Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina

In Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina, author Noe Montez considers how theatre, as a site of activism, can produce memory narratives that change the public’s reception to governmental policies that address a previous regime’s human rights violations. Drawing on contemporary research in transitional justice strategies, memory studies, and theatre history, Montez examines the Argentine theatre’s responses to the numerous changes in 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 Argentina’s 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 why 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. Plays studied include El Periférico de Objetos’s Máquina Hamlet (1995), Mariana Eva Perez’s Instrucciones para una collecionista de mariposas (2002), Lola Arias’s Mi vida después (2009), and Patricio Abadi’s Isla flotante (2015).,br>
This book fills an important gap in Latin American theatre history and performance studies, exploring theatrical engagement in postdictatorship Argentina, analyzing plays by artists who have not yet been addressed in English-language articles and books, and exploring the practicalities of staging performances in Latin America.