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The Madres of disappeared Central American migrants wear the photos of their missing sons and daughters and chant: “¡vivos se fueron, vivos los queremos!” The grieving women, the photos, and the chants are a cluster of traumatic memes that convey the ongoing nature of disappearance as political practice. Like the Madres of Plaza de Mayo almost fifty years before them, the Madres’ mobilization of traumatic memes underlines the durational and globalized nature of protest as a response to continuous and globalized criminal practices. This talk maps a history of loss, criminality, and resistance and argues that the traumatic memes alter the space of disappearance into a space of forceful political re-appearance.
Diana Taylor is founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU, and the 2017 President of the Modern Language Association. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama; of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997; and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003), which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004); and numerous other titles. (http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/people/diana-taylor)