SOURCE: Graham-Jones, Jean. “Broken Pencils and Crouching Dictators: Issues of Censorship in Contemporary Argentine Theatre.” Theatre Journal 53, no. 4 (2001): 595-605.

[In the following essay, Graham-Jones discusses how Argentine playwrights devised ways to incorporate “counter-censorship” into their productions during the repressive 1970s in that country.]

Autocensura [self-censorship] continues to be as dirty a word for the Argentine artist as it was during the 1976-83 military dictatorship. When asked about the subject, artists commonly respond much as the writer Héctor Lastra did in 1986: “I have always insisted that self-censorship does not exist. What exists is censorship. To speak of self-censorship is a way of being reactionary, because you're attacking the individual.”¹

Is the line between censorship and self-censorship in recent Argentine cultural production as easily drawn as Lastra would have us believe? Argentine cultural critic Andrés Avellaneda has written that cultural control inextricably links together Power and Text: “The history of culture is also the history of censorship.”² Censorship undeniably played a role in Buenos Aires theatre produced during the first years of the military dictatorship. Nevertheless, even under repressive conditions, theatre practitioners successfully staged plays that carried strong sociopolitical messages. Although there are documented cases of theatres and playwrights having been censored, it is not always easy to track the effects of censorship. It is even more difficult to trace the extent of censorship's internalized counterpart, self-censorship, on the individual artist. Many Argentinean theatre practitioners, echoing Lastra, have been loath to entertain the idea of a self-silencing or a self-editing as a conditioning factor in their efforts to (re)present extratheatrical reality on stage. In cases where the presence of the internal self-censor has been acknowledged, it has been cast in an oppositional relation: external censorship at the hands of victimizing military/government forces versus the conscious or repressed self-censoring acts on the part of victimized artists. The practices of censorship and self-censorship, often presented as mutually exclusive, do not appear therefore to explain the many resisting texts produced under dictatorship. How can we account for artistic agency in the face of (self)censorship?

I believe that the relationship between censorship and self-censorship is not nearly as oppositional as it might seem. In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler argues that the process of censorship always remains incomplete because the censored object or act “takes on new life as part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.”³ Diana Taylor complicates the relationship between censor and censored in her analysis of the “underside of [Argentinean] social spectacle” in which she argues that the military and resisting movements such as the Madres shared the same cultural discourse.⁴ Building upon these authors' work, as well as upon theories proposed by certain Chilean critics to account for censorship-evasive strategies in their nation's theatre, I argue that a third element, counter-censorship, is also present in acts of social resistance in the face of external censorship and internal self-censorship. Through theorizing various theatrical responses to censorship, I seek to open up the oppositional paradigm that, in my opinion, has contributed to the current crisis in Argentine theatre and cultural production.

CENSORSHIP AND SELF-CENSORSHIP IN AN ARGENTINE THEATRE UNDER DICTATORSHIP⁵

Argentina was no stranger to state repression or organized violence when the coup hit in 1976, but, with the military's National Reorganization Process [Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, often referred to as the Proceso], terrorism became institutionalized in a project designed to impose “national values” along with “national security.” Popular statistics place the number of people “disappeared” during the eight-year Junta rule at 30,000, and most of these disappearances occurred during the dictatorship's first years. During those early years, Argentines experienced an over-whelming sensation of insecurity and powerlessness, as the military regime carried out its systematic campaign to “re-organize” national life. Telephones were tapped; all news was filtered through the Secretary for State Information; and National Security Law 0840, Article 3, specified that any unauthorized report of an attack on social order was punishable by incarceration. The Postal Service was given the power to intercept and examine any private correspondence. Contrary to the Armed Forces' repeated denials, the State oversaw a complex network of clandestine (concentration) camps throughout the country, the now-infamous “detention” centers. In the face of such threats, thousands of Argentines fled the country.

