Antonin Artaud, Mexico and the Raramuri: racial issues and colonialism in Artaud's travels through Mexico
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5965/1414573102442022e0208Keywords:
Antonin Artaud, Colonialism, MexicoAbstract
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.
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