Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater

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Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater

by Carla Della Gatta

University of Michigan Press, 2023

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07577-5

Paper: 978-0-472-05577-7

eISBN: 978-0-472-90374-0 (OA)

eISBN: 978-0-472-22095-3 (standard)

About the Book

2024 American Society for Theatre Research Barnard Hewitt Award Finalist

2023 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist
Best Academic-Themed Book, College-Level - English at the International Latino Book Awards Honorable Mention

Latinx peoples and culture have permeated Shakespearean performance in the United States for over 75 years—a phenomenon that, until now, has been largely overlooked as Shakespeare studies has taken a global turn in recent years. Author Carla Della Gatta argues that theater-makers and historians must acknowledge this presence and influence in order to truly engage the complexity of American Shakespeares. Latinx Shakespeares investigates the history, dramaturgy, and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s—the era of West Side Story. This first-ever book of Latinx representation in the most-performed playwright’s canon offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater looks beyond the visual to prioritize aural signifiers such as music, accents, and the Spanish language.

The book’s focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art-making (including casting), and modes of storytelling. The case studies range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, the book draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, first-hand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses, largely by scholars of color. Latinx Shakespeares moves toward healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose oeuvre has too often been mobilized in the service of a culturally specific English-language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins within the establishment of European/British colonialism/imperialism.

About the Author

Carla Della Gatta is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University.

Reviews

2024 Barnard Hewitt Award Shortlist

— American Society for Theatre Research

2023 George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist

— Theatre Library Association

Best Academic-Themed Book, College-Level - English Honorable Mention

— International Latino Book Awards

“Latinx Shakespeares offers a state-of-the-art account of Latinx themed, directed, and acted (re)performances of Shakespeare transacted in the last 25 years, greatly enhanced by Della Gatta’s respect for the many performers and directors with whom she enters into conversation. The book should be of particular interest to readers concerned about ‘the staging of difference of any kind in Shakespeare,’ which Della Gatta identifies with ‘the West Side Story effect’ in an opening chapter that alone is worth the price of admission.”— Thomas Cartelli, Muhlenberg College

“Carla Della Gatta’s Latinx Shakespeares offers a most welcome critical survey of how signal features of Latinx theatremaking—the theatrical use of language, sound, spectacle, social consciousness, cultural specificity—have guided, informed, and shaped myriad stagings of ‘Shakespeare’ over the last several decades. Della Gatta’s engagingly expert account details how ‘Latinx Shakespeares’ have evolved to become a constellation of reciprocally inflective practices that together activate a reimagining of how both Latinidad and Shakespeare play on the contemporary cultural stage. An invaluably illuminating book.”

— Brian Herrera, Princeton University

“This impressive work intervenes at the intersection of two very important conversations—Latinx Studies and Shakespeare Studies—and makes a significant contribution to the field.”— Jon D. Rossini, University of California Davis

"Latinx Shakespeares supplies an authoritative and indispensable resource on theatrical uses of Shakespeare as a conduit for onstage explorations of Latinidad, and of Latinidad's aesthetic, creative, and critical futures as examined through dramaturgical engagements with Shakespeare."— Shakespeare Bulletin

"Works such as Latinx Shakespeares are, or should be, for everybody. That the study is performance-centered, concerned with its audience's use of Shakespeare "as a tool of activism" and an essential part of intracultural American theater, should be heartening for anyone worried about the plays' contemporary societal relevance."— M.L. Stapleton, Shakespeare Quarterly

"Those of us who have ventured into the theatrical act of Latinizing Shakespeare have found a fellow traveler in Carla Della Gatta. In her most recent book, Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater, she has identified our practices and brought them into focus for artists, scholars, and general readers alike."— Guillermo Reyes, Theatre Survey

"The pairing of Shakespearean texts with Latinx adaptations is particularly revelatory, and Della Gatta balances her descriptions of each play and performance so that scholars from each of the overlapping areas of Latinidad, Shakespeare, and performance studies are grounded and engaged. Latinx Shakespeares is an indispensable record of, and argument for, the richness and productivity of Shakespearean performance of, by, and for Latinidad."— Michael Vaclav, Ethnic and Third World Literatures

"Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater is a well-researched, argued, and generous work of scholarship, valuable to many fields outside of Shakespeare studies, including ethnomusicology, performance studies, colonial and decolonial theory, and any number of subfields of history. Carla Della Gatta's book enacts its theories, and rather than telling the reader what Latine Shakespeares is, it shows what Latine Shakespeares is becoming."— Guillermo Aviles-Rodriguez, Theatre Journal

“In pushing back against the dichotomy of global and Anglophone, [Della Gatta] highlights the importance of the ”diversified local" and indeed asks us to think about Latinx Shakespeare not as “intercultural, postcolonial, postrace, and so on” but rather as “intracultural.”

— Anandi Rao, The Shakespearean International Yearbook

“With its descriptive and vivid case studies and critical frameworks, Latinx Shakespeares is an essential book for scholars and students of Shakespeare, as well as historical and contemporary theater in the United States. Della Gatta provides indispensable structures for engaging discussions, dramaturgical analysis, and future criticism for those practicing and researching Shakespeare in performance today.”

— William Floyd Wolfgang, Kritikon Litterarum

“In the case studies [Della Gatta] sites, Brown characters take the lead not only to challenge identity categories but also to expand on the very concept of Latinidad, thus, emphasizing the need for remapping it to embrace all commonalities within Brown communities who have experienced colonialism, migration and linguistic barriers.”

— Antonio Velasquez, The Year's Work in English Studies