Helena Buffery

Negotiating the translation zone: Invisible borders and other landscapes on the contemporary “heteroglossic” stage

This article aims to negotiate the landscape of contemporary theatre translation, focusing on the translation and reception of Catalan theatre. It explores the problems faced by minority or minorized languages and cultures in achieving visibility on the international stage, showing how this impacts on notions of translatability. I analyse and contextualize perceptions of translation failure as regards the Catalan textual theatre tradition beyond its borders, comparing it with the relative success of Catalan visual performance internationally. This allows me to identify how market forces construct and limit intercultural theatre and spectatorship, and provides a window onto the specific problems faced by literary translation in a culture dominated by visual channels of communication. Combining insights from theorists of cultural transfer with work in intercultural theatre and performance studies, I highlight the ways in which theatre translation creates, engages and shapes intercultural spectatorship and I explore reception as an embodied phenomenon.

The ‘Placing of Memory’ in contemporary Catalan theatre

A 2005 conference on Catalan Theatre since the ‘Transition’ attested to the existence of a problem with theatre memory in the Catalanspeaking territories. On the one hand, the problem was perceived to be that of institutional memory: researchers, teachers and programmers were thought to be somehow failing to ‘re-member’ Catalan theatrical tradition in their shaping of contemporary performance practice. On the other, competing maps of what constituted tradition revealed the ‘placing of memory’ – understood here to be the re-positioning of the past as collective experience – to be fraught with the same problems and misunderstandings that have plagued representation of the Catalan cultural scene over the past two decades. In this article, I will explore how contemporary Catalan theatre has responded to the changing make-up of Catalan society through re-negotiation of the places of Catalan culture. Although I will begin by rehearsing the institutional debate over the contemporary theatre canon in Catalonia, the main focus will be on evidence that negates the lack of Catalan theatrical memory. Following Sharon Feldman’s perception of renewed attention to the meaning of lived cultural space in Catalan dramatic writing, particularly in terms of the location of culture in the urban spaces of Barcelona, I will trace how the importance of the ‘placing of memory’ manifests itself in three plays, Barcelona, mapa d’ombres (Barcelona, Map of Shadows, 2004), Forasters (Blow-Ins, 2004) and Raccord (2005), as paradigmatic encounters between memory-theatre and theatrical memory on the Catalan stage. One of the key markers of discourse about theatre within Catalonia has been the posited deficiency of theatrical memory, in particular during the 1980s and 1990s. The immense creativity of the 1970s is mourned in critiques of the new monuments, alongside calls to remember the role of pre-Transition movements in mapping the theatrical space and the 1. The proceedings were published as Carles Batlle i Jordà (ed.), I Simposi Internacional sobre teatre català contemporani: de la transició a l’actualitat (Barcelona: Institut del Teatre/Diputació de Barcelona, 2005).

On pain of difference

In ‘Feminist criticism in the wilderness’, Elaine Showalter defines two principal trends in feminist criticism: feminist reading, ‘concerned with the feminist as reader’ (1981, p. 182), and gynocritics, the study of women as writers. The books in this review generally fit into the latter trend, in their recovery of women writers, and other cultural players, as women. Even Abigail Lee Six’s book, which does not present itself primarily as having a gendered agenda, begins with the claim that it is ‘the first in-depth and holistic study of Adelaida Garcı́a-Morales’s fiction’ (p. i), thus pointing to its status in recovering the work of an(other) all-but-unknown woman author. However, what distinguishes them from critical texts of the 1980s is their dialogue with a range of theoretical trends and social texts, leading to a degree of questioning of the value of difference discourse, underpinned by some awareness of the importance of social context in determining what could be said or written at any time, and thus of the corresponding relativity of any subversion of hegemonic values achieved by women authors. This can be seen both in Anja Louis’s 2005 reading of the work of Carmen de Burgos, which attempts to negotiate the slipperiness of intentionality and conventionalism in its exploration of the feminist agenda of its subject, and, more generally, in Pilar Godayol’s edited volume, Catalanes del XX (2006), which uncovers the importance of a whole network of women to the development and preservation both of a voice for women and of a Catalan tradition. In Women and the Law, Louis displays the interdisciplinary research undertaken for her PhD thesis, drawing on a wide range of sources, from feminist literary criticism to theories of melodrama, from legal history to jurisprudence and moral philosophy, in order

Unsettling sites: approaches to gender and sexuality in Latin American culture

One of the most productive trends in Latin American Studies in the past two decades has been the shift towards the consideration of gender and sexuality, both as a way of uncovering hidden histories and marginalized voices, and as a key to uncovering the changing relationships between discourse and power that underpin the writing of history, leading to radical reshapings of the way in which we understand Latin American history and culture. As the editors ofGender, Sexuality and Power in Latin America since Independence recognize, there has been a proliferation of academic programmes and conferences in recent years that seek to read their subject through the lens of gender history, and their book grew out of an ongoing exchange of ideas with academics and students, in particular that arising from the annual programmes at the Oaxaca Summer Institute. Thus, whilst the volume brings together a diversity of contributions and approaches, ranging across the whole geography of Latin America over the past two centuries, and subjects as diverse as the culture of duelling in nineteenth-century Uruguay and contemporary Mexican internet sites for gender and sexuality, it succeeds in maintaining an epistemological focus on the idea that ‘gender and sexuality are central to any analysis of history’ (p. 25). The questions proposed by the volume – ‘Why are so many scholars interested in the history of gender and sexuality in Latin America? How does studying gender and sexuality offer them new insights into the past and present in Latin America and elsewhere? What are the sources and methods they use to elicit information about gender difference, sexual practice, and power in historical contexts?’ (p. 5) – draw attention to the broadly pedagogical focus of the volume, and its intended market for taught programmes in Latin American Studies, to be read alongside key texts in the history of gender and sexuality, such as Foucault (The History of Sexuality, 1976), Butler (Bodies that Matter, 1993), Scott (Gender and the Politics of History, 1999), Halperin (How to Do the History of Homosexuality, 2002) and Lancaster (The Trouble with Nature, 2003). However, the individual essays also offer invaluable cutting-edge scholarship on aspects of the relationship between gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, in