Diana Taylor

[In the following excerpt, Taylor examines the connection between politics and contemporary Latin American drama.]

While commentators studying Latin American theatre generally recognize the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the quantity and quality of the plays produced from the 1960s onward, we still do not have a good name to describe the process (or perhaps multiple processes), or a very clear understanding of its (their) complexity or periodization. Various terms have been proposed. Beatriz Risk enumerates them in her work El nuevo teatro latinoamericano: Una lectura histórica: "theatre of identity, revolutionary theatre, committed theatre, historical theatre, theatre of violence, theatre of social criticism, documentary theatre, avant-garde, popular theatre"; she herself opts for "new theatre." Several studies have traced the history of that term and its practical applications, notably Rosa Eliana Boudet's Teatro nuevo and Marina Pianca's Diógenes. The term has gradually gained a degree of currency in Latin American studies, although it is doubtful whether everyone using it refers to the same phenomenon. While my use of "theatre of crisis" only partially overlaps with what is generally understood as "new theatre," the latter deserves a brief analysis both because of its widespread use and because it has a certain limited applicability. My comments on the several features characterizing the term will, I hope, clarify my use of it throughout this work and the differences I perceive between new theatre and theatre of crisis.

For Risk and Pianca, new theatre seemingly applies to the entire theatrical movement that developed toward the end of the 1950s (coinciding with the Cuban revolution of 1959), which broke with inherited, especially bourgeois, models and became revolutionary and "dialectical," following Brecht's theatre. The movement spread gradually throughout the Latin American continent and finally reached Hispanic American communities in the United States. The "new" theatre addresses a "new" proletariat and peasant audience, forming part of a wider socioeconomic and political confrontation in which the underclasses struggle for decolonization and for the appropriation of methods of production, including theatrical production. Risk, Pianca, and Boudet all equate new theatre with popular theatre, which does not clarify it significantly because the term "popular theatre" is also open to interpretation.

The definition proposed by Risk, Pianca, and Boudet is, paradoxically, both too general and too specific to prove helpful or meaningful in understanding the profusion of plays produced since the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the one hand, the concept of new theatre signals a widespread commitment to social inquiry and change on the part of the playwrights. In the most global sense, all the serious drama written after the late 1950s which tried to change the situation of the dispossessed is a form of new theatre, characterized by what Leon Lyday and George Woodyard describe as "a spirit of revolution, both in terms of aesthetics and often of sociopolitical values." On the other hand, however, the term also refers to a particular methodological approach (a dialectical or Brechtian model), a clearly defined ideological position (Marxist-Leninist for Boudet), and a specific proletarian audience. So while the dramatists presented in my study unanimously endeavor to demystify sociopolitical obfuscation and alter social attitudes, none of their work—not even that of Enrique Buenaventura, whom Risk uses as her model—falls into the category of new theatre. The use of the term to refer both to a demythifying theatre that profoundly and critically examines society and its own role within it and to a propagandistic theatre that imposes a "correct" political attitude and world view raises a host of contradictions. How can one kind of theatre simultaneously expose and impose an ideology?

The equation of "new theatre" with "popular theatre" further complicates the issue. Questions about what popular theatre is and whose interests it serves are by no means resolved. Discussion about the term's meaning continues in Latin America as well as other parts of the world: for example, in Nigeria and South Africa. Without exhausting all the possible issues the term "popular theatre" raises, two major positions on the subject clarify its use in the context of this study. Many theatre practitioners and scholars accept a "by the people, for the people" definition of popular theatre. Karin Barber's study of the Yoruba traveling companies in Nigeria typifies this stance. Their plays, staged by Yoruba practitioners, reflect the rural audience's values and tastes without attempting to analyze or alter them. From Barber's examples, however, it seems clear that even though these plays are written in Yoruba and performed for audiences unaccustomed to drama, they can in fact reaffirm negative stereotypes and divert the audience's attention from the widespread sociopolitical corruption in Nigeria resulting from the recent flow of petro-naira (oil-generated dollars). Though not intentionally "antipopular," such plays can undermine the position of their audience by, for example, idealizing wealth or feminine submission without providing a context for analysis or question. Throughout this study I refer to this "by the people, for the people" theatre as "people's theatre."

The conscious political use and abuse of people's theatre has been noted by such activists as Frantz Fanon and Augusto Boal, who argue that such traditional popular events as carnival and vodun (or voodoo) rites, placed within the framework of colonization, can prove to be antipopular: thus, "the native's relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away." Those in power not only allow but often promote "native," "folkloric," or "traditional" cultural products and events, thereby controlling, co-opting, and often reifying them. Sometimes the ministries of culture promote this art, claiming to bring it international recognition and thus to secure personal fame for the artist and good press and tourism for the nation. Sometimes the promotion of "native" art takes a more sinister turn. South Africa provides an example of people's culture used against the people: the Nationalist Party claims that apartheid and "separate development" helps protect "Bantu" culture.

The other definition of popular theatre, the one I use throughout this work, takes into account that theatre plays an instrumental part in shaping ideology, whether it is an agitational, integrative, or demystifying kind of theatre. Therefore, it defines a theatre as "popular" if it advances and supports the interests of the oppressed and marginalized groups within a society. Popular theatre, as Boal and other practitioners recognize, need not necessarily be written by members of the oppressed classes or even address a popular audience as long as it furthers the position of the disadvantaged within the system. Many dramatists want to reach as wide an audience as possible, hoping to transform the social structure both from without and from within. Theatre can undermine the assumptions and expectations of the audience and in this sense, perhaps, can prove most effective where its efficacy is least anticipated. Popular theatre, then, refers less to specific spectacles, audiences, and methods of production than to the aims this theatre serves. By means of intense examination and self-examination, popular theatre attempts to liberate both its audience and itself from the constraints and blinders imposed (however imperceptibly) by the hegemonic cultural discourse.

Yet like people's theatre, this popular theatre also manifests its own ideological blind spots, thereby possibly perpetuating oppressive relationships. The black consciousness movement promotes a male ideology ("Black man, you are on your own"), as does its theatre. Male Latin American political revolutionaries, as Buenaventura points out in La requisa, also tend to infantilize or marginalize women. Sometimes, as Wolff's Paper Flowers or Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice illustrate, the "revolutionary" discourse can exclude and even actively attack other oppressed groups—in this case, women. For Cleaver, "rape was an insurrectionary act" attacking "the white man's law" through his object, woman. This theatre, too, is a product of society and reflects its prejudices. In fact, it is naïve to suppose that "new theatre" can escape the cultural limitations inherent in any and all art forms.

