Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas, 1st ed. 2017

Coordinators: Beauchesne Kim, Santos Alessandra

Language: English

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This book offers an innovative examination of the utopian impulse through performance as a proposition of practical engagement in the contemporary Americas. The volume compiles unique multidisciplinary and exploratory texts, applying diverse critical and artistic approaches. Its contributors reconceptualize utopia as a creative and theoretical method based on a commitment to sociopolitical transformation. Chapters are organized around notions of mapping utopias, indigenizing practices, political manifestations, and the construction of social identities.

1. Introduction: Utopian Interventions and their Relevance in the Contemporary Americas - Kim Beauchesne and Alessandra Santos
Part 1: Mapping Utopias in Performance: Cross-Cultural (Dis)locations
2. A New (Anti) Manifesto for the Americas. Version 2015 - Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Saul García López, and Michèle Ceballos Michot
3. tangible cartographies: surviving the colonial/welcome to my house - Jayce Salloum and Manuel Piña
4. Flash: Butoh, Hip-Hop, and the Urban Body in Crisis - Michael Sakamoto
Part 2: Indigenizing Utopian Performances: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Challenges
5. Writing. First. contacts? - Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin
6. Colonial Blanket for Peoples Who Refuse to Vanish - Afuwa Granger and Aerlyn Weissman
7. Masking Revolution: Subcomandante Marcos and the Contemporary Zapatista Movement - Brianne Orr-Álvarez
8. Utopic Cannibalism in Fausto Carlos, Leonardo Sette, and Takuma Kuikuro’s As Hiper Mulheres - Sarah Shamash
Part 3: Political Manifestations and the Practice of Utopia: Global Connections
9. Real Utopias - Erik Olin Wright
10. No Suture: Rethinking Utopia through J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the Occupy Movement, and Idle No More - Dan Adleman
11. Utopian Discourse and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Curtis Hanson’s Too Big to Fail, and Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Todo lo que era sólido - Gabriela Badica
12. El Che de los Gays and Hija de Perra: Utopian Queer Performances in Post-Dictatorship Chile - Manuela Valle
Part 4: Utopia and the Performance of Social Identities: Negotiating Collective Subjectivities
13. Could Bilingual Radio Be Utopian? Latin American Sound Performance through Radio in Western Canada - Carmen Miranda Barrios
14. Revisiting Utopias from the 1970s in Argentine Cinema (2003–2012): The Case of Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clandestina. Memory and Subjectivity - Rita De Grandis
15. The Utopian Impulse in the Videos of Pola Weiss (Mexico City, 1977–1990) - Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
16. Utopia in Ruins: The Ochagavía Hospital - Jon Beasley-Murray


Kim Beauchesne is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Alessandra Santos is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Creates a necessary discussion on the topic of rethinking the current relevance of utopia, in a climate of global instability

Compiles reflections of academics in dialogue with artists and community organizers on the subject of utopia

Focuses on crucial, pioneering research being conducted by leaders in the academic and artistic field in order to create a discourse on utopia