Duke UP, Print.