Again, one cannot overlook the potential political manipulation of popular theatre. Like people's theatre, it can impose, rather than propose or expose, a vision. Do the university students and radical intellectuals have a moral right to instruct the underprivileged on a "better" life? How does doing so differ from religious proselytizing? Is it merely a coincidence that a similar conflation of educational and religious zeal occurred after the Mexican Revolution with the initiation, by José Vasconcelos (Mexico's minister of education) of a program of traveling educators known as "missionaries?" Can the literate, usually from the bourgeois class, even presume to understand or voice the concerns of the illiterate and semiliterate underclass? How does this presumption differ from the official claims that government works in the best interests of the populace? What happens when popular theatre becomes institutionalized? When "popular theatre" groups such as Cuba's Grupo Teatro Escambray and the Conjunto Dramatico de Oriente (which Boudet uses as the prototypes for her analysis of new theatre) formally adopt rules that "the actor must possess and practice marxist-leninist principles … in a constant and systematic manner." one can again question whose interests are being served.

One of the problems I perceive in the term "new theatre" is the implicit and, in the case of Boudet, Risk, and Pianca, explicit automatic legitimation of theatrical activity perceived as "popular." The terms "new" and "popular," posited in such a way as to reflect and authorize each other, tend to place the subject above discussion and criticism, rather than—as their claims insist—open the field to inquiry. Theatre, precisely because it is process rather than object, always lends itself to multiple uses and abuses, onstage and off. Popular theatre and people's theatre are no exceptions. Without entirely discrediting or discarding the concepts of new and popular theatre, it is important to recognize that they cannot in themselves legitimate or endorse theatrical activity as politically "correct" or socially liberating. Again, as with all theatrical activity, the context defines theatre's ultimate role and character. Popular theatre, then, as I understand and use the term, incessantly questions and rigorously analyzes its own position and ideology.

Another of the major drawbacks in the term "new theatre" is the facile but erroneous assumption made by commentators that if the goals of these plays are similar (social equality, personal and political freedom), their methodology is too. Somehow the diversity and originality with which the plays themselves propose critical revisions of reality has not been duplicated in the criticism. "New theatre" criticism, rather than exploring alternative modes of theatrical discourse, usually legitimates one, the Brechtian, claiming that new theatre is epic theatre, collective theatre, and so forth. The repeated critical appeal to specific models or methodologies proves limiting. It fails to account for the multiple anti-Aristotelian, antihierarchical forms that sprang up after the 1960s: loas (a form that had almost disappeared after the nineteenth century), farces (by definition an anarchic genre), elgrotesco (an Argentine genre developed by playwright Armando Discepolo [1887-1971] which advances its own alienation techniques), the sainete, short skits or gags dating back to Spain's Golden Age. Conversely, some playwrights (Egon Wolff, for one), take the "well-made play" and demolish it before our eyes. But surely these too are profoundly popular forms and aspirations that continue the earliest attempts made by Latin Americans to express their own local realities in their own voices.

Another disadvantage in the term "new theatre" has to do with periodization: after thirty years, one may justifiably question the validity of the adjective. In a sense, we can say that "new" serves a symbolic rather than practical function. Risk, Boudet and Pianca, as I noted, relate new theatre to the Cuban revolution, and in a sense the word supports the revolutionary aspirations for a new beginning, new dating systems and calendars, new men and women.

Pianca tries to reconcile the symbolic with the practical by dividing the development of new theatre into three consecutive stages: during 1959-68 it developed on a national level; from 1968 to 1974 it became international through Latin American theatre festivals; and from 1974 to the present, it began "under the sign of exile, atomization and repression" but experienced a "restructuring and a new hope." In raising the fundamental issue of periods, Pianca's 1-2-3 approach seems to set up an untenable dichotomy between national and international theatrical development within Latin America. It also introduces a final note of optimism which, given the current reality of sociopolitical acts of repression and continuing genocide carried out in some Latin American countries today (particularly in Central America), seems unsustainable. While she correctly notes that individual theatre groups started working on a national level in universities and cultural centers during the 1960s, the impetus and the energy stemmed from a revolutionary consciousness that was affecting all of Latin America and a large portion of the rest of the world as well. Pianca, like most scholars, recognizes the connection between the emergence of the new theatre and the Cuban revolution in 1959, but she downplays the relationship between the individual national "drama" and what I perceive, in consciously theatrical terms, as Latin America's "major drama of liberation," corresponding to the first stages of the Cuban revolution. The revolution was of course in the most literal sense a national phenomenon—it did not in fact extend beyond the island—but in another sense it was clearly an international phenomenon.. [The] revolution proved a suspenseful drama. For Latin Americans who aspired to self-government and self-definition, it was a heroic epic: the oppressed conquered their oppressors; David slew Goliath. For the antirevolutionaries in the United States and elsewhere, the revolution signaled the danger of a "Communist takeover" and led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs attempt. On the basis of the relationship I see between the new theatre and two stages in the revolutionary impetus of the 1960s (the initial revolution and the subsequent institutionalization or, as some argue, failure of the revolution), I would expand Pianca's first stage to the end of the 1960s and divide it into two parallel movements. Even though labeling does tend to be self-legitimating and to promote its own fiction of validity, the need to distinguish between concepts and categories makes it impossible to dispense with the practice altogether. Therefore, I propose the following terms: the theatre of revolution and the theatre of crisis, to signal two general, often overlapping kinds of theatrical activity.

As we have noted thus far, most of the serious, noncommercial theatre of the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s was a revolutionary theatre in spirit and form. This is not to suggest that revolution "sparked" this new theatre; several of the plays within the category were actually written before the Cuban revolution. Rather, the conflicts and changing perspectives that led to revolution also shaped this new theatrical perspective. The very constant threat posed by the United States to Latin America throughout this century became increasingly obvious and alarming. I am not referring simply to overt invasions and political meddling—the overthrow of the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in 1954, or the thwarted invasion of Cuba in 1963; perhaps of greater long-term consequence was the subsequent CIA counterinsurgency campaign, which initiated the use of terrorist tactics and the now infamous practice of "disappearances" throughout Central and South America. (The term desaparecido was used in the Latin American press for the first time in conjunction with U.S. counterinsurgency in Guatemala). The increasingly hostile relationship between the United States and Latin America provoked a revision of the colonial self/other tension: the imperialist, now other, was to be rejected in favor of the redefined heroic self.