Avellaneda, in his ongoing study of censorship in Argentina, has noted that the Argentine state had long practiced a cultural control that reached its apogee in the early Proceso with the increased number of censors and consequently of artistic products censored. During the dictatorship, book-burnings were organized, and certain artistic products were prohibited by official decree. Producers of offending materials were closed down temporarily, and bookstore owners, publishers, and distributors often destroyed their own holdings to avoid censure. As smaller publishers went out of business, the larger publishing houses promoted international best-sellers in much the same way that commercial theatres imported “safe” Broadway musicals. The mass media—television, radio, and film—were heavily monitored by official censors. Scripts were submitted for approval prior to any taping (or funding), and censors controlled the distribution of all films. Foreign films, if not prohibited outright, had any “offensive” material cut before being shown, and Argentinean films were subjected to similar treatment.⁶

Theatre in Buenos Aires played several roles in what Taylor calls “the national mise-en-scène of collective and individual fears and anxieties” staged during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.⁷ Of the 8,960 disappearances officially documented by CONADEP (the National Commission on Disappeared People, formed in 1983), 1.3 percent were “actors, artists, etc.”⁸ Theatre was subjected to less censorial control than the mass media and, and as a result, became one of the few public forums for reflection and resistance.⁹ Often plays and performers were left alone if the productions took place in non-mainstream theatres or cabaret spaces.¹⁰ The Argentine Junta, taking its cue from Chile's General Augusto Pinochet, preferred to ignore an off-Corrientes production rather than create a cause célèbre out of a publicized closure and prohibition. Censorship in the theatre typically occurred after the play had gone into production, following opening or, at the very earliest, during the rehearsal period. Apart from the relatively few official prohibitions of certain plays and the closing of theatres (usually for one or two days, as a warning), or the displacement of sets and costumes (under the pretext of conducting an “inventory check”), Argentinean theatre and its practitioners were victims of a primarily anonymous aggression: performances were disrupted by audience “plants”; smoke bombs forced spectators and performers out into the streets; mysterious late-night fires damaged and destroyed theatres. Individuals were threatened in anonymous telephone calls and unsigned letters, and theatre practitioners “disappeared,” as in the cases of the authors Rodolfo Walsh and Francisco Urondo. Unofficial blacklists were circulated, preventing those named from being hired by film companies, television and radio stations, and the “official” national and municipally owned theatres. These official theatres, and the larger commercial houses, limited their seasonal offerings to apparently non-political plays by canonized authors, primarily foreign.¹¹ As a consequence, many theatre practitioners exiled themselves to Spain, Mexico, Italy, France, and the United States.

For the theatre, witnessed in the above-mentioned official prohibitions and unofficial acts of violence, explicit and implicit censorship became an important and effective controlling device.¹² Eduardo Pavlovsky's play, Telarañas [Spiderwebs] received the dubious honor of being the first play banned by official decree during the dictatorship.¹³ It also serves as an example of both implicit and explicit censorship and of the complexities of the relationship between the censor and the censored. The play centers on the familial trinity (Deleuze and Guattari's “mommy-daddy-me”) to portray the attempted indoctrination of a child by his parents through increasingly sinister techniques of instruction, ending in the rebellious son's death by hanging and the parents' creation of a heroic memory-myth of their dead son.¹⁴ Pavlovsky completed writing Telarañas before the coup, and rehearsals had begun in 1976. As the military regime settled in, Pavlovsky began re-working what would become the play's most controversial scene, the “Invasion,” in which two paramilitary agents break into the home and torture the family. In the production, these two outside torturers were “disguised” as gas meter-readers. Yet even after such precautions, the company, which included Pavlovsky himself playing the role of the Father, continued to have concerns about possible repercussions from the regime, and the premiere was postponed until November of the following year. As a further precaution, Telarañas's opening was kept very low-profile, debuting during the Teatro Payró's noon-time experimental theatre series. Critics were invited to the opening, however, and one review appeared in a local newspaper.¹⁵ The play had two performances, and when Pavlovsky chose not to respond to the Municipal Secretary of Culture's request that the play be voluntarily withdrawn,¹⁶Telarañas was prohibited by official written decree for its violation of Junta-upheld values, as the following excerpt claims:

