Carnival Theater: Uruguay's Popular Performers and National Culture (Cultural Studies of the Americas)

The murgas are troupes of performers, musicians, writers, and creators who, during Montevideo's Carnival, perform on the tablados, temporary stages built in the neighborhoods of Uruguay's capital city each year. Throughout the period of Uruguay's subjection to a brutal dictatorship and in the following era of "democratization," the murgas, envisioned originally as popular theater, were transformed into a symbol of social resistance, celebrated by many and perceived by others as menacing and subversive.

Focusing on the cultural practices of the lower classes and more specifically on the processes and productions of the murgas, Gustavo Remedi's Carnival Theater is a deeply thoughtful consideration of Uruguayan society's identity crisis and subsequent redefinition in the wake of the authoritarian-bureaucratic-technocratic regimes of the 1960s. A revealing work of cultural criticism, the book proposes a new set of criteria for the interpretation and critique of national culture.

Gustavo Remedi is assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Trinity College.

Amy Ferlazzo teaches at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.