Journal article
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND ENRIQUE BUENAVENTURA
Contemporary French and francophone studies, Vol.17(4), pp.378-387
09/01/2013
DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2013.817078
Abstract
This essay offers an initial exploration of connections between Césaire and Spanish-speaking authors and literary movements, including the vibrant culture of public performance that developed in Latin America in the 1960s, by exploring the largely unexamined influence on him of the Colombian director and playwright Enrique Buenaventura. First, I demonstrate how both Césaire and Buenaventura express their theatrical objectives in essays and interviews with the term "consciousness-raising" and its associated methods. For both Césaire and Buenaventura, theater must serve a social function, by awakening spectators from their own indifference and provoking them to take part in a revolutionary struggle against prolonged colonization and cultural dependency. In the staging of their plays, they seek to overturn the oppressive creator/consumer hierarchy-whereby the colonizer is the creator, and the colonized the consumer-that reinforces these forms of neo-colonialism. And both authors were greatly influenced by the primary inspirational figures for theater in Latin America: Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, and Bertolt Brecht. Second, I compare the plays that each wrote and staged about the reign of Henri Christophe, the early nineteenth-century black king of Haiti, as a means of enacting these principles: Césaire's La Tragédie du Roi Christophe and Buenaventura's La Tragedia del Rey Christophe.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- AIMÉ CÉSAIRE AND ENRIQUE BUENAVENTURA
- Creators
- Roxanna Curto
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Contemporary French and francophone studies, Vol.17(4), pp.378-387
- DOI
- 10.1080/17409292.2013.817078
- ISSN
- 1740-9292
- eISSN
- 1740-9306
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis Group
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 09/01/2013
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian; Spanish and Portuguese; University College Courses
- Record Identifier
- 9984397919702771
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