WHEREAS: [the play] proposes a line of thinking that is directly aimed at shaking the foundations of the institution of the family, [and] as said institution is a result of the spiritual, moral and social conception of our society. [Whereas] even though said position is portrayed, by and large, through a collection of symbolic attitudes, said attitudes have the necessary transparency to distort, in an easily-perceived way, the essence and traditional image of said institution. … To the above can be added the use of indecent language and the succession of aberrant scenes, delivered with excessive crudeness and realism.¹⁷

The reader will note in the decree's wording no reference to the play's political content. The production had already made self-censorial efforts to excise overt political references, but it should be remembered that the Proceso sought to reshape the country politically and morally. The reader may also note, in the last lines, that the Censor had no difficulty assuming the role of theatre critic. Indeed, the language corresponded closely to that of the one published review, bringing up the related topic of the solidarity (or lack thereof) between critics and theatre practitioners. During the dictatorship, there were indeed cases in which critics consciously omitted any “compromising” information about the individual being profiled. For example, not one critic mentioned Ricardo Monti's overtly political pre-dictatorship play Historia tendenciosa de la clase media argentina … [Tendentious History of the Argentinean Middle Class …]¹⁸ in the previews for his 1977 Visita [Visit]. However, in other situations, such as Telarañas's, the critic worked closely with the regime to repress and censor.

The above discussion makes evident that the line between acceptable and unacceptable theatre was purposely kept blurred throughout the dictatorship. Such blurring corresponds to one of censorship's more insidious objectives, as Roberto Hozven points out:

Censorship, by not making literally explicit what the prohibition covers, extends itself figuratively to the totality of our social actions and interpellates us in relation to society, our jobs and ourselves as the always possible receivers and protagonists of some guilty action, collective and indeterminate, but experienced individually by a defenseless conscience.¹⁹

This universalization and internalization of the censoring process manifested itself in self-censorious acts as Argentina became increasingly a “culture of fear.”²⁰ Hozven describes self-censorship as the act wherein the artist, as “inxile” or internal exile,²¹ provides an “alienated” answer to the problem of how to avoid having the artistic product censored: “[by] reproducing [censorship] within himself in order to attempt to prevent consciously, through the active practice of fear, the irruption of any ‘slip’ provoked by the subject's unconscious rebellion.”²²

Argentina's situation, at least during the first years of the dictatorship, demanded that the artistic message be preconditioned, often forcing the artist into a form of inxile.²³ In 1979, the Argentine writer María Elena Walsh described self-censorship's impact on the individual artist: “We each have a broken pencil and an enormous eraser already encrusted in our brains.”²⁴ That same year she condemned the collective result in the now famous article, “Misadventures in Kindergarten-Land” [“Desventuras en el País-Jardín-de-Infantes”]:

For some time now we've been like children, and we can't say what we think or imagine. When the censor finally disappears …, we'll be decrepit [and] not even know what to say. … The ubiquitous and diligent Censor has transformed one of the most lucid cultural centers of the world into a Kindergarten, a fabricator of deceits that can only undertake the childish, the impudent, the frivolous or the historic, [and then only] if it's been blessed by holy water.²⁵

Walsh speaks of an internalization of the policing mechanism so complete that the artist is completely blocked, and the tools necessary for the creative act destroyed. Given self-censorship's insidious nature, working at both the conscious and unconscious levels, it becomes nearly impossible to ascertain the extent of its influence on the creation of a play like Telarañas.

COUNTER-CENSORSHIP AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE

Such censorial and self-censorial pressures notwithstanding, many Argentinean artists working during the military regime created resisting works with strong sociopolitical messages. How can we interpret the effectiveness of such artistic products? Over the last two decades, Chilean critics, writing both in and outside their country, have attempted to document the effects of external censorship and internal self-censorship on theatre produced during their own nation's dictatorship (1973-1990). By examining the various mechanisms and strategies employed to effect the communicative act, authors such as Roberto Hozven, Juan Carlos Lértora, and Rodrigo Cánovas have attempted to theorize the experience of attempted free expression in a repressive society. In the process, they have identified two types of self-censorship: one, an after-the-fact self-censoring, that excuses and retracts any previous unacceptable statement; and the other, a preventive self-censoring that attempts “to put the bandage on before the wound appears,” to anticipate and avoid any potential offense. In both circumstances, the self-censoring subject ends up effectively paralyzed and alienated.²⁶ In order to account for positive cultural production under repression, a third category, counter-censorship, was proposed.