The Latin American revolutionary movement was linked to a larger, polyphonic revolutionary discourse worldwide. According to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, political power could be achieved only by means of armed struggle. Regis Debray, the French philosopher and student of Louis Althusser, announced through his Revolution in the Revolution? that the 1960s marked the end of an epoch, the "death of a certain ideology" and "the beginning of another, that of total class warfare, excluding compromise solutions and shared power." Previously pacifist approaches such as Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil rights movement became increasingly militant. At this point, there was a romanticization not only of revolution but also of the violence deemed necessary to bring the revolution about. While the escalating confrontations did not meet with the ultimate success that Castro, CMe, or Debray might have desired, in many ways Debray's title itself sums up the proliferating and conflicting left-wing philosophies that sprang up around the world during the 1960s. In the United States, two main lines of revolutionary thinking—best represented iconographically by means of the clenched fist and the peace symbol—typified the discourse. On one hand were the then militant civil rights movement, student rioting on college campuses, the growing feminist movement, and anti-Vietnam protests—only a few examples of political agitation in the United States. On the other was the so-called "sexual" revolution, which many political revolutionaries must have deemed, at best, antirevolutionary and decadent.

Both forms of revolutionary discourse manifested themselves in other countries, sometimes in combination with other kinds of attacks on political and institutional authority. The civil rights movement, influenced by the Cuban revolution, in turn influenced the formation of the black consciousness movement in South Africa in 1968. Armed struggle against Portuguese domination during the late 1950s and early 1960s, directly linked Angola's Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Mozambique's Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) to Castro's Marxism, both financially and ideologically. These struggles eventually led to national independence and Marxist governments for those two African countries in the 1970s. The Prague Spring (1968) signaled an internal rupture within Communism itself; it raised hopes of a nonauthoritarian, liberating Communism in eastern Europe, which was then crushed by Soviet Stalinism. The 1968 Cultural Revolution in China also tightened its definition of "revolution" and proposed to "purify" or purge it of stagnating elements. In Paris, during the revolt of May 1968, the student left not only questioned the "the truth of knowledges" and rejected the university (in the words of Althusser) as "the dominant ideological State apparatus in capitalist social formations"; they also contested different varieties of Communism, from Stalinism and Maoism to the cult of anarchism, situationist "created chaos," and Trotskyism. In Mexico in October 1968 the raised fist emblematized one trend in the revolutionary thinking: left-wing students challenged the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has dominated Mexico since the 1910-20 revolution. They were massacred in Tlatelolco, a working-class housing compound in the middle of Mexico City, two weeks before the Olympics. Throughout the 1960s, however, the "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll" trend also affected Mexican youth in what was known as the onda, the wave.

The revolutionary movement promised to cast Latin America in a leading role on the world's political and cultural stages. The 1960s provided a new theatrical infrastructure for the marginalized, the oppressed, and the repressed. Radical theatre companies such as Bread and Puppet and the San Franscisco Mime Troupe were on the move; there were national festivals and international festivals. There was renewed hope that Latin America, theatrically as well as politically, would find acceptance not as an inferior other but as a revitalizing, revolutionizing self. Yet, Latin American theatre, with the exception of Triana's Night of the Assassins (staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company as The Criminals in 1968), was not taken up by the European and U.S. practitioners. And at home, the new feeling of liberation eventually collided with the reality of oppressive power.

The Cuban revolution, aside from providing the hope of viable political alternatives for Latin America, also produced a riveting theatrical image. In other words, though the revolution worked primarily on the real order (a political event, which I leave to political theorists), it had a significant symbolic component. Without reducing the revolution to a spectacle, it is important to notice that its spectacular components served a vital, real function. They captured worldwide attention; they rallied followers and admirers by ennobling the revolutionaries while delegitimizing their opposition. The compelling figure of Che and to a lesser degree the figure of Castro dominated the imagination of a huge portion of the population of Latin America. The revolution generated images of epic proportions, which coincided with Brechtian terminology; Che's heroic quest embodied the continent's hopes for liberation. The entire sequence was highly spectacular: a new world was being created out of conflict, a new beginning, a new hero or "revolutionary man." The self-representation of the revolution was also powerfully theatrical: the frozen frame of Che in his beret; the green fatigue uniforms of the Castristas; the Brechtian gestus as the revolutionary attitude of "men" in action; the episodic plot described by Che in his diary, his continuing struggle to move the revolution to Bolivia and then to other oppressed regions of Latin America; the enthralled popular audience. Events reactivated the "revolutionary myth" envisioned by José Carlos Mariategui. And just as scholars argue that theatre provides one means of forging a collective identity, the revolution too created a sense of national and international identity mediated through an image. Instead of twenty-five politically marginal, economically and culturally dependent countries, Latin America could envision itself as a united, coherent entity, a producer (rather than importer) of cultural images.

Notwithstanding its epic proportions, the "drama of liberation," even when applied to the revolution, cannot be "read" according to strictly Brechtian terminology. Although it was a politically liberating event (to a degree), sided with the oppressed against an oppressive and corrupt government, and tried to expose a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist ideology, it also imposed its own reality. The contradictions underlying many discussions of "new" or "popular" or "revolutionary" Latin American theatre reflect the paradox that lies at the heart of this and perhaps every revolution. If we continue to examine it according to theatrical terminology (discussions of "revolutionary" theatre tend to conflate the two), we detect a significant overlap with Artaud's dramatic theory as expressed in his collection of essays The Theater and Its Double. Unlike the Brechtian dialectical theatre, which insists on space for critical distancing—"Spectator and actor ought not to approach one another but to move apart"—the theatricality of the Revolution encouraged an Artaudian identification, even a merging, with those heroic figures "capable of imposing this supreme notion of the theater, men who [would] restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe." Artaud's theory calls for collective fusion in the name of metaphysical transcendence; the individual assumes the image and takes on the "exterior attitudes of the desired condition." Likewise, the revolution encouraged subsuming the personal to the collective ideal. The individual surrender to the ideal creates a new real in both theatrical and revolutionary discourse. The actor, committed to the process of creating a new real, "makes a total gift of himself," as Jerzy Grotowski advocated, following Artaud's lead, and "sacrifices the innermost part of himself." But not only in theatre do people give themselves up like Artaud's "victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." The mythification of violence as a source of liberation, whether self-directed or other-directed, in Artaudian theories of a total, essential, and heroic theatre—the "theatre of cruelty"—also forms part of revolutionary thinking, a factor as much in its discourse as in its military strategy. Images of self-sacrifice and surrender characterize works on revolution. Fernando Alegria, in Literatura y revolución describes "the bloody operation" of self-examination and recrimination through revolutionary literature, in which authors and their public undergo a painful and glorious striptease: they unmask, "wash, scrub, fumigate themselves, burn their clothing and expose their flesh to merciless scrutiny." Moreover, revolutions themselves are almost synonomous with violence; though people do speak of "nonviolent revolutions," the term seems contradictory. Hannah Arendt argues in On Revolution that revolutions "are not even conceivable outside the domains of violence." This is a position the Cuban revolutionaries themselves, maintaining that the struggle for political power was inseparable from armed warfare, would have accepted.

