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.

 

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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). 

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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://periodicos.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/21615. Acesso em: 21 nov. 2024.