Politics and Performance in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Film and Theatre By Phillippa J. Page. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2011.

Abstract

Despite its misleading and limiting equating of the distinct concepts of ‘genre’ and ‘media’, this book productively exploits the value and potential of ‘genre’ as an analytical category and as a site where aesthetic and social boundaries are performatively crossed, (re)negotatiated, reflected upon and questioned. In this respect, this volume’s greatest contribution is that it opens up the fields of Argentine Film and Theatre Studies to the social and the political precisely through hybridization across theatre, the documentary, the fiction film, radio, television and the performativity of social and political practices. If hybridity has long been a ‘fundamental paradigm’ in both Argentine Literary Criticism and Latin American Cultural and Media Studies, it is still under-explored in Argentine Film Studies. This book undoubtedly constitutes an invaluable initiative towards filling this gap.