This giving oneself up to the revolution, however, is not a Brechtian critical or dialectical position. A sudden linguistic shift occurs at the point where one would follow the Brechtian terminology to its logical conclusion, to critical awareness and emotional distancing. Here, the surrender to the revolution is described in natural rather than theatrical terminology: one becomes a revolutionary and creates a new real by giving oneself up to the seemingly irresistible force or process. In this sense, the meaning of "revolution" as the steady motion of heavenly bodies in orbit, which follow laws of physics beyond human control, carries over into the modern usage of the term. For one commentator on Latin American popular theatre, "the new socialist hero" will be neither a pessimist nor a conflicted, tortured individual but "a man caught up in the revolutionary whirl-wind."

Just as the Cuban revolution was theatrical, much of the so-called "revolutionary" theatre of this period incorporated and furthered revolutionary ideology, identity, and images. The theatre of revolution, while functioning primarily on the symbolic order, also aimed at real, political consequences and saw itself as an important instrument in the social struggle. During the 1960s, collective theatres began to reinforce the grassroots movements with their emphasis on leadership, unity, mass mobilization, and combined force. This theatre manifested the widespread preoccupation with war, either reaffirming or decoding military terminology. Augusto Boal, for example, speaks of theatre as a "weapon" in overthrowing systems of oppression and describes theatrical "raids" staged in 1963 during the Cuban crisis: "A group of actors meet on a corner and begin arguing about politics to the point of threatening physical violence; people gather around them and the group suddenly begins an improvised performance that deals with the most urgent political issues. Only midway through the performance does the crowd realize that it is attending a play." In Cuba, theatrical groups such as the Conjunto Dramatico de Oriente (started in 1961) and the Grupo Teatro Escambray (1968) gradually moved away from scripted theatre and staged collective acts of group definition and affirmation. Revolutionary theatre is a pragmatic, educational, useful theatre, conceived as a practical exercise in learning about the revolutionary process and encouraging "public participation in [revolutionary] solutions. Theatre is an excellent vehicle to detect and combat problems." Theatrical performances also became acts of collective affirmation and group definition.

It is easy to see the considerable overlap and the blurring of boundaries between the theatricality of revolution and the revolutionary theatre. For one thing, both function concurrently on the real and the symbolic level. Both work as double images, W. J. T. Mitchell's "hypericons." They are simultaneously images and generators of images. They provide not only spectacles but scenarios in which one can envision oneself otherwise, take an image and embody it, become it. The theatricality of the roles and parts does not suggest that these are not socially real or efficacious. By assuming the images of power, one can obtain power—therein lies the real power of images: "the robe makes the man" and "a dog's obeyed in office."

The drama of revolution, both onstage and off, orchestrated images to support the revolutionary drive to overthrow both those in power and the ideology associated with that power structure. As the examples noted above suggest, for images to be politically powerful they must be selected carefully; they must signal one unequivocal message. The theatricality of revolution, like theatre's revolutionary potential, lies in one basic strategy: the elimination (rather than the accumulation) of signs. This theatre, not surprisingly, is often univocal in its attempt to further its ideology. This is its strength as an instrument of change, and its weakness as theatre.

Not all the plays of the 1960s, however, even the socially committed ones, looked to the Revolution for their goals and identity or unquestioningly accepted the revolutionary myth of liberation. Contradictory images, formulated in some of the major plays of 1965-70, reflect the beginning of an ideological crisis. As the revolution within the revolution split factions on the left, the Cuban revolution underwent crisis from within. Opposition also increased from the outside as right-wing governments steadily gained power. The Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 was the first of a wave of repressive governments that began to take over in Latin America. The triumphalist drama of liberation gave rise to another, far more complex, and problematic depiction of reality. The word "revolution" itself meant no one thing, appropriated as it had been by parties old and new, as varied and unrevolutionary as Mexico's Institutionalized Revolutionary Party, Juan Carlos Onganía's authoritarian revolución Argentina of 1966, and Guatemala's "third revolutionary party" (1966) headed by Julio César Mendez Montenegro and characterized by death squads. The word "revolution," clearly, had a potent symbolic function that justified its indiscriminate application. As early as 1965 Triana's Assassins was already suggesting a disenchantment with revolution in general and with the Cuban revolution in particular, insinuating that "revolution" did not necessarily mean "liberation." The revolutionary process in Cuba was undergoing critical systemic change as it compromised its principles in order to adhere to the Soviet program. Basing its original liberating ideals on José Martí's visions of a revolution grounded in love and self-determination, the Cuban revolution initially considered itself strong enough to tolerate many kinds of ideas. In 1965 with the uneasy reception of Triana's Assassins and in 1968 with the famous Padilla affair, it became evident that the fidelistas, like Latin American parties before and after them, also felt the need to restrict, censor, and condemn ideas. As Triana's play makes clear, the concepts of revolution and repression, which had in the romanticization of revolution been conceived as antithetical binaries, now seemed indistinguishable. The conflict between the old order and the new had ultimately failed to generate a new language, a new order, new images, new paradigms for historical process.

Dreams of liberation and self-determination gradually gave way to a new authoritarian order, but one which (like the Mexican Revolution) integrated the revolutionary vocabulary and images—new images that also proved recreations of the old. Che's heroic though almost predictable downfall replayed yet again the extinction of a heroic race, another Cuauhtemoc. Like Demetrio, the hero of Los de abajo, Mariano Azuela's novel about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20, Che and his followers were ambushed in a ravine and fought to the last man. Real events, echoing fiction, acquired a dejd vu quality. So too the new image of a Latin American "self" stemming more from a rejection of the other than from any real sense of affinity or identity, proved fictitious and unsustainable. The characters, like the societies they represent, continued to be marginal and economically dependent. One of the hopes for the revolution, as expressed by H. A. Murena in 1960, was that it would "free man from the myths that oppress him," so that he "could become once again his own master." Yet, the revolution seemed to recreate, rather than dispel, the old myths.

