TY - GEN AU - Townsend,Sarah TI - The Unfinished Art of Theater : Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil PY - 2018/// PB - Northwestern University Press KW - Theatre studies KW - bicssc KW - Performing Arts KW - Theater KW - History & Criticism N1 - Open Access N2 - The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not yet coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on archival research, Townsend reveals the importance of avant-garde projects that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy: ethnographic operas, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for a theater shut down by the police. The book argues that avant-garde art is tied to the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism UR - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/49665/1/external_content.pdf UR - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/49665/1/external_content.pdf UR - https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/70911 ER -