Mind the gap: selling revolution, marginality and spectacle in post-revolutionary Nicaragua

Abstract

A group of elderly women set up prayer camps in public roundabouts throughout Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to pray for ‘peace and reconciliation.’ A few miles away, in a humble barrio, escaping sexual discrimination and violence, a 24-year-old transvestite performs a sexually charged act in a circus. Meanwhile, across from the national parliament, hundreds of ex-agricultural workers exposed to the pesticide nemagon exhibit their dying flesh to the nation and the world in order to expose corporate greed and government inaction. These cases, happening under the new Sandinista regime, reflect a plurality of social spaces where theatricality, as the rhetorical manipulation of spaces and bodies aiming to affect publics, has become a mechanism for revealing the interstices of power relations in present day Nicaragua. This work explores various instances of linked and entwined government-sponsored and -sanctioned social performances of power and visibility, as well as other social performances that draw attention to the gap between the rhetoric of the government and social reality.

Keywords:

• theatricality
• revolution
• marginality
• power
• nostalgia
• Nicaragua

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto Guevara

ALBERTO GUEVARA is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at York University.