Antonin Artaud, Mexico and the Raramuri: racial issues and colonialism in Artaud's travels through Mexico

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5965/1414573102442022e0208

Keywords:

Antonin Artaud, Colonialism, Mexico

Abstract

The nine months of Artaud's travels through Mexico, usually treated as a footnote in his biography, need to be seen as more than that: they were a turning point in the direction of his work/life. For Jay Murphy (2017), there would be an Artaud before and another after his journey to Mexico, because we can observe a profound metamorphosis in his work, even if we set his “madness” aside. A paradigm shift that encompasses the evolution of a Theatre of Cruelty towards the concept of the Body without Organs. Within this context, this text first aims to critically present, in a post-colonial perspective, Artaud's intentions in seeking a primordial theatrical language in the Mexican canyons, its limits and possibilities, and secondly, to interrogate how racial issues were problematized in such a quest and how they reverberate through his work and beyond, radically affecting and changing the field of Theatre and Performance Studies.

 

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Luciana da Costas Dias, Universidade de Brasília (UnB)

Pós-doutorado no Center for Performance Philosophy, da Guildford School of Acting, na University of Surrey, Inglaterra. Doutora em Filosofia pela Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Mestrado em Filosofia na UERJ. Bacharel, Licenciada e mestre em Filosofia pela UERJ. Professora Associada do Departamento de Artes Cênicas da Universidade de Brasília (UnB). 

References

ALLAIN, Paul; HARVIE, Jen. The Routledge companion to Theatre and Performance. London: Routledge, 2006.

ANDERSON, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.

ARTAUD, Antonin. O teatro e seu duplo. Trad. Monica Stahel e Teixeira Coelho. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006.

ARTAUD, Antonin. La pintura de María Izquierdo. Revista El semanario nacional, n.1370, p.22-23, 1936.

ARTAUD, Antonin. To have done with the Judgement of God. In SONTAG, Susan (org.). Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p.555-569.

ARTAUD, Antonin. Mexico: Viaje Al Pais De Los Tarahumaras. Ciudad del Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1984.

ARTAUD, Antonin. The Peyote Dance. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

ARRIETA, Olivia. Religion and Ritual among the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico: Maintenance of Cultural Autonomy Through Resistance and Transformation of Colonizing Symbols. Icaza Sa Review n.8, v. 2, p.11-23,1992.

ASHCROFT, Bill; GRIFFITH Gareth; TIFFIN, Helen. Post-Colonial Studies: the key concepts. London: Routledge, 2000.

BARBER, Stephen. Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London: Creation Books, 2003.

BUSH, Christopher. Theory and Its Double: Ideology and Ideograph in Orientalist Theory. Paroles gelées Journal n.1, v.12, p. 5-25, 1994.

CARASCO, Raymonde. Approche de la pensee Tarahumara. In FAU, Guillaume (org.). Antonin Artaud - Catalogue Exposition BNF. Paris: Bibliothèque National de France / Gallimard, 2006.

CARASCO, Raymonde. Ciguri. Voyage(s) au pays des Tarahumaras. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares n.53, v. 2, p.241-249, 1998.

CARDULLO, Bert, KNOPF, Robert. Theater of the avant-garde: 1890-1950 a critical anthology. London: Yale University Press, 2001.

CASTANEDA, Carlos. Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.

CLIFFORD, James. On ethnographic surrealismo. Comparative studies in Society and history, n.23, v.4, oct, 1981.

CULL, Laura. How do you make yourself a theatre without organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the concept of differential presence. Theatre Research International n.34, v. 3, p.243-255, 2009.

DALTON, David. Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018.

DELEUZE, Gilles, GUATTARI, Felix. November 28, 1947: How do you make yourself a Body Without Organs? In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York: Continuum, 2004.

DERRIDA, Jacques. A escritura e a diferença. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2014.

FONTANA, Bernard, SCHAEFER, John. Tarahumara: Where Night is the Day of the Moon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.

GIL, Jose. Metamorphoses Of the Body. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

GOODALL, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

HERTZ, Uri. Artaud in Mexico. Fragmentos, 25, p.11-17, 2003.

HOOKER, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

HUBERT, Renée Riese. Antonin Artaud's Itinerary through Exile and Insanity. In Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, edited by Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.

HUXLEY, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. London / New York: Chatto & Windus, 1954.

IRIGOYEN-RASCÓN, Fructuoso. Tarahumara Medicine: Ethnobotany and Healing among the Rarámuri of Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

KRUTAK, Lars. (Sur)real or Unreal? Antonin Artaud in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas n.8, v.1, p.28-55, 2014.

MÈREDIEU, Florence de. C’etait Antonin Artaud. Paris: Fayard, 2006.

MORFEE, Adrian. Antonin Artaud’s Writing Bodies. Oxford: Clarendon Press Publication, 2005.

MURPHY, Jay. Artaud`s Metamorphosis: From hieroglyphs to Bodies without Organs. London: Pavement books, 2017.

NICHOLSON, Melanie. Surrealism’s ‘found object’: The enigmatic Mexico of Artaud and Breton. Journal of European Studies n.43, v.1, p.27-43, 2013.

ROWELL, Margit. Antonin Artaud: works on paper - exposition catalogue. New York: The Museum of Modern Art / H.N. Abrams, 1996.

SAVARESE, Nicola. 1931: Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition. TDR n.45, v.3, p.51-77, 2001.

SCHEFFLER, I. Considerações sobre rito e teatro em Artaud. Urdimento - Revista de estudos em artes cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 1, n. 14, p. 33-43, 2010.

SCHECHNER, Richard. Performance Theory. London: Routledge, 2003.

SONTAG, Susan (org.). Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Tate's online glossary, Primitivism. Disponivel em: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/primitivism. Acesso em: 29 out. 2018.

THOMPSON, Ayanna. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. London: Routledge, 2008.

TORGOVNICK, Marianna. Gone primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

SU, Tsu-Chung. Artaud's Journey to Mexico. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture n.14, v. 5, p,01-09, 2012.

TURNER, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine, 1995.

Published

2022-09-26

How to Cite

DIAS, Luciana da Costas. Antonin Artaud, Mexico and the Raramuri: racial issues and colonialism in Artaud’s travels through Mexico. Urdimento: Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas, Florianópolis, v. 2, n. 44, p. 1–29, 2022. DOI: 10.5965/1414573102442022e0208. Disponível em: https://www.periodicos.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/21615. Acesso em: 18 may. 2024.