Sarah J. Townsend
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Biography:
My work asks how an attention to culture can illuminate histories of capitalism (and vice versa). I’m primarily a Latin Americanist and a specialist in theater and performance, but in the interest of exploring capitalism as a world system I frequently stray across geographical and linguistic boundaries, and I consider how theater and performance engage with other genres and media. In addition to Spanish and Portuguese, I work with materials in Italian, French, and (less frequently) German, and long ago I spent two years studying Yoruba, which continues to inform some of my teaching and research endeavors.
My current work focuses on the Amazon and has led me to engage with political ecology, geohistory, and current debates about natural resource extraction. For the past several years I’ve been conducting archival and field research in Manaus, Brazil and in various sites throughout Italy for a book-in-progress called Opera in the Amazon: Culture, Capital, and the Global Jungle. This project revolves around the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house in Manaus that was built in the late nineteenth century during the Amazonian rubber boom and is now the site of an annual opera festival. Opera in the Amazon examines the building’s history, productions performed on its stage (as well as other events such as political meetings), and films and literary works in which the theater appears. In doing so, it charts the changing dynamics of global capital from the vantage point of a region defined by natural resource extraction, and it challenges traditional cartographies of cultural creation and circulation by showing that opera has always been a global genre closely tied to the historical development of capitalism. In 2021-2022 I was in residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago working on this project with funding from an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars.
I also have another book manuscript underway, which I’m currently calling by the working title of Rio-mar, Mare internum: The Amazon and the Mediterranean in an Age of Empire. This project traces comparisons and connections between these two regions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It takes its cue from the fact that during the rubber boom, the Amazon was often referred to as the “Mediterranean of South America,” a moniker based in part on speculations by geographers and geologists that the Amazon River basin had once been an interior sea. In addition to shedding light on a crucial moment of transition in the capitalist world-system, Rio-mar, Mare internum illuminates the historical processes through which transnational regions are (re)configured—in particular, regions where economic and political power revolves around water.
My first monograph was The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil (Northwestern UP, 2018), which was short-listed for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Best Best Book in the Humanities Prize (2018) awarded by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. In collaboration with Diana Taylor I also co-edited Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (U of Michigan P, 2008), and more recently Vinay Dharwadker and I co-edited a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies titled Redesigning Modernities: Infrastructures, Ecologies, and Emancipatory Openings (September 2023).
This last publication grew out Redesigning Modernities, a collaborative grant-funded project led by the School of Global Languages and Literatures at Penn State that I facilitated in 2019-2020. For several years I also organized the annual Hemispheric Americas lecture series, as well as events such as a teach-in on the fires in the Amazon and a lecture and workshop on “Black Narratives in Brazilian Comics” by the Brazilian graphic novelist Marcelo d’Salete. I’m currently the Honors Advisor for Spanish and serve on the College of Liberal Arts Undergraduate Studies Committee.
TEACHING
My teaching includes graduate and undergraduate courses conducted in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and I enjoy working with doctoral students on a wide range of projects grounded in Latin America and the Americas as a whole, as well as with students who have overlapping theoretical interests but concentrate on other parts of the world.
Graduate seminars:
- Contemporary Latin American Fiction and Film: The Rural and the Wild in an Urban Age
- Race, Performance, and Possession in the Americas
- Brazil and Comparative Modernisms (x-listed with Comparative Literature)
- Amazonia and Extractivism
- History, Time, and the Contemporary Latin American Stage
- Latin American Modernisms and (Old) New Media
Undergraduate Courses:
- Amazonian Ecologies
- Through the Looking Glass: Race in the United States and Brazil
- Culture and Social Struggle in the Amazon
- Avant-Garde Primitivisms
- Portuguese for Romance Language Speakers
- Mexi/Cali Noir
- Luso-Brazilian Theater Workshop
PUBLICATIONS
Books:
- The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil (Northwestern UP, 2018)
- Co-editor with Diana Taylor, Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (U of Michigan P, 2008)
Articles and Essays:
- “Oikos and Ecology in Theater of Capital.” Part of a forum on Alisa Zhulina’s Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life in Modern Language Notes (Comparative Literature issue, forthcoming in December 2024)
- “Thinking through Performance Practices in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” In Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Graciela Montaldo. Routledge, 2024.