Counter-censorship, unlike self-censorship, is active and resisting. Counter-censorship takes advantage of the paradox of the censoring act pointed out by Butler:

Never fully separable from that which it seeks to censor, censorship is implicated in its own repudiated material in ways that produce paradoxical consequences. If censoring a text is always in some sense incomplete, that may be partly because the text in question takes on new life as part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.²⁷

According to Hozven, counter-censorship seeks “to disarticulate the repressive discursive system in order to generate a discourse censored by that very system.”²⁸ Following Butler, I question whether counter-censorship actually manages to “disarticulate the repressive discursive system,” operating as it does from within that very discursive system. I use the term to describe the action or process undertaken by texts that actively seek to resist censorship or self-censorship.

Some examples of counter-censorial strategies utilized in plays staged in dictatorship Chile and Argentina include parody, the orphaned quotation (i.e., inserting a canonized text so that it carries the potentially censured message), the double entendre, and transference (i.e., breaking the controversial message up so that different, atomized voices carry a piece of the message and no one is solely responsible). It merits noting that all four strategies rely on irony, allusion, and, ultimately, on a shared language between the text and its intended audience. Indeed, Taylor writes of Argentinean audiences honing the art of “counter-censorial” spectatorship: “people had become good ‘interpreters’ or readers of signs.”²⁹ Argentinean playwrights, especially during the early, and most repressive, Proceso years, made counter-censorial use of such rhetorical figures as metaphor, allegory, and analogy, and the reappropriation of cultural codes already in place in Argentine theatre. In the plays of the period, family dynamics functioned as a metaphor for multilevel power relations, and paternalism reached authoritarian extremes while the offspring's immaturity symbolized a national state of arrested infantilism. The enclosed space of the home effectively and frequently represented the country under dictatorship. On-stage action often took the form of ritualized play, as seemingly innocent games were transformed into sadomasochistic rituals. Productions blurred the boundary between realism and avant-garde absurdism, and often cloaked themselves in such canonized, and therefore acceptable, structures as the turn-of-the-century grotesco criollo. They reached their audiences by, to paraphrase the playwright Roberto Mario Cossa, “metaphorizing reality.”³⁰

A brief overview of six Argentinean plays from the late 1970s will exemplify some of these counter-censorial strategies of sociocultural resistance employed. The surprise hit of the 1976 theatre season was Juegos a la hora de la siesta [Games during Naptime] by Roma Mahieu.³¹Juegos tells the story of a group of adolescents playing in a park while their parents nap. Giving into pressure from a bullying friend, the youths participate in a series of games culminating in a bird's strangulation-death. The sadomasochistic allegory ends with a call for a solidarity of the weak as the youngsters finally stand up to the bully. Ricardo Halac's 1978 play, El destete [The Weaning] is a vaudevillian indictment of an Argentinean society that refuses to allow its children to grow up, as the play's young mother carelessly asphyxiates her child with her breast. In Roberto Mario Cossa's award-winning 1977 play, La nona [The Granny], an immigrant centenarian grandmother's voracious hunger destroys everyone else in her family in what constitutes class genocide. Cossa built his play on the traditional grotesco criollo model, the vehicle for a savage humor determined, as the author recalls, “by the climate of terror in which the country was living.”³² The grandmother's true authoritarian, patriarchal nature was underscored by the character being played by a male actor—even as the casting provided a humorous distancing. The nona was a destructive force, blind to the needs of anyone else and certainly a metaphor for the repressive military triumvirate and the classes that accommodated such a national situation. Oscar Viale, in the 1978 Encantada de conocerlo [Pleased to Meet You], incorporates a character from the popular turn-of-the-century sainete: the controlling mother that sees only what she wants to see. He then gives the situation an ominously absurd twist when the woman refuses to acknowledge the reality of her daughter having been raped in her home by a clearly authoritarian enemy. Susana Torres Molina's 1977 Extraño juguete [Strange Plaything] stages a self-consciously metatheatrical performance when what appears to be an unexpected visit from a door-to-door salesman at the home of two middle-aged, unmarried sisters turns into an attempted rape, deterred only at the last moment by the rapist's need to relieve himself. It is at this point, nearly the end of the play, that the spectators realize that they have just witnessed a performance, an erotic, psychodramatic acting-out, scripted and staged by the two upper-class matrons with the role of the rapist going to an out-of-work actor. Extraño juguete's purposefully ambiguous metatheatrical game inspired numerous receptions—ranging from well performed psychological drama to biting critique of the artist's socioeconomic marginalization during dictatorship. In Ricardo Monti's Visita [Visit] (together with La nona, the much lauded play of the 1977 theatre season), a young assassin invades the home of an older, possibly immortal couple and their son-slave-pet. However, the act of murder is purposely deferred so that it remains unclear at play's end exactly who succumbs. Has the spectator just witnessed an attempt at revolutionary parricide, or does the authoritarian parent destroy the child? Visita's very hermetic, metaphysical text not only allowed for a philosophical meditation on the limits of human existence but also functioned to encode a sociopolitical message.³³

