What is the first image that comes to mind when someone asks a person to describe what the word ‘South’ evokes for them? Does the word conjure images of a ragged, bygone section of the USA filled with lush plantations fuelled by slavery and colonialism, a mythic, sparsely populated, indigenous terrain in a country in South America, a semi-enchanted, volatile and sexually charged landscape in Australia or does it evoke the complex and multilayered topography of the uncomfortably familiar, the imagery and associations that inform the notion of belonging, and the people, places and events that ground memory and identity in the land of otherness? Even as plate tectonics between nation states grind and shift, ‘North’ is still the seat of privilege and power and by extension, South remains a locus of sub-alternity. If we were to look at these two as characters in a global drama, depending on the needs of the dramaturgy, South would either be cast as the necessary sidekick or the perennial foe (and loser) to North, the truly gallant champion of the story. To talk about South, in the current geopolitical sense, is to conjure a deceptive cartography, where otherwise symmetrical geographical opposites stand for much more than the old binary of ‘first’ vs ‘third’ world, or ‘centre’ vs ‘periphery’. South has entered our imaginary as a separate space, largely defined from above as not North: a place for the undesirable, deceptive also in that it is often located within the urban centres of northern states, and that in turn, operates as an affirmation and validation of the North as better, even ideal, by contrast. When Barack Obama – himself the fruit of complex gender and racial North–South relations – warned during a campaign speech against neglecting Latin America referring to it as his ‘own back yard’,Footnote1to many in lands ranging from ‘south of the Rio Grande’ to East Los Angeles this was a reminder that the set of cultural perspectives that for hundreds of years associated them with the unwelcomed remained unchallenged even within a political narrative professing the mantra of ‘change’.
More than a decade into the twenty-first century, it should not be surprising that South, as conceptual idea, affective imaginary, and contested post-colonial subject, wanders through the ‘backwoods’ of Eurocentric, transatlantic-leaning discourses in halls of learning and journals devoted to theatre and performance still struggling for recognition freed from the debilitating, if well-intentioned, constraints of an ethnographic, anthropological paradigm. The world's Global South, continues to be reminded of its pariah-ness and its indebtedness to the Global North, for myriad colonial, postcolonial, economic, historical, political and symbolic reasons. Yet, its all too real power is manifest in the shifting vectors of the northern media-deemed ‘Arab spring of 2011’ as much as it is in the focus on the ‘surprising’ rise of Brazil as economic powerhouse and host of not only the 2016 Summer Olympic Games but also the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Wresting southern theatrical stories from their second-class citizen status is hardly news in the era of a revitalized hemispheric emphasis in the teaching of American Studies at colleges and universities across the USA. Yet, on high profile US and UK theatrical and cinematic stages, as well as in other realms of the performative, stories from the Global South – Danny Boyle's decidedly colonial take on poverty-and-crime-ridden Dharivi slums of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Alejandro González Iñárritu's ambitious transnational quartet of films Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Wajdi Mouawad's haunting drama Incendies (Scorched, 2002) about identity quest and trauma and Lynn Nottage's stage play Ruined (2009) notwithstanding – remain few and very much far between. Theatrical funding and film distribution could be cited as identifiable culprits in the elastic game of ‘who gets to be dominant in the world’ multi-platform media programming, in effect, continuing to relegate stories and artists from the Global South to the periphery, if they show up on the radar at all. Occasional ‘wonders’ emerge on the US theatre scene, such as Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics (2003), Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (2010), and Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo (2010), but the discussion around these works and more inevitably focuses on restrictive notions of identity politics, and therefore segregates the possibilities for more expansive conversation and reflections on the potentialities explored and sometimes exploited deliberately in their work by artists from or working within the Global South and/or its mythic imaginary. Intended or not, the sparse appearance of these ‘blips’ on the northern cultural landscape often results in an exoticising effect, further enforcing the very dynamics that could have been challenged by their inclusion in the programming.
Issues of language and translation come to bear certainly in the availability to English-language dominant cultures in the West of performance works and scholarly reflections on material created or situated in a southern (in its global sense) context. If Globish – the new strand of hybrid English – is the new language of the world of commerce, what happens to work that refuses to translate itself into that language and its variants? If a work demands to be absolutely local and regional in its southern-ness, does it run the risk of being automatically neglected or alternately ‘discovered’ and ‘fetishised’ for its ‘authenticity and purity?’ How to approach the South with tacit respect and obliging complicity towards the complex historical relationship the South has had to the North on a geographic and economic level if one is or identifies from the North? ‘Respect’ and ‘complicity’ are also certainly relevant to being aware of Contemporary Theatre Review's position as an English-language, northern publication, its broad readership notwithstanding. But let's take this one step further: if one is from the South, from el sur más sur, from the absolute tip of the southern hemisphere, is the work one creates and then disseminates in a global market always going to contend with and wrestle with the seeming obligation to northern dominance, especially when power brokers in the Global North at the multinational, corporate level continue to effect the ebb and flow of marketability and visibility? Is a southerner always going to be riding the undertow?