For many writers who believed that revolution could free the oppressed, the Cuban revolution became another repressive institution. For those who believed that Latin America had reached a new level of democratization and liberty, the 1968 massacre of the students in Tlatelolco proved that neither the powerful elites at home nor the U.S. government supporting them were about to relinquish their grip without open warfare. For those who believed in progress, the new wave of authoritarian governments recalled Bolívar's Sisyphean view of Latin American history, his disillusioned, "I've ploughed the sea." Revolution/repression, self-determination/colonization, progress/repetition, triumph/extinction—the dream of differentiation collapsed into a nightmare of monstrous sameness. The theatre of crisis stems from this collapse.

After the brief historical overview of theatre and theatricality as instruments of oppression in Latin America, it may seem arbitrary to designate a body of theatre produced between 1965 and 1970 as a theatre of crisis. And, of course, in a way it is. There have been many periods of crisis, not only in Latin America but the world over, and hence, one might argue, many theatres of crises. Though in the broadest sense this is true, we can still perceive differences between various manifestations of crisis theatre. What do the theatre of the Holocaust, protest theatre in black townships in South Africa, theatre of the absurd, and commercial "hits" have in common? While we may note that the differences between them are more interesting than the similarities, we cannot overlook that all have been analyzed in terms of crisis, whether political, ideological, or economic. The issues these theatrical activities raise range from ethical ones (Adorno's contention that art after the Holocaust is barbaric) to purely financial ones (how will theatre in Buenos Aires or on Broadway survive as a viable industry if it prices itself out of the consumer market?).

The theatre of crisis that I propose to study builds upon two crisis theories, the social and the scientific. A combined social-scientific theory brings together two determining factors: the subjective experience of crisis and personal decomposition with objective systemic shifts, ruptures, or delegitimation. In other words, the individual or group's response to crisis is inseparable from the concrete, usually violent or spasmodic, rifts within social systems and institutions. Individuals and groups have boundaries, identities, goals. As Jiirgen Habermas points out in Legitimation Crisis, the same is true of systems. When those boundaries, identities, and goals are significantly undermined, or when the maintenance of boundaries alters the identity of the system, either ossifying or subverting its structures, we can say that the system is in crisis. However, as Habermas notes, systems can tolerate varying degrees of disturbance without entering into crisis: "Only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises.…Crisis states assume the form of a disintegration of social institutions."

This objective/subjective definition of crisis excludes from discussion several other kinds of theatre; theatre of protest and theatre of the absurd, for example, express only one of the two facets of crisis, the objective and subjective respectively. Theatre of protest often signals objective systemic strife, as in the case of black theatre in South African townships, yet one of its notable features is its affirmation of personal and group cohesion and identity. The filmed version of Percy Mtwa's play Bophal exemplifies my point. While fighting and explosions turn the streets into a stage for what Wole Soyinka calls "the deadly drama enacted daily in the streets and suburbs of South Africa," and while apartheid is recognized as posing a potent and invidious threat to black integrity, the political crisis only accentuates the urgency of reaffirming the blacks' solidarity and sense of identity.

The theatre of the absurd, on the other hand, represents a crisis ideology, the subjective rather than objective experience of crisis. The theatre of the absurd, both as Martin Esslin defines it and as we note in the plays generally associated with it, uproots the disintegrating characters and refuses to recognize the sociohistoric context that gave rise to their rootlessness and existential anguish in the first place. Esslin develops his idea of the theatre of the absurd from Camus's definition of absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus: "In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile as much because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as because he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity." This theatre's separation of the subjective and objective factors of crisis, combined with the loss of memory, makes the objective sociopolitical specificity of the catastrophe inaccessible to the characters. Moreover, while the theatre of the absurd reflects the consciousness of a moral and philosophical collapse following World War II, this theatre was produced in a period of social, political, and economic consolidation in Europe and the United States.

The theatre of Holocaust stems from the same sociopolitical crisis that generated the theatre of crisis, World War II, but unlike the theatre of the absurd, it vows never to forget the historic events that gave it rise. In the same "universe" deprived of illusions and light, such writers as Elie Wiesel make a new start: "In the beginning there was the Holocaust, we must therefore start all over again." The theatre of the Holocaust shares many of the characteristics with the theatre of crisis and, one could argue, is another manifestation of a theatre of crisis as I use the term. Griselda Gambaro's The Camp (1967), for example, exposes the concentration camp universe in a way that resembles what Lawrence Langer later called the "literature of atrocity" in his 1975 study, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. While Langer mainly (though not exclusively) equates the literature of atrocity with the literature of the Holocaust, Gambaro continues the tradition, finding that the univers concentrationnaire aptly conveys the horror also of Argentine fascism with its exterminators and death camps. The main difference between the theatre of crisis and theatre of the Holocaust, then, is that the entire focus of the latter is fixed on one historic event, and it is therefore necessarily more limited in application. Another important difference is that while the theatre of atrocity is a theatre of crisis, the opposite does not hold—the theatre of crisis is not always atrocious. The theatre of crisis invariably deals with violence but with many different kinds of violence, from the subtle, deforming pressures exerted on individuals by oppressive forces or authority figures (Carballido, Triana), to racial and sexual violence (Buenaventura, Wolff), to the spectacular cruelty of torture and terrorism (Gambaro, Wolff, Buenaventura). Not all forms of violence express the hideous, irrational, unmitigated horror that Langer associates with the "aesthetics of atrocity."

Nevertheless, like the theatre of crisis, the theatre of the Holocaust signals both the objective and subjective reality of crisis. Both (and one could include most protest theatre as well) emphasize collective suffering, point to an "official" enemy responsible for the systematic annihilation of people(s), refer to concrete sociohistoric reality, and combine "historical fact and imaginative truth." Like the theatre of crisis, the theatre of the Holocaust subverts the lines of demarcation traditionally used to distance the spectators; on the contrary, it implicates them as accomplices in the onstage violence. However, one could also argue that the theatre of the Holocaust takes a step—temporally and ideologically—beyond crisis in that it isolates the problem and assumes a position in the face of it. And whereas the theatre of the Holocaust fixes its attention on a historically limited and unique past, and protest theatre generally looks forward to a happier future, the theatre of crisis is grounded in contradiction; it shapes undifferentiation. We can call it a theatre of crisis precisely because the historic point of reference, like all else, blurs into decomposition.