Counter-censorship does not, however, provide a neat alternative to the censorship/self-censorship oppositional paradigm. On the contrary, it is inextricably intertwined with censorship and self-censorship. The above cited plays stand as examples of counter-censorial, resisting texts that seek to convey a message critical of the regime and at the same time avoid its backlash; yet ironically many of them reproduce the very repressive order they would condemn in the military regime. Note, for instance, the functional roles of women in several of the plays mentioned: Halac's careless mother, Cossa's grotesque grandmother (albeit traditionally performed in drag), and Viale's controlling mother are made to carry their texts' dramatic blame for the social disorder. Indeed, many plays of the period display a great deal of violence against the minority other and parrot the very intolerant traditional values the Proceso regime sought to impose on the Argentine populace through its project of “national reorganization.”³⁴ By virtue of a shared cultural discourse, the would-be (self)censored counter-censorial text becomes “part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.” These texts betray an internalization of the censorial policing mechanism so that, even as they counter-censorially resist the authoritarian state, they perpetuate it.³⁵

ARGENTINA'S CONTINUING DOUBLE BIND OF CENSORSHIP AND SELF-CENSORSHIP

Although Argentina experienced an explosion in open political and cultural expression during the first years of redemocratization, repression has not disappeared from the national cultural scene. The recent governments' neoliberal economic policies have led to recession, unemployment, and discontent among certain sectors of the society. President Carlos Saúl Menem, after having pardoned the dictatorship's military leaders, continued to threaten those critical of his government with arrest (for desacato [disrespect, contempt]), suggesting that they toe the self-censoring line. There have been “disappearances,” madres and journalists continue to be threatened, and sometimes, as in the case of the photojournalist José Cabezas, even murdered. A militaristic presence has continued to make itself still felt even under democratic government.³⁶ Censorship played a role in the two democratically elected governments of Alfonsín and Menem: films were prohibited, television and radio programs preempted or canceled, and certain songs banned. Censorship's internalized counterpart is also still with Argentines. In 1985, a full two years after the country's return to democracy, the playwright Roberto Mario Cossa confirmed María Elena Walsh's earlier predictions: “External change doesn't mean anything if there is no change inside. … Even though we may live in a democratic country, there is a censor in each one of us, a crouching dictator ready to react.”³⁷

The presence of continued self-censorship under “democracy” can also help to understand certain recent aesthetic trends. Andrés Avellaneda has noted in literature, as I perceive in the theatre, that even as Argentine cultural practitioners began to examine, revise, and process their country's recent history, as early as the mid-1980s there was another movement, among a younger generation, to destroy the illusion that any text could be taken as “true.” Avellaneda notes that, while the country was beginning to talk about what had happened (to recapture their own history), a “new writing” arrived on the scene, one that sought to reject all “real” referents and any need for literature to bear witness to reality. Avellaneda has connected this rise of what he calls a “postmodern” aesthetic in Argentinean cultural production to the internalization of censorship, and his comments may account for what I perceive to be a ongoing crisis in post-Proceso Argentine theatre,

