Considering a Hemispheric
Perspective
Dr. Laura R. Dougherty
Department of Theatre & Dance
What’s Up? South!
Blue Marble photograph (7 December, 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17)
A stabilized view (phew!)
What they say when they
saw it
Upsidedown
Map
(1943)
Joaquín
Torres-García
“There should be no
North for us, except in opposition to
our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down, and
now we know what our true position is, and it is not the
way the rest of the world would like to have it. From now on, the
elongated tip of South America will point insistently at the
South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline irremediably
and forever toward the South, toward our pole. When ships sail
from her traveling north, they will be traveling down, not up as
before.
Because the North is now below.”
Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949) and The School of the
South
Not the Only America on the Block:
or, Why I Use the Terms USAmerica
and USAmerican
“Even the name ‘America’ bespeaks the crisis;
conventionally used to designate the cultural identity of the
United States, its implicit erasure of Latin American and
Canada is now painfully apparent, leading Buell and other to
suggest that one response to this global trend might be the
‘refashioning of American Studies as a hemispheric
project’” -Gretchen Murphy from Hemispheric Imaginings
Consider your perspective
 Exploring your subject area from a hemispheric perspective
encourages connections and connectivity
 So that we are “exploring histories of the north and south as
profoundly intertwined. It allows us to connect
histories of conquest, colonialism, slavery, indigenous rights,
imperialism, migration and globalization (to name some issues)
throughout the Americas”- Diana Taylor
“A hemispheric
perspective stretches the
spatial and
temporal
framework to
recognize the
interconnectedness
of seemingly separate
geographical and political
areas and the degree to
which our past
continues to haunt our
present.“ –Diana Taylor
“A hemispheric
approach to the study of performance in
the Americas illuminates the different tropes, genealogies,
and cultural forms in the respective cultures of imperialism and
enactments of national longing and
anticolonial imagination. The hemispheric focus firmly
shifts the frame of reference from Europe, to
their different
illuminate the shared historical experiences
of North, South, and Central America-colonialism, slavery,
independence wars, national formation and new transnational
identities…” --Jill Lane
Suggested resource: the
Hemispheric Institute
for Performance and Politics
http://hemisphericinstitute.org
Suggested resources:
 Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modernity by Néstor García Canclini
 The Idea of Latin America by Walter D. Mignolo
 Hemispheric Imaginings:The Monroe Doctrine and
Narratives of U.S. Empire by Gretchen Murphy
 The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas By Diana Taylor
Works Cited
 Harmon, Katharine. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other
Maps of the Imagination. NY: Princeton Architectural P, 2004. Print.
 Lane, Jill. “Keywords in Latin American Performance.” Theatre
Journal (56:3) October 2004: 456-9. Web.
http://www.jstor.org/stable25069474
 Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings:The Monroe Doctrine and
Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2005.
Print.
 Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas. Durham & London: Duke UP, 2003. Print.