These various questions and more arise when faced with assembling this special issue provocatively and ambiguously entitled ‘South’. The contents of this issue vary in their range of discourse and in the territorial geographies illuminated as sites of and for performance – from Australia to Mexico, from Glasgow to Chile, from the Balkans to Argentina (and Argentina itself, a case study on intra-national centre–periphery dialectics, representing a de-centralised performative discourse). Site-specific grids of history, politics and culture inflect the narratives presented in essays by Nina Namaste on Mexican playwright and filmmaker Sabina Berman's 2004 play and 2009 film, Diana Looser's evocation of the mapping of diasporic Samoan works from the ‘mythic’ and very real islands of the South Pacific, and film director and scholar Pedro Lange-Churión on the cinematic work of Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel. A powerful influence on a generation of young theatre artists, Martel's films have inspired creators such as Mariano Pensotti, whose deeply idiosyncratic El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal, 2010) played very well to North American audiences in January 2012 and UK audiences in May 2011. Moreover, it is crucial to stress that although theatre making in the twenty-first century may be sometimes taught and written about as if it were a discipline separate from other disciplines in the arts, the impact of film and cinematic tropes in dramaturgy is significant. Theatre-makers are in dialogue historically not only with other works of theatre but with works of film, music, dance and visual art. Thus, the inclusion in this special issue of an article devoted to Martel's highly idiosyncratic ‘Salta trilogy’ is not only a bid towards deepening cross-disciplinary dialogue, but also to highlight the theatrical aspects of the manner in which Martel frames her subjects, deploys narrative strategies in her scripts, and positions the spectator in increasingly (as the trilogy has evolved over the years) uncomfortable somatic relationships with her work, especially in regard to the imagining of off-screen action. In the production, circulation and translation (linguistic and cultural) of works by artists collaborating across the ocean from Glasgow to Santiago, Chile is central to the essay by Paola Botham as much as it is to the one by UK-based, Serbian dramaturg and scholar Duška Radosavljević, who examines Sarah Kane's seminal first play Blasted from a Balkan perspective. Letica Robles-Moreno offers a meditation on virtual spaces of embodiment and disembodiment, and how identities online can be reconfigured through a looking-glass prism of de-colonized sites and spaces. Paola Marín and Gastón Alzate-Marin contribute an emotive and cognitive essay on the radical, formal work of Colombian visual and performance artist Rosemberg Sandoval made from defiantly local geographical and bodily sites.
The broader implications of these essays and this issue point towards the inherently difficult and problematic assumptions made about theatre pieces and films created by and for ‘border dwellers’. What draws most of the articles in this issue together are themes of migration, the enforced perceptions of nation-hood and the value placed on centralised, and usually capital city-based, expressions of cultural product over presumed ‘frontier’ work or works from a colloquially ‘lesser’ South, and the complex and multiple ‘border crossings’ that enable voices radicalised in one country or region to become re-voiced and transformed in another. By casting our gaze firmly outside recognisable transatlantic referents and situating geographically most of the works discussed in this issue below the equator, and most of its discussants above it, we join in the call to release the border from borders, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that marked spaces and drawn lines do exist, if not from a political, economic, or identity-based standpoint, even when work is made in one suburb instead of another. As activists in southern South America like to say, paraphrasing Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949), El sur es nuestro norte (the South is our North).Footnote2Over and over again throughout this issue various ventriloquised soundings echo through the vital interrogatives that examine what it means to be a citizen-artist in the twenty-first century. Embodying de-territorialisation and hybridity, the scholars and practitioners that make up these fragments of the southern-inflected map allow themselves the necessary obligation to acknowledge the impossibility of embracing a coherent concept of nation and/or state, while at the same time evoking a latent desire to reclaim said concept. Arriving from a place of ‘broken-ness’, and distended from the long arms of capital, the South of this South has its own unique and contradictory stories to tell.
If the image first evoked when the word ‘South’ was posed at the beginning of this reflection was one of redolent lushness, quivering and ostentatious sensuality or other Other-ed forms of uninflected renderings of unreserved exoticism, it is our hope that such Otherings would be challenged by the offerings in this issue. Beyond a first level glance at the rigorous and provocative bounty of the southern voices within these pages, we also extend an invitation to contest a wee bit the notion that the exotic has no-place-at-all in discussions of the Global South. In fact, we would argue that the heterotopic, queerly exotic, and firmly ‘outside’ the ‘norm’ idea of South should be embraced and thus resist ‘normalisation’ or Globish-ness, if not altogether, then as a matter of re-recording the ghostly traces of exile, resistance, difference and rage that continue to exist in the so-called hemispheric ‘back yards’ of the world. We hope this issue will open up further debate and discussion in the field, and encourage our readers, colleagues, fellow scholars and practitioners, to consider how the concept of ‘South’ exists for them as intellectual construct and living reality.
Notes
‘We've been so obsessed with Iraq and so obsessed with the Middle East, we've been neglecting Latin America even in our own back yard’, he said during a campaign speech in Alexandria, VA, 10 February 2008: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gopuefFpcx0> [accessed 10 June 2012].
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaqu%C3%ADn_Torres_Garc%C3%ADa#Paintings> [accessed 10 July 2010]. The Uruguayan artist developed his own artistic theory in 1941 dubbed ‘Constructive Universalism’. A key concept of his theory was one of the ‘Inverted America’, in effect: that by turning the map upside down, those living in the Global South would have a true idea of their position.