The theatre of crisis by definition, then, involves objective systemic change: that is, the dissolution or the transformed identity of social institutions and structures attempting to cope with or stave off systemic rupture or collapse. Crisis is not linked to the collapse of any specific political ideology, however, of either the left or the right. It can, for example, result from other, nonpolitical factors. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (430 B.C.), perhaps the prototypical model of the theatre of crisis, a play ofand about crisis, was written during an outbreak of the plague and against the background of the Peleponnesian wars (431 B.C.). It manifests the characteristics associated with crisis thus far—the loss of identity and the collapse of boundaries leading to "contagious" crimes such as parricide and incest. The subjective and objective factors of crisis are inseparable and mutually fueling. Oedipus's crimes ostensibly "cause" or provoke the Theban crisis, and his own crisis (his own awareness of his unhappy situation) directly stems from his attempts to resolve the social catastrophe. Not only is the play overtly violent—Oedipus stabs out his eyes, and Jocasta hangs herself—but Thebes as a city is drowning in a sea of violence and disease. Or, crisis can result from the fracture between competing, irreconcilable ideologies or "isms." The abyss into which the indiano Don Alvaro hurls himself, in Duque de Rivas's Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), represents the no-man's-land, the ruptured ideological, political and cultural frames of the early nineteenth century. Chekov's plays also belong, in a general sense, to a theatre of crisis. They focus on the moment of transition between two economic and cultural systems, a moment that provokes feelings of decomposition and despair in those caught in the middle of the social transformation. However, the violence in Chekov's plays, the murders and suicides, can hardly be called atrocious; nor does the chopping down of the cherry trees, though violent within the context of the play and world-shaking in its sociopolitical implications, constitute what we normally think of as a hideous act of violence. Chekov's disintegrating characters and waning worlds quietly fade away.

During the period under examination in Latin America, the causes of system transformations and disintegrations vary from country to country—from the crisis within the revolution on the left to the rise of quasi-fascist totalitarianism on the right. In Cuba the entire social apparatus taken over from Batista was dismantled and restructured to serve the sociopolitical and economic ends of the new revolutionary government. Early in its history, however, the Cuban revolution underwent major internal, structural changes as it increasingly compromised its original agenda and became incorporated into Soviet Communism. In Argentina, Onganía's government (which came to power with the repressive coup d'état of 1966) called itself "the Argentine revolution" and intended not only to eliminate and reconstruct existing institutions but to override constitutional limits and remain in power indefinitely. Colombia, in the 1960s, saw the end of a decade of widespread civil strife known simply as La Violencia, which had left 300,000 people dead. It also experienced the intensification of other kinds of violence associated with the growing drug trade, which escalated to such a degree that at present murder is the leading cause of death in males between the ages of eighteen and forty. Mexico, by comparison, seemed relatively stable, yet the PRI government (an undemocratic oligarchy) came under extreme fire during the late 1960s. Civil confrontation became critical in 1968: government tanks patrolled Mexico City's main streets; hundreds (some estimates say thousands) of students were massacred in Tlatelolco, and their bodies were burned or dumped into the ocean. The crisis in Chile did not occur until slightly later, but ideological confrontations had gradually intensified through the late 1960s. The heated competition between the PDC (the Christian Democratic Party, heavily backed by the U.S. CIA) and the FRAP (the anticapitalist, antiimperialist socialist-communist alliance) led to the victory of the PDC in the 1965 elections and then, because of increased dissatisfaction among major elements of the population, to the election of the FRAP and Salvador Allende in 1970. Before Allende's presidency could be ratified by the Chilean Congress, however, the Chilean military with United States backing initiated the series of assaults that led to Allende's death in 1973 and the imposition of Augusto Pinochet's military regime. For all their differences, then, many Latin American countries in the 1960s underwent profound crisis; their societies were either threatened with civil war or became embroiled in revolution culminating in military dictatorships. What we are dealing with here is full-fledged sociopolitical and economic crisis, rather than a subjective crisis of consciousness or ideology.

Notwithstanding the different causes of crisis in these various contexts, the effects, as manifested through the theatre of crisis, remain surprisingly constant in both content and representation. The similarities, quite obviously, were not intended. Nor do they reflect a school of thought, a dramatic tradition, or even a coherent, shared ideology—except perhaps the shared rejection of Western hegemony evident in these Latin American plays—but rather a crumbling set of beliefs and structures: myths of democracy and personal freedom, progress and utopia, Marxism, liberal humanism, and revolution. The inability to subscribe to them as possible solutions leaves a void, attesting to the difficulty of finding another sustaining ideology. The concept of liberal nationalism failed early in the century, creating its own disillusionment. Democratic socialism had no roots in Latin America. Therefore intellectuals found themselves floundering, seeking a nonmythifying ideological basis in which to ground beliefs. The common denominator of these plays, then, is not intertextual but extratextual.

Still, common denominators do exist, and the analysis of the similarities in conjunction with the differences allows us to map out the parameters of a Latin American theatre of crisis between 1965 and 1970. Produced in the moment of suspension provoked by a systemic schism, this theatre shows society balanced between destruction and renovation, subject to change and open to question. The moment of crisis is one of rupture, of critical irresolution, the "in between" of life and death, order and chaos. And because these plays combine feelings of decomposition with the threat of imminent extinction, they often reflect the moment of annihilation and/or terror. The characters, locked in a dreadful present, perceive time as a contradiction. The historical moment is lived as ahistorical. As Anthony Kubiak notes, the "moment of terror, like the instant of pain, is a moment of zero time and infinite duration. Although terror can only exist in history, it is felt as naked singularity, existing outside all possible representation." The temporal displacement implicit in crisis is accompanied by spatial dislocation as well; the characters in the plays presented in this study have no safe home of their own—they live in houses either owned or taken over by someone else. Nor do the houses shelter or protect; often they are prisons, with barred windows and locked doors. Sometimes, the house itself becomes a weapon, an instrument of oppression or torture. Often, too, the structures collapse: walls fall in or break down, either crushing the inhabitants or exposing them to the violence from outside. The inner spaces merge with the outer; the sociopolitical conflicts are fought out on city streets, in homes, on human bodies. Crisis, as rupture, suspends boundaries, denying the characters the possibility of temporal and spatial shelter; there is no place to hide, no future to look forward to. "To think disaster," as Maurice Blanchot observes in The Writing of Disaster, "is to have no longer any future in which to think it." The theatre of crisis is fragmented, inconclusive. It offers no resolution, no restorative harmony, no cathartic relief.

René Girard, in The Scapegoat, notes the uniformity in various and culturally divergent depictions of crisis, suggesting that the similarities in the social and personal experience of crisis lead to similarities in its representation. What, then, are the effects of crisis? What happens to individuals in a society whose boundaries, goals, and identity are being attacked? Societies that are not in crisis respect authority and maintain hierarchies, resort to a judicial system in times of conflict, tolerate diversity, "name" and differentiate between members; societies confronting crisis initially—for that second of suspension—do none of the above. When systems are attacked, the effectiveness and legitimacy of authority become suspect and, as frequently happens in Latin America, vulnerable to violent contention. The notion of legitimate government, of due process and judicial integrity, of moral and ethical safeguards all interconnect to such a degree that the challenges posed to one threaten the others.

