Latin American Theatre Review

Diana Taylor’s theoretically provocative, artful, and politically rich new book asks, “What to do when it seems that nothing can be done, and doing nothing is not an option?” (2). Amidst the continually unfolding violence and acts of disappearance throughout the Americas, undergirded by colonial histories, imperialist interventions, and neoliberal extractivist practices—that many of us in academia are embedded in— Taylor invokes artists, activists, and scholars to presence, or to be presente! Presente in this monograph is multivalent—it’s the act of taking a basin of blood between the Guatemalan Constitutional Court to the National Palace by performance artist José Galindo in her office-job lunch break upon hearing of former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt’s running for parliament in 2003 (124), through to the armed action of the Zapatistas of Chiapas with their iconic masks and “noisy silence” (76).

Meandering through the many presencings of this book, is the continually reflective scholar-activist-artist present at the scene—as witness, protestor, collaborator, provocateur, engaged in the reciprocal process of acting with others. Taylor reminds us that political interventions require a complex play of embodied [End Page 145] doings and relationalities between scholars, artists, and activists. Building from Dwight Conquergood’s urge for a shift in performance studies from objectivity to proximities and embodiment, Taylor’s urgent call to presente is relational, situated, reflective, low to the ground, and rooted in decolonial practice (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, among others). Her interdisciplinariness is expansive, without being expansionist, joining “fugitives, artists, scholars and activists” (24) interested in other forms of worldmaking.

Comprising nine chapters, readers are invited to walk and talk with Taylor over her expansive life line of work, encounters that often unfold around her time as founding director of the Hemispheric Institute (1998–2020), but sometimes take other temporalities, in journeys in and across Mexico, Guatemala, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, Montreal, and the United States. She cautions that this is not autobiography. Indeed, the individuated I, as she persuasively theorizes, is a product of the colonial enterprise, one that annuls reciprocity and relationality. There are frictions in these journeys—the discussion of trans hurt following the queer play Juana la Larga (2014) in chapter six feels too quickly glossed for a call for “we-ness.” However, Taylor on the whole critically unfurls the challenges and different ways of being present through embodied and discursive acts of transfer. My personal favorite is the final chapter, which features Taylor’s encounter with the GM food corporation Monsanto and her collaboration with artivists The Yes Men (Jesusa Rodrίguez, Jacques Servin) in an act of environmental activism. Impersonating the company through a fake web site and news release, led to legal threats and demands from Monsanto for an apology from New York University, Taylor’s institutional home. Taylor’s interaction with university lawyers and senior administrators exposed the fragility of academic freedom in the neoliberal academy and its embeddedness in structures of corporate power and violence. The book’s many scenes, from tour-guiding in sites of trauma, theatre in shopping malls, to Monsanto and the US university, fold in to each other, interrelated in the colonial-neoliberal cartographies. Yet where violence is interconnected, Taylor suggests so too is resistance. Taylor does not settle into foreclosing notions of performance efficacy and subversion, concepts that have often been the mainstay of performance studies. Instead, she engages in more generative acts of transfer— untethering colonial epistemologies and signposting ways for the production and performance of knowledge to be more present in political struggles—thereby making this book widely relevant across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. [End Page 146]