Theatre is widely known to be an integral aspect of Argentine culture and the country's national identity formation. Naturally, this theatrical ecosystem is ripe for scholarship with major studies by Jean Graham-Jones, Paola Hernández, Phillipa Page, Ana Elena Puga, Cecilia Sosa, Diana Taylor and Brenda Werth. Noe Montez's Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina builds on previous scholarship to examine theatre in Buenos Aires from 1990 to the present.
Analysing the relationship between theatre, performance and national identity in Argentina, Montez demonstrates the ways in which Argentine theatre-makers have questioned sociopolitical concerns and disputed mainstream political discourses in response to the military dictatorship that governed the country from 1976 to 1983. The book examines memory narratives and the ways in which they have influenced Argentina's transitional-justice policies, or how the country has responded to state-sanctioned violence and violations of human rights through official governmental operations. To do this, Montez recognizes how theatre in Buenos Aires aids in forging specific methods of activism and political engagement.
Montez focuses on Buenos Aires theatre in one specific moment to convey the exchange between artistic production and the Process of National Reorganization, the official name given to military dictatorship. While previous scholarship has principally focused on the years during and immediately after the dictatorship, Montez draws from artists who began their careers after 1990. In this way, Memory demonstrates a theatrical lineage of Argentine theatre-making and playwriting to manifest how the country's dictatorial past still influences artists such as Mariana Mazover, Patricio Abadi and Damiana Poggi, who began their careers during the period of transitional justice.
Since Argentina's Process ended, theatre artists have used public performances to generate public consciousness of the dictatorship's legacy of violence. In addition, theatre performance has become a way to advocate for and honour the country's estimated thirty thousand desaparecidos, the term given to people who were kidnapped by the dictatorship. Theatre artists and performers have used stages, locally and abroad, to create art that both questions the Argentine government's transitional-justice policies and enables human rights activists to push forward memory narratives that memorialize the desaparecidos in a more meaningful way than has been done.
Demonstrating its usefulness to Latin Americanists as well as theatre scholars, Memory offers a comprehensive account of transitional-justice policies and Argentine history following the fall of the dictatorship. Montez discusses the development of ‘national memory narratives’, oral historian Tina Campt's term to embody ‘selective reconstructions of history in which individuals configure their memories to strategically produce a narrative of the past’ (p. 4). As opposed to individual memory narratives, the collaborative and collective aspects of theatre facilitate memory narratives that can explain histories geared toward mainstream, mass cultural appeal. Montez then explores their practical and theoretical limitations and the complications that arise when competing discourses are constructed. In this way, Montez sees the relationship between Argentina's memory narratives and transitional-justice policies in conversation with post-Shoah Europe, post-apartheid South Africa and post-Pinochet Chile to explain collective memory formation by people who have been traumatized by state-sanctioned violence.
Chapter 1, ‘Resisting the Menem Administration's Narratives of Reconciliation and Forgetting’, examines resistances to memory narratives by focusing on plays by El Periférico de Objeto, Javier Daulte, Marcelo Bertuccio and Luis Cano, that explore the limitations of the Argentine government to impose narratives of forgetting. These playwrights questioned mainstream transitional-justice advocates during Carlos Menem's presidency. Chapter 2, ‘Teatroxlaidentidad: The Right to Memory and Identity’, offers a glimpse into human rights activist theatre. In chapter 3, ‘Reparation, Commemoration, and Memory Construction in the Postdictatorship Generation’, Montez examines how artists during the administrations of Néstor Kirshner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner draw attention to the pressing need to create a living archive and remember personal narratives of the past as opposed to more widespread national discourses. Chapter 4, ‘Performing Public Memorialization of the Malvinas War’, analyses productions that occurred at the same time as national commemorations of the Malvinas War. Productions such as Mauricio Kartun's Pericones (1987), Roberto Ibañez's Fireworks (2011) and Augustín Palermo's Queen Malvinas (2012) criticized the government's treatment of veterans and lionized soldiers in a similar fashion to how artists honoured los desaparecidos.
Noe Montez demonstrates how cultural production, memory narratives and transitional justice are inseparable in post-dictatorship Argentina. Theatre in Buenos Aires is a driving cultural force that facilitates dialogues about politics that wield the power to either validate or debase transitional-justice policies. Memory makes it clear that these policies and memory narratives are constantly evolving and, because of this, theatre performance remains a site of intervention to generate social and political change.