When all basis for positive (noncrisis) differentiation has been undermined, these societies respond in two sequential ways. First, they experience the "monotonous and monstrous" sameness of crisis that negates difference; they fail to name, differentiate, valorize, or make distinctions. Michel Foucault's description of the plague in seventeenth-century France reveals all the stereotypes of crisis: the "suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingled together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity." Artaud also describes the plague as a crisis in which "social forms disintegrate. Order collapses"; crisis is accompanied by "every infringement of morality, every psychological disaster."

Second, because this sameness is threatening and intolerable, those who exert some power combat disorder with a vigilant, oppressive order. This is the deadly "society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it" described by Michael Taussig in his Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. If crisis provokes disorder, then, the "solution" to crisis would seemingly entail the imposition of strictest order, states of emergency, law, and penalties, and the application of what Foucault calls the "disciplinary mechanism" that monitors individuals precisely by naming them, locating and compartmentalizing them, and controlling their movements by means of either visual surveillance (the Panopticon) or computers (the threat to black liberation posed by computers in South Africa). People are compartmentalized, subjugated: "All events are recorded … [the] uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery … power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure." Crisis, experienced as a profound disorder that threatens power, hierarchy, social systems, and individual identity, sets in motion an "ordering" mechanism of surveillance, of social and individual control.

Aside from the imposition of centralized, vigilant order, which epitomizes crisis governments from South Africa's Afrikaner Nationalist party to Pinochet's military regime, societies in crisis also set in motion a mechanism of exclusion; they invent false differences and convert members of society into grotesque and apparently threatening others. Initially, this attack on the other also passes as a solution to crisis—if crisis is equated with undifferentiation, surely the politics of differentiation provides the way out of crisis. Systemic crisis often results in persecution and scapegoatism because selective violence, as Girard argues in Violence and the Sacred, is conceived as channeling the community's aggression. Instead of destroying each other, members of the community agree to focus their aggression on a "safe," expendable victim. Moreover, as these plays demonstrate, violence is perceived as a defense against crisis, rather than as an effect of it. By participating in the creation of difference and in the politics of segregation and exclusion, people can comfort themselves that they are doing something to solve the problem; they not only differentiate but rigorously maintain boundaries. Yet because the "difference" is generally a false one, a created one, the hatred, exclusion, and persecution of the other often masks a deeper hatred and self-hatred. The violence associated with sociopolitical crisis, then, is self-perpetuating, coming back to destroy the individuals who initiated the violence as a form of self-defense.

The similar depictions or descriptions of crisis evident in this theatre reflect the uniformity of the experience of social, systemic crisis. In the theatre of crisis analyzed in this study, the sets concretely depict the struggle for spatial control in the face of structural collapse. When walls cave in, crumble, or disappear, inner is inseparable from outer and private from public. The blurred and obliterated boundaries reveal worlds in ruin, both onstage and off. The physical destruction reflects disintegrating judicial, moral, and physical frameworks, distinctions that will not hold, partitions that fail to separate or protect.

The same annihilating undifferentiation is evident in the depiction of the characters. The overwhelming majority of characters in these works have no distinguishable identity; few even have names. They are socially marginal, physically infirm, or malformed to the point of monstrosity. Waves of violence wash over previous distinctions and hierarchies: children kill their parents; the police violate the innocent; personal violence and state violence mingle and feed on each other.

One of the significant features of crisis, as attested both by this theatre and by theorists as divergent as Girard and Habermas, is that it incapacitates the subject to deal effectively with the situation. The theatre of crisis abounds in examples of passive characters unable to react constructively to the situation at hand. The characters' ineffectuality may stem, in part, from powerlessness. Habermas, who introduces the concept of crisis in medical terms, compares the subject of crisis to a patient in critical condition: "Crisis cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it—the patient experiences his powerlessness vis-á-vis the objectivity of the illness only because he is a subject condemned to passivity and temporarily deprived of the possibility of being a subject in full possession of his powers." It is only later, when the characters are in a sense beyond crisis, that they can gain the lucidity to assess what occurred. However, we should resist interpreting this powerlessness and passivity as either historically or biologically determined. It is not a personality defect on the part of the victims, as critics of the indigenous victims of the Conquest or of the Jews in the concentration camps (to signal out only two groups), seem to suggest. Rather, it is situational, positional; the victims are caught in a deadly and complex web of circumstances and cannot effectively judge, from their position within it, how to best extricate themselves. Usually, they need outside help from those who are not themselves trapped in the critical situation.

The characters' sense of being trapped, of being unable to deal with crisis, results in the creation of both victims and victimizers. Several of the most vicious characters in these plays see themselves as victims of crisis and claim to be coping with their predicament when they attack others who, they feel, are responsible for provoking it. As Girard notes, "Rather than blame themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which costs them nothing, or other people who seem harmful for easily identifiable reasons." Hitler, in Mein Kampf; exemplifies perhaps the most extreme position of crisis culminating in mass victimization, blaming what he saw as the humiliation of the German nation after World War I not on military defeat (the "outward symptom of decay") but on "toxins," "harmful poisons," and an "alien virus" undermining the national "body." Only the extermination of the Jews, according to his thinking, could restore "health." Unable to identify the true causes of crisis, the "victims" can become the victimizers, willing to kill for a "cure." Within the context of the plays, the protagonists who experience crisis—Lalo, the Torturer, the Hake, Lorenzo, and even SS Officer Franco—consider themselves its victims. In order to "defend" themselves, they rationalize exterminating others on the grounds that they are "Communist" (Buenaventura and Gambaro), or "bourgeois" (Wolff), or hurtful and harmful in some way (Carballido and Triana). Therefore, it is deemed necessary to marginalize the "dangerous" individuals or kill them. While the individuals thus singled out as victims may in fact be guilty of some crime, it is not the catastrophic, earthshaking crime for which they are being persecuted and punished. The victims of the kind of violence associated with persecution, as opposed to judicial law, are usually members of marginalized social groups: poor, black, female, and so on.

