Artificial Savages in a Transcultural Landscape

This monograph explores the work of scholars and performance artists from the United States (U.S.) and Mexico to expose the dire realities of white nationalist agendas in a global community.

In this volume, William Stark, PhD, considers the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in terms of sociocultural and sociopolitical critiques established by performance artists and scholars Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Violeta Luna, Roberto Sifuentes, and La Pocha Nostra. This study offers a transcultural perspective of select performative texts and performance art pieces, with a view into ways in which Gomez-Pena's performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra, continues to serve as a locus of creative collaboration and community for an international cohort of artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and performance artists. This volume represents a collective internalization of geographies, a mapping of national territories and identitary boundaries, which makes of the human body a text, and the site where acts of psychomagic, poems and performative texts disturb normative cultural paradigms, interrogate notions of cultural hybridity, and trouble the epistemological architecture of cultural, ethnic, racial, and national delimitations.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies and performance art.