It is perhaps this convergence that can help define the Argentine cultural tone of the last ten years: … the problem of the seduction that not-telling poses for a society that accepted, in its immediate past, a ferocious and indiscriminate punishment, and that resists, in its present, to recognize it. In other words, [this time] psychoanalytic: [it's] as if Argentine social repression stimulated … a psychic repression that sought to manifest itself and define itself in allusory languages, or in the move toward an aesthetics equally allusive, presented as inevitable negotiations with the history of discourse and not with reality.³⁸

Avellaneda is speaking of a self-censorship so fully internalized that it is perceived as an aesthetic choice. The same postmodern trend has made its presence felt on the contemporary Argentine theatre scene. Just as the country was returning to democracy, an underground movement sprang up. This was a theatre of unconventional show times, venues, and audiences, of eclectic influences, techniques, and media. The older, more committed theatre practitioners complained of the deaths of the play, the playwright, and the message. Others critics claimed that the “new theatre” was a pale imitation of Anglo-American postmodern performance, seeking to transgress and destroy without proposing any alternatives.³⁹

What Avellaneda perceives a “cultural tone” might also be described as the neoconservative face of so-called avant-garde aesthetics, a misapplied Baudrillardian end-of-utopian thought that seeks to depoliticize and carnivalize. It is tempting to point the finger at the country's recent neoliberal globalizing project (leading some Argentines to speak of their country's “McDonaldsización”) as the source of such a universalist, depoliticized tendency. Yet it is not enough to blame the censor, either externalized as a recent president or the military enemy, as Héctor Lastra does in the comment that opens this study, or internalized, but still objectified as an invasion, as Cossa does in his concerns about the “crouching dictator.” Many Argentine theatre practitioners and critics, in their insistence on the repressive binary paradigm or in their refusal to (re)activate their relationship with explicit and implicit censorship, self-censorship, and counter-censorship, have contributed to “not-seeing” and “not-telling” and thus to the continued authoritarian presence in Argentine cultural production.

The introduction of a third term, counter-censorship, opens up the oppositional paradigm and allows for a fuller examination of the political, social, and cultural life of the plays produced under dictatorship and an analysis of how contemporary Argentine theatre has yet to come to terms with its country's repressive past and present.

Notes

1. Quoted in Andrés Avellaneda, “La ética de la entrepierna: Control censorio y cultura en la Argentina,” Hispamérica 15.43 (1986), 42-43. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are mine.

2. Andrés Avellaneda, Censura, autoritarismo y cultura: Argentina 1960-1983 (2 vols. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1986), 1:7. For an account of specific cases of theatre censorship, see Vivian Brates, “Teatro y censura en Argentina” in Reflexiones sobre teatro latinoamericano del siglo veinte, eds. Miguel Angel Giella and Peter Roster (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna/Lemcke Verlag, 1989), 218-240.

3. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130.

4. For analyses of Argentinean censorial discourse, readers are particularly directed to Avellaneda's two-volume compilation Censura, autoritarismo y cultura: Argentina 1960-1983, as well as his article “Argentina militar: los discursos del silencio,” in Literatura argentina hoy. De la dictadura a la democracia, eds. Karl Kohut and Andrea Pagni (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1989), 13-30; and Frank Graziano's book Divine Violence. Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War” (Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford: Westview Press, 1992). Taylor's analysis is set forth in her article, “Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, eds. Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1994), 275-305, and developed in her book, Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War” (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997). In Disappearing Acts, Taylor reads the entire Proceso as yet another reenactment of the continuing Argentine national struggle between men staged on and through the feminine.

5. See my book Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre under Dictatorship (Lewisburg/London: Bucknell University Press/Associated University Presses, 2000) for an extended analysis of the theatre produced in Buenos Aires during and immediately following the Proceso.

6. In his discussion of the Argentine film industry of the early 1970s, Steven Kovacs notes that, technically, it was not required for the script or screenplay to be submitted to the interventor [official censor]. Nevertheless, it was advisable in order to “minimize the risk of the final product being turned down” (Kovacs, “Screening the Movies in Argentina,” New Boston Review 3.3 [1977], 20). The effects of censorship and prohibition, compounded by those of a floundering economy, meant disaster to the film industry: “dropping from forty features a year in the early seventies to thirty-three in 1975 and twenty-one in 1976” (Ibid., 20).

