Yuyachkani's Andinismo: Performing (towards) a Poetics of Race

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM AT WASH ZOOM LECTURE SERIES ON RACE AND ETHNICITY 

[Co-Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Sciences; and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos]
 

Peruvian theater troupe Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, is well known for its theatrical aesthetics, which draws on a unique, truly cosmopolitan blend of Western, Andean, and even Asian performance traditions. It is now commonplace to comment upon lo andino in the work of Yuyachkani, but most who do so focus on a readily evident oral, visual, and thematic repertoire—the use of Quechua, the deployment of Andean music, dance, masks, and costumes, and the use of characters from popular highland festivals. The danger in such assessments, however, is to suggest that Yuyachkani falls into the type of Andeanism, famously criticized by Orin Starn in 1991, that romanticizes the Andes as a place of untouched, authentic indigenous culture which in its persistence has somehow managed to remain “outside the flow of modern history.” My work aspires to dig deeper into Yuyachkani’s Andeanism—a political-aesthetic proposition informed by rigorous study, fieldwork, and experimentation—by placing its corpus of over 30 plays in direct dialogue with some of the most important thinkers of ethnicity in Peru, many of whom the group directly references in essays, interviews, and the plays themselves. This presentation will focus on the centrality of the work of José María Arguedas for Yuyachkani. More than any other thinker, Arguedas pushes the group from a static understanding of lo andino, dominant among academics in the 70s and early 80s when the group began, towards a staging of interculturality that, I argue, should place Yuyachkani as a major contributor to the theorizing of race in the Andes. 

Anne Lambright (Chickasaw Nation) is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests center on Andean literature and culture; human rights and social justice studies; critical transnational Indigenous and Native American studies; Latin American film, sonic, and visual cultures; and translation theory and practice. She is the author of Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru (2015), awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize for outstanding book on Spain or Latin America by the Modern Language Association, and Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas (2007), and she is co-editor of Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America (2007). Currently, she is completing a critical anthology and translations of selected human rights plays by the renowned Peruvian theater troupe, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. 

 

Lecture at this link:
https://wustl.zoom.us/j/94175102047?pwd=dmVlSEJoTjBPaGkvZWlYK28xNjh2dz09
For more information, contact Prof. M. Moraña: moranamabel@gmail.com