Resistant Strategies

Marcos Steuernagel and Diana Taylor, Eds.

Resistant Strategies (2021) focuses on historical and contemporary Mayan strategies of resistance and their impact on the work of artists and activists in Mexico and beyond. The contributions to this edited volume build upon various resistant acts that have deep historical and artistic roots in southern Mexico, and traces how these acts and traditions expand outwards, operating across the Mayan diaspora.

Out of the Archive and Into the Streets: El Cusco de Martín Chambi

Silvia Spitta

This book is the result of a long collaboration with one of the Andean world’s most cherished photography archives. The digitization and preservation efforts of the works of Martín Chambi, the renowned indigenous photographer, culminated in the first city-wide exhibit of the photographs he had taken in his adopted city before the devastating earthquake of 1950. Creatively engaging the history of Andean photography, archival theory, and performance studies, this latest volume (2020) combines theory and practice to bring one of the Americas’ most important photographic archives to life.

Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience

Alejandro Castro and Irina Troconis, Eds.

This edited volume (2019) compiles for the first time six critical perspectives on the work of Venezuelan performance artist Deborah Castillo. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cultural studies, political theory, and performance theory, the contributors explore the different forms of radical disobedience that materialize as Castillo engages with questions of power, authority, the body, and the State, against the background of Venezuela’s current crisis and the failures of the Bolivarian Revolution.

“El Ciervo Encantado: An Altar in the Mangroves”

Lillian Manzor and Jaime Gómez Triana

“El Ciervo Encantado: An Altar in the Mangroves” (2015) analyzes El Ciervo Encantado’s performances and public interventions in the tradition of 1980s Cuban performance art, using Rancière’s theories of space and the political and Maryse Condé’s poetics of the mangrove to understand how these works create a space for freedom, not within the actor/performer in his or her theatrical work, but in the public space of the community.

Centro de Estudios Mapuche Pewma (EN)

Pedro Cariman, Cecilio Melillan, and Fresia Mellico

The Centro de Estudios Mapuche Pewma is a Spanish-language initiative of members of an Argentinian Puel Mapu Mapuche indigenous group, most of whom live in the province of Neuquén. This publication serves as a collection of their primary documents and a space for scholars and community members to continue researching, documenting, and discussing different aspects of the Mapuche history, culture, and language.

Indigenous Encuentros

Pilar Rau

At the Hemispheric Institute’s fifth Encuentro, “Performing ‘Heritage’: Contemporary Indigenous and Community-Based Practices,” members of two indigenous communities in Brazil, the Kaiapó and the Maxacalí, staged performances that generated fascination, confusion, and considerable dialogue. “Indigenous Encuentros” (2005) presents audio-visual documentation and analysis of their participation in this event.

emisférica

emisférica is the Hemispheric Institute’s peer-reviewed, online, trilingual scholarly journal. Published biannually, journal issues focus on specific areas of inquiry in the study of performance and politics in the Americas. The journal publishes academic essays, multimedia artist presentations, activist interventions, and translations, as well as book, performance, and film reviews. Its languages are English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

[ConTactos]

As communities across the world succumb to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are placed in an exasperating bind between our desire to intervene and the seeming impossibility of doing so amidst a global lockdown that forecloses the very modes of contact upon which many of our abilities to intervene rely. In this time of perilous proximities, HemiPress, has published critical reflections by leading theorists, activists, and artists, that engage in meaningful deliberations about the urgencies wrought bare by the calamity before us. [ConTactos] features short texts that arrest power, expose inequalities and violence, and model alternative proximities for the present and the future.

Dancing While Black: Black Bodies / White Boxes

Produced by Angela's Pulse

After two years of dreaming, mulling, strategy conversations, and research, Angela’s Pulse realized the creation of a digital journal dedicated to the voices and visions of Black dance artists. Dancing While Black: Black Bodies | White Boxes (2019) is the collaborative effort of 33 contributors, editors, artists, advisors, and designers. Intentionally keeping Blackness at the center, the Journal explores themes of Black bodies, Black space, and white boxes.

Art, Migration, and Human Rights

Diana Taylor, Marcial Godoy-Anativia, and Jesusa Rodríguez

In August 2015, a group of 38 students, professors, researchers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, and activists from 13 different countries boarded a bus in San Cristóbal de las Casas for a week-long trip across the southern Mexican state of Chiapas and the cities around it. The trip was part of a three-week course on “Art, Migration, and Human Rights,” offered by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

How Movement Makes Meaning

Debra Levine

How Movement Makes Meaning (HMMM) was an intensive NYU Abu Dhabi 2018 J-term class on dramaturgy and dance. Theater Professor Debra Levine collaborated with choreographer Aakash Odedra during his residency at the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi to create an opportunity for experiential learning. HMMM investigated the creative process of choreographing a work prompted by the current refugee crisis. Employing the techniques of dance dramaturgy, the course investigated how choreography creates meaning through bodies in motion, and discovered how a dramaturg can contribute to that process.

Decolonial Theories and Practices

Diana Taylor

Emerging predominantly from Latin America, ‘decolonial’ studies call attention to the fact that coloniality is not only not over, not post, but that it permeates almost all aspects of our lives: subjectivity, race, gender, language, as well as our epistemologies and pedagogies. This course from 2019 examined some of the basic elements of coloniality and the theories and practices that scholars and artists have developed to contest ongoing practices of “epistemicide.”