7. Taylor, “Performing Gender,” 276.

8. CONADEP (Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desaparición de Personas), Nunca más (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1984. English trans. Writers and Scholars International. London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 296. It should be noted that over half the desaparecidos documented by CONADEP were workers and students (30.2 and 21 percent, respectively).

9. The Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo has assigned a similar role to literature of the period: “Suppressing debate and dissent and liquidating the public sphere are more devastating even than censorship, and when the military dictatorship froze public political forms of reflection, literary discourse was able to propose itself as a space for reflection” (“Strategies of the Literary Imagination” in Fear at the Edge. State Terror and Resistance in Latin America, eds. Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press, 1992, 240). For examples of other acts of cultural resistance, see Kathleen Newman's article “Cultural Redemocratization: Argentina, 1978-89” (in On Edge. The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, eds. George Yúdice, Jean Franco and Juan Flores, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

10. Usually referred to as cafés-concert, these were small spaces (seating 50 to 150 spectators) where, in the reminiscences of Enrique Pinti (one of Argentina's best-known performers and the originator of the immensely-popular Salsa criolla), “there was slightly more tolerance” (Pinti, Enrique Pinti. Conversaciones con Juan Forn [Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1990], 132).

11. The Buenos Aires critic Gerardo Fernández noted that, paradoxically, both the National Theatre (the Cervantes) and the Buenos Aires Municipal Theatre (the San Martín) attracted larger audiences during these years, thanks in part to the low ticket prices but also because of the popularity of such “proven” foreign texts. These plays included, at the Cervantes, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Shaw's Pygmalion, in addition to such national classics as the staged version of Hernández's epic gaucho poem Martín Fierro. Foreign plays staged in the San Martín during the period include Saint Joan and Widowers' Houses (Shaw), Golden Boy (Odets), The House of Bernarda Alba (García Lorca), Mary Stuart (Schiller), Dance of Death (Strindberg), Waiting for Godot (Beckett), and The Mayor of Zalamea (Calderón).

12. Butler distinguishes between implicit and explicit censorship by noting that the former term, unlike the latter's explicit state policing or regulation, refers to “implicit operations of power that rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable” (130).

13. Eduardo Pavlovsky, Telarañas in La mueca. El señor Galíndez. Telarañas (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1980), 123-78.

14. For a more detailed analysis of the 1977 production of Telarañas as well as its 1985 restaging, see my article, “Framing the Proceso: Two Productions of Telarañas” in Latin American Theatre Review (Spring 1996), 61-70.

15. The overwhelmingly negative review, entitled “Objectionable Play in the Payró Theatre” [“Pieza objetable en el Teatro Payró”], ran in the November 23, 1997 edition of La Prensa and was signed by E. F. R., identified by Pavlovsky as Erwin Félix Rubens. See Pavlovsky, La ética del cuerpo. Conversaciones con Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Babilonia, 1994), 71.

16. Pavlovsky, quoted in Severino João Albuquerque, Violent Acts. A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 143.

17. Quoted in Avellaneda's Censura, 1986, vol. 2, 161. Critics have often asserted that Telarañas was banned for its political content. A careful reading of the decree shows that, once again, the State was objecting to the way in which traditional values were (re)presented on stage. The Proceso's project was much broader than a mere political restructuring.

18. The play's complete title demonstrates the influence of Peter Weiss's documentary theatre: Historia tendenciosa de la clase media argentina, de los extraños sucesos en que se vieron envueltos algunos hombres públicos, su completa dilucidación y otras escandalosas revelaciones [Tendentious History of the Argentinean Middle Class, of the Strange Events in which Certain Public Figures Found Themselves Involved, their Complete Elucidation and Other Scandalous Revelations] (Buenos Aires: Talía, 1972).

