Reviewed by:

• Marginality Beyond Return: Us Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s by Lillian Manzor
• Eric Mayer-García

Lillian Manzor’s Marginality beyond Return: US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s is the first critical book dedicated to Cuban theatre in the US. As Manzor recounts in the acknowledgements, this project began in 1990 during a conversation between the author and two playwrights outside the Duo Theatre in New York. That conversation [End Page 255] shifted her approach and quickly led to one of her first publications, in GESTOS, where she introduced early versions of several of the concepts and questions she considers in this present work. Fast forward to 2023, Manzor’s long-awaited monograph on US Cuban theatre, Marginality beyond Return, is the culmination of many years of careful thought, presentations, and publications on the subjects therein. The author makes several field-changing interventions, including introducing the term “US Cuban,” a hybrid identity-in-difference distinct from Cuban American. As Manzor argues, US Cuban playwrights did not conform to the paradigm of multiculturalism that opened opportunities in equity theatres during the decades of the Hispanic and the Latino. Rather, their plays presented latinidad as the antithesis to the homogeneous, commodifiable, and interchangeable Other multiculturalism sought to interpellate. The author’s historiography questions narratives of Latine theatre since the 1960s that associate its beginnings with community-based activism alone. Finally, Manzor calls for the continued development of Latine theatre archives, interdisciplinary and transnational research methods, and collaboration with artists in theatre research. The persuasive force behind Manzor’s arguments and her meticulously researched historiography is the archives she has assembled over the last three decades, working with artists to donate and with archivists to process collections in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive and the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries.

Distinguishing her subjects from Cuban Americans, Manzor introduces the term “US Cuban,” which builds on the theories of Norma Alarcón and other Third World feminists to name a hybrid identity-in-difference. In presenting several case studies, Manzor forges a dynamic interdisciplinary discourse to theorize the cultural production of an “ensemble” of border-crossed—atrevesados, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s sense of the term—US Cuban artists whose theatre makes visible the hybrid, the abject, the intersectionally marginalized who are normatively erased by larger bifurcated paradigms of racial, gendered, sexual, political, and national identities. The book spotlights María Irene Fornés, Manuel Martín, Jr., Magali Alabau, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Alina Troyano a.k.a. Carmelita Tropicana, and Alberto Sarraín. By presenting their work together, the author problematizes the neat teleology of activism to professionalization in the historiography of US Latine theatre while calling into question the literary, sociological, and historical foundations of studies on Cuban Americans.

The book’s title paraphrases a poem by Lourdes Casal, Afro-Cuban author, intellectual, and activist. Casal’s poem, quoted in part as the introduction’s epigraph, expresses the experience of forever remaining a foreigner—whether in her adopted patria chica (“little homeland”) of New York or when she returns to the city of her birth—as a “marginality, immune to all turning back” (1). This is one example of how, throughout the book, Manzor organically adapts terms from artists themselves in her analysis of their work and theorization of said work’s larger meaning to US Cuban and Latine identity.

The author herself identifies as US Cuban and carefully attends to her hybrid and shifting positionality—a Cuban-born immigrant, a racialized Latina, a transnational feminist, a university professor and intellectual—to situate herself in relation to social structures “as a seeing and speaking critic” (14). She draws on anecdotes of her own and of authors like María de los Angeles Torres or Melinda López as discursive instances of mise en abyme that continually connect theory with social and political contexts, one of many ways the book engages in what Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga would call theorizing in the flesh.

Marginality beyond...

 审阅者：

• 
  无法回归的边缘： 1980 年代和 90 年代的美国古巴表演，莉莲·曼佐 (Lillian Manzor)
•  埃里克·梅尔-加西亚

莉莲·曼佐尔（Lillian Manzor）的《无法回归的边缘性：1980 年代和 1990 年代的美国古巴表演》是第一本专门针对美国古巴戏剧的评论书籍。正如 Manzor 在致谢中所述，这个项目始于 1990 年作者与两位剧作家在纽约二重奏剧院外的一次谈话。那次谈话 [结束第 255 页] 改变了她的方法，并很快促成了她的第一份出版物《GESTOS》，其中她介绍了她在当前工作中考虑的几个概念和问题的早期版本。快进到 2023 年，曼佐尔期待已久的关于美国古巴戏剧的专着《回归的​​边缘性》是多年来对该主题的仔细思考、演讲和出版物的结晶。作者做出了一些改变领域的干预措施，包括引入“美国古巴人”一词，这是一种不同于古巴裔美国人的混合身份差异。正如曼佐尔所说，美国古巴剧作家不符合多元文化主义的范式，这种范式在西班牙裔和拉丁裔的几十年里为平等剧院提供了机会。相反，他们的戏剧将拉蒂尼达呈现为与其他多元文化主义试图解释的同质、可商品和可互换的对立面。作者的史学对 20 世纪 60 年代以来拉丁戏剧的叙述提出了质疑，这些叙述将其起源与基于社区的行动主义联系起来。最后，曼佐尔呼吁继续发展拉丁戏剧档案、跨学科和跨国研究方法，以及与艺术家在戏剧研究方面的合作。 曼佐尔的论点和她精心研究的史学背后的说服力是她在过去三十年中收集的档案，与艺术家合作捐赠，并与档案管理员合作处理古巴剧院数字档案馆和迈阿密大学古巴遗产收藏中的藏品图书馆。

为了将她的研究对象与古巴裔美国人区分开来，曼佐尔引入了“美国古巴人”一词，该词建立在诺玛·阿拉尔孔和其他第三世界女权主义者的理论基础上，以命名一种混合的差异身份。在介绍几个案例研究时，曼佐尔打造了一种充满活力的跨学科话语，对跨国界“atrevesados”（按照格洛丽亚·安扎杜阿的术语来说是“atrevesados”）的文化生产进行理论化——美国古巴艺术家的戏剧使混合体、卑鄙的、被交叉边缘化的人在规范上被种族、性别、性、政治和民族身份等更大的分歧范式所消除。这本书重点介绍了 María Irene Fornés、Manuel Martín, Jr.、Magali Alabau、Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas、Alina Troyano（又名 Carmelita Tropicana）和 Alberto Sarraín。通过共同展示他们的作品，作者对美国拉丁戏剧史学中从激进主义转向专业化的简洁目的论提出了质疑，同时对古巴裔美国人研究的文学、社会学和历史基础提出了质疑。

该书的标题释义了非洲裔古巴作家、知识分子和活动家卢尔德·卡萨尔 (Lourdes Casal) 的一首诗。卡萨尔的诗被部分引用为引言的题词，表达了永远作为外国人的经历——无论是在她收养的纽约的 patria chica（“小祖国”），还是当她回到她出生的城市时——作为一种“边缘性” ，免疫一切回头”（1）。这是曼佐尔如何在整本书中有机地采用艺术家本身的术语来分析他们的作品以及理论化所述作品对美国古巴和拉丁身份的更大意义的一个例子。

作者本人认为自己是美国古巴人，并仔细关注她的混合和不断变化的身份——出生于古巴的移民、种族化的拉丁裔、跨国女权主义者、大学教授和知识分子——将自己与社会结构的关系定位为“说话批评家”（14）。她借鉴了她自己以及玛丽亚·德·洛杉矶·托雷斯或梅琳达·洛佩兹等作家的轶事作为“mise en abyme”的话语实例，不断将理论与社会和政治背景联系起来，这是这本书涉及安萨尔杜阿和切丽·莫拉加的多种方式之一称之为肉体理论。

 边缘化超越...