- Co-authored with Heather McCune Bruhn, “Gold Links: Teaching Culture through Commodity Chains.” Comparative Literature Studies special issue Redesigning Modernities: Infrastructures, Ecologies, and Emancipatory Openings 60.3 (September 2023): 460-474
- “Manaus.” In Latin American Literature in Transition, Vol. 3 (1870–1930). Ed. Fernando Degiovanni and Javier Uriarte. Cambridge UP (Cambridge UP, 2022).
- “Os elos do modernismo: Raça, música e política no palco do Theatro Municipal.” Special dossier on Modernismos ed. Bernardo Buarque de Holanda and César Braga-Pinto in Revista Brasileira de História 42.90 (May-August 2022): 125-147
- “Money Mazes, Media Machines, and Banana Republic Realisms.” American Literary History 31.4 (Winter 2019): 687-714
- “The Flight of the Bat: Theatrical (Re)production and the Unevenness of Modernism’s World Stage.” Modernism/Modernity Print+ Cluster titled ‘Modernism on the World Stage’ (October 15, 2019): https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/flight-bat
- “The Siren’s Song; or, When an Amazonian Iara Sang Opera (in Italian) on a Belle Époque Stage.” Special issue of Latin American Theatre Review on Brazilian Theatre 52.2 (Spring 2019): 149-167
- “The Spectral Stage of Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint.” Modern Drama 61.4 (Winter 2018): 501-525 [Winner of Modern Drama‘s Outstanding Article Prize for 2018]
- “Oswald de Andrade’s Os condenados and the Decay of the Amazonian Aura.” Journal of Lusophone Studies 3.2 (Fall 2018): 104-124
- “His Master’s Voice? A Hemispheric History of Phonographic Fictions.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 70.2 (December 2017): 197-216
- “Modernism’s Unfinished Stage: Theatre in Latin America.” In The Modernist World. Ed. Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren. Routledge, 2015. pp. 417-425
- “Radio / Puppets, or the Institutionalization of a (Media) Revolution and the Afterlife of a Mexican Avant-Garde.” Cultural Critique 91 (Fall 2015): 32-71
- “De sobremesa, crónicas ‘revestidas de galas’ y el escenario ausente del modernismo hispanoamericano.” Revista iberoamericana 232–33 (July–December 2010): 939-956
- “Total Theater and the Missing Pieces of the Brazilian Avant-Garde.” Modernism/Modernity 16.2 (April 2009): 329-355
- “Black Indians and Savage Christians: Unmaking the ‘Other’ in the Performance of Conquest.” e–misférica 2.1 (April2005):http://hemi.es.its.nyu.edu/journal/2_1/townsend.html
Publications
The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil
- Author(s): Sarah J. Townsend
- Publication Date: 2018
- Website: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810137400/the-unfinished-art-of-theater/
A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic 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 extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.
Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance
- Author(s): Sarah J. Townsend Co-editor with Diana Taylor
- Publication Date: 2008
- Website: https://www.press.umich.edu/230876/stages_of_conflict
Stages of Conflict brings together a vast array of dramatic texts, ambitiously tracing the intersection of theater and social and political life in the Americas over the past five centuries. Including eighteen works faithfully translated into English, the collection moves from a sixteenth century Mayan dance-drama to a 2003 production by the first published indigenous playwright in Mexico. Historical pieces from the sixteenth century to the present highlight the encounter between indigenous tradition and colonialism, while contributions from modern playwrights such as Virgilio Pinero, Jose Triana, and Denise Stolkos take on the tumultuous political and social upheavals of the past century. The editors have added comprehensive critical commentary that details the origins of each play, affording scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and Latin American studies the opportunity to view the history of a continent through its rich and diverse theatrical traditions.