It is interesting to note throughout these plays that the objects of attack in times of crisis are precisely the boundaries—physical, moral, legal, or discursive—that previously maintained social hierarchies, family and personal integrity, law and order. All the crimes associated with crisis, such as parricide, infanticide, and incest, "seem to be fundamental," Girard notes. "They attack the very foundation of the cultural order, the family and the hierarchical differences without which there would be no social order." Buenaventura's cycle of plays depicts violence as both the result of the imposition of social and class boundaries and an attack on those hierarchies regarded by the outcasts as exclusionary and oppressive. In The Menu, the boundaries are literally painted on the stage in the shape of various colored circles; the Beggars are fumigated before they are permitted to cross from one ring to another to pick up the leftovers that the charitable ladies graciously throw their way. Notwithstanding the insistence on maintaining difference, however, the enforced distinctions only underline the fact that all these characters are very much the same. While the poor are unwashed, infirm, greedy, deformed by poverty and degradation, the wealthy ladies themselves are freaks and hybrids: the Wo/Man, the Fatso, the Dwarf. The colonized, having internalized the colonizer, incarnate contradiction; they are simultaneously victim and victimizer, the embodiment of the two-in-one, grotesque self/other. The monstrosity and violence in the privileged circle is no different from the monstrosity and violence of the beggars. The painted lines maintain power rather than difference—or, more precisely, they maintain power by insisting on false difference. In Triana's Assassins, Lalo's "crime" reeks of incest; he pretends to penetrate his parents with his knife and roll in their blood. His world becomes a nightmare of undifferentiation in which life is indistinguishable from death and refuse. The bedroom, as site of reproduction and incorporation, "becomes" the bathroom, the site of excretion and expulsion. In Gambaro's Siamese Twins, Lorenzo's personal need to annihilate his twin is physically carried out by the police who, though theoretically upholders of law and justice, torture and kill Ignacio and dump his body in an unmarked grave. The play opens up spiraling worlds of violence in which the violence inside the home and the individual and the violence of the systems and structures outside augment each other. Ultimately, the violence ends in a whirlwind of terrorism, which, by invading the streets, homes, and private lives of individuals, "gets us where we live" and deterritorializes us. In Wolff's Paper Flowers, the Hake's destruction of Eva attacks both class and gender, for he substitutes the real, tangible woman's body for an incorporeal, "effeminate," middle-class body politic. Wolff has so effectively—that is, so invisibly—transposed one site of aggression (the middle class) onto another (the woman) that almost without exception commentators read the The Hake's violence as a political act, the more-or-less justifiable attack by a social underdog on an exclusive system of power. The fact that it is also a misogynist act (in which a physically powerful man destroys a powerless woman), and an example of scapegoating, has passed without comment.

The plays examined in this study, while not all violent, are about violence, a term that is hard to define in the best of times and almost impossible to pin down in a discussion of oppression and crisis. I discuss the various kinds in individual chapters and in the concluding remarks, but it is worth noting here that the plays as a whole emphasize two major, interrelated spheres of violence: crisis and oppression. The paradigm of crisis, as I have noted, includes the initial subjective-objective collapse that provokes disorder and undifferentiation, followed by the implementation of the strictest order, the differentiation and exclusion of a group into a grotesque other, and the persecution and scapegoating of the marginalized group or individual. The paradigm of oppression includes the deforming, though often less overt, violence that casts the victim as grotesque other in the repressive self/other binary—the distanced, underdeveloped, childlike, ignorant, inferior, helpless, passive, feminized, persecuted other whose "permanent dream," according to Frantz Fanon, is to become the self, the defining power, "the persecutor." In connection with these two major paradigms, we see numerous secondary manifestations: revolutionary violence (response to oppression), institutionalized or professionalized violence (criminal governments, torture and terrorism associated with both oppression and crisis), behavioral disorders and seemingly gratuitous acts of cruelty (again, related to both crisis and oppression).

While there is significant overlapping between the two paradigms of violence, crisis and oppression, they are not inherently connected. Crisis, as I noted, can stem from factors such as plague or war that are not directly or even indirectly related to oppression. Moreover, even when crisis derives from clear sociopolitical clashes resulting from oppression, crisis threatens the legitimacy of the ruling power (insofar as it threatens all objective and subjective frameworks), while oppression need not. This is not to say that oppressive societies are morally or ethically "legitimate" but merely that their existence is not questioned or contested in any manner that will seriously jeopardize their continuity. Oppressive systems are usually so consolidated, so deeply cemented in institutions, laws, and ideology, that their legitimacy is taken for granted not only by the oppressors but often by the oppressed themselves. These systems can last decades without experiencing or provoking crisis, in part because their violence has been rendered natural, almost invisible. It was long considered "natural" for women to serve men, for blacks to serve whites, and so forth. Studies in law, history, human nature, and biology among others—by means of which "man" came to represent "mankind," proved how natural a state it was. Some scholars go so far as to deny that we can use the word "violence" to describe institutionalized oppression. Even Hannah Arendt states that a "legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable in the suppression of the rights of minorities and very effective in the suffocation of dissent without any use of violence." Here I disagree with Arendt; rather than thinking in terms of violence and nonviolence (power) in regard to oppression, we might more accurately think in terms of explicit and implicit violence. Explicit, or overtly physical, violence is easy enough to recognize. No less real, though perhaps just as damaging in the long run, is the implicit violence of naming and directing the other, of naturalizing distinctions based on gender, race, and class, of limiting the others' options and casting them in symbolic if not literal servitude. My broader definition of violence includes the violence Emmanuel Levinas refers to in Totality and Infinity: "Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action." While I oppose Levinas's downplaying of explicit violence, I believe that no one has better delineated the corrosive effects of what I call implicit violence.

Even though oppression and crisis are not necessarily related, this study illustrates the process by which implicit violence becomes explicit, by which the age-old violence associated with oppression bursts into the reactive violence of the oppressed. The process of decolonization is violent and perhaps, as Fanon suggests, "always violent" (my emphasis). What interests me here, however, is that the violence of decolonization precipitates crisis. Fanon describes the objective systemic shifts and the subjective transformations I have associated with crisis as inherent in decolonization: "A whole social structure [is] being changed from the bottom up," and "there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution" by means of which "a certain 'species' of men" is replaced by another. That crisis, then, marks both the culmination of distress and the uncertainty for the future—the question of "whether or not the organism's self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery." Recovery here should not signal a return to an earlier noncrisis state in what would constitute the politically conservative or reactionary move toward reestablishing the status quo. Rather, "recovery" and "self-healing" suggest that the state and individual strive for self-definition, autonomy, nonviolence. The problem, of course, is that the process threatens to be circular and self-perpetuating. If decolonization precipitates crisis, and if crisis (as the paradigm indicates) throws systems and individuals into abeyance and undermines structures of definition (which is not necessarily bad, as Fanon points out, but always critical), resulting in a situation that then triggers strict repressive measures, where will it end? That is what these plays ask us to consider.