Documents of culture

the issue of transculturation in the Cuadernos de Cultura Teatral (1936-1943)

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the conferences published in the Cuadernos de Cultura Teatral (1936-1943) edited by the National Institute of Theater Studies, which is part of the National Commission of Culture, in order to account for the incipient debates around the issue of transculturation present in some of the conferences published there. Emphasis will be placed on those conferences that specifically addressed the performing arts in Latin America as zones of intersection, crossroads, and collision of cultural practices.

While most of the authors invited to speak used expressions such as "fusion" or "mestizaje" to designate the types and genres of theater in which complex cultural elements from different linguistic and social traditions were articulated, the question of the encounter between communities, languages, and cultural forms in conflict acquires a special conceptual density in the proposals of Pedro Henríquez Ureña and José Uriel García. Our general hypothesis seeks to approach the idea of translation as an intervention in the symbolic chain of meaning and a singular act of appropriation, as part of the praxis of transculturation that Fernando Ortiz will postulate some years after the conferences analyzed here, in which, however, the first approximations to this theoretical development can already be recognized.