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The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil

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The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not yet coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on archival research, Townsend reveals the importance of avant-garde projects that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy: ethnographic operas, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for a theater shut down by the police. The book argues that avant-garde art is tied to the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

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Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

792 TOW u

Publisher

: ., 2018

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780810137417

Classification

792

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

-

Subject(s)

History & Criticism
Performing Arts / Theater

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Sarah Townsend

Other Information

Cataloger

umi

Source

https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/034d2c8e-9218-42fe-b6c2-378d022e8ddf

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