19. Roberto Hozven, “Censura, autocensura y contracensura: Reflexiones acerca de un simposio,” Chasqui 12.1 (1982), 70.

20. The term “culture of fear” was first applied to the Argentine situation by political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell, “La cosecha del miedo,” Nexos 6.6 (1983). As Norbert Lechner states in his article “Some People Die of Fear. Fear as a Political Problem” in Fear at the Edge. State, Terror and Resistance in Latin America (eds. Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992, 26), it “refers to the wholesale, everyday experience of human-rights abuse.” Lechner continues by saying, “We experience the imprint of authoritarianism as a culture of fear.”

21. Carina Perelli, in her article “Youth, Politics and Dictatorship in Uruguay,” defines inxile, or insile, as “the marginality suffered by those who were either direct or potential victims during the authoritarian period” (eds. Corradi, Fagen, and Garretón, Fear at the Edge, 232, n. 4).

22. Hozven, “Censura,” 71.

23. As Amy K. Kaminsky reminds us, “[L]anguage is in the first instance fundamental to a sense of community,” and “the simple act of communication is interrupted under dictatorship” (After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora [Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], xii).

24. Quoted in Avellaneda, Censura, 1:48.

25. Clarín [Cultura y Nación], 16 August 1979, quoted in Avellaneda, Censura, 2:184-85.

26. Hozven, “Censura,” 71.

27. Butler, Excitable, 130.

28. Rodrigo Cánovas E., “Lectura de Purgatorio. Por dónde comenzar,” hueso húmero 10 (1980), 171. See also Juan Carlos Lértora, “Rasgos formales del discurso censurado,” Literatura chilena, creación y crítica 9:2 (1985), 7-9.

29. Taylor, Disappearing, 237.

30. Quoted in Jorge Eines, “Metaforizando la realidad” (Interview with Roberto Cossa), Primer Acto 213 (1986), 46-47.

31. Roma Mahieu, Juegos a la hora de la siesta, undated typed manuscript archived in ARGENTORES, Buenos Aires. The play ran from July 1976 until December 1977, when it was prohibited by presidential decree (for attempting to destroy “fundamental values that go to the essence of our national self”).

32. Quoted in Sergio Morero, “Es cuestión de tener buen oído” (Interview with Roberto Mario Cossa), Teatro 5.20 (1985), 40.

33. Most of the play scripts have been published: Ricardo Halac, El destete in El destete; Un trabajo fabuloso (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paralelo 32, 1984); Roberto Cossa, La nona in Teatro 2 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1989), 67-136; Oscar Viale, Encantada de conocerlo in Teatro tomo 1 (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1987); Susana Torres Molina, Extraño juguete (Buenos Aires: Editorial Apex, 1978); and Ricardo Monti, Visita (Buenos Aires: Talía, 1978). La nona has been staged in English in the United States (translation by Raúl Moncada); and Visita received its English-language premiere in 1995 at Florida State University under the direction (and translation) of this author. For a more detailed discussion of some of these plays, as well as of theatre produced throughout the dictatorship, the reader is directed to my study, Exorcising History.

34. See Taylor's Disappearing Acts and Newman's “Cultural Redemocratization” for accounts of oppositional resistant texts that perpetuate misogyny and violence against women.

35. It would appear that Theodor Adorno's heavy warning still held: “When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder.” “Commitment” in Ernst Bloch, et al. Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 189. I tend to agree with Fredric Jameson's assertion, in his conclusion to the collection, that Adorno's 1962 defense of the modernist committed work necessarily fell short of accounting for “the fate of modernism in consumer society itself” (209) and later “fascist” regimes.

36. One need only recall that the recent governor of the province of Tucumán is the General Antonio Domingo Bussi, who orchestrated a bloody “cleansing” of the city of Tucumán during the Proceso's first year.

37. Cossa, “El pensamiento vivo del autor,” Teatro 5.20 (1985), 24-26.

38. Avellaneda, “Hablar y callar: construyendo sentido en la democracia,” Hispamérica 24.72 (1995): 38.

39. I respond to some of these criticisms elsewhere (Exorcising History, 159-61).

I would like to thank Jean Dangler, Loren Kruger and Susan Bennett, as well as the anonymous reviewer for TJ, for their very useful comments and provocative questions.