UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of theater networks between Mexico City and Quebec during the NAFTA years (1994-2018) and their role in regionalizing North America. It examines the regional imaginaries enacted through theater collaborations, considering both the material and imagined dimensions of these networks, exposing the role of theater and its translations in the politics of international and intercultural exchange. It explores the dis/connections between the political agendas that draft continental projects and the everyday practices enacted across these geographic and cultural spaces. Conceptually, the intercultural is theorized in the project as the reassembly of the networks that enable these intercultural performances, and not through principles of hybridity. In this process, translation is foregrounded in order to reveal the implications of paraphrasing and referencing meaning in another context, as well as the new configurations of knowledge and aesthetic languages produced by this contact.

The dissertation extends the hemispheric conceit of what the North is to Mexico and of Canada’s broader South, re-thinking the region from a perspective less centered on Anglophone meditations or on the discourses of official leadership. It begins with the theories of translation, regionalism and interculturalism that guide it, followed by a reassembly of theater networks between Mexico City and Quebec established primarily via the activation of latinité as an imaginative tool. The last two chapters are close readings of case studies representative of these networks: a co-production – La vida no vale nada/La vie ne vaut rien – created by a Mexican and a Quebecois company, and a Quebecois text – La divine illusion by Michel Marc Bouchard – in production in Mexico City. These last two chapters rely heavily on translation for their analysis, and test the limits of the intercultural in our understanding of global cultural production. The project thus expands its cultural analysis by introducing hypercultural as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the rhizomatic accumulation of shifting meaning and aesthetics beyond the premises of national or cultural essence. I argue that these theater networks – while enabled by political agendas and economic regulations – perform the superabundance of culture that results from contact in global times, and evidence the complex work of mis/translation that makes it possible for us to imagine and inhabit regions.