¡Presente!

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Performance; The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas; and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War,” all also published by Duke University Press. Taylor was founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2020. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Prologue: Jumping the Fence  ix1. ¡Presente!  12. Enacting Refusal: Political Animatives  453. Camino Largo: The Zapatistas' Long Road toward Autonomy  674. Making Presence  1055. Traumatic Memes  1276. We Have Always Been Queer  1537. Tortuous Routes: Four Walks through Villa Grimaldi  1758. Dead Capital  2039. The Decision Dilemma  226Epilogue  245Notes  251Bibliography  299Index  321

“Diana Taylor advances a timely and necessary theorization of the politics of performance, delivering nuanced and heartfelt analysis of the creative strategies of artists and activists who labor to intervene in historical and contemporary injustices across the Americas. Showcasing Taylor as a scholar, activist, and accomplice present at the site of performance, ¡Presente! is an intellectually brilliant and crucial model of politically engaged theory.” - Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, coeditor of (Blacktino Queer Performance) “A major project drawn from a life's work of travel, searching, introspection, and unceasing political commitment to and collaborations with artists and activists, ¡Presente! is a work of great power, poetics, and political impact.” - Josh Kun, University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication "For a work so theoretically rigorous, ¡Presente! stands out for its wide legibility. By foregoing unnecessary academic jargon and taking pains to explain her own ethical entanglements in plain English, Taylor’s scholarship makes for a surprisingly smooth read, though it is at times heartbreaking: she does not minimize the grimmer aspects of her subject matter, which include devastating accounts of kidnappings, torture, and genocide. The uninitiated reader will find her writing clear and unpretentious, and may discover that her gloss of the postcolonial canon does much to demystify." - Sam Adrien Smith (Full Stop) "A valuable meditation on what it means to practice the responsibility of writing through social relations, on creating new ways of doing and being in academia, performance, and life." - Analola Santana (Theatre Survey) "A call for a new spirit of militancy to see what is missing, learn to unlearn, and energize the fight." - Angela Marino (Performance Research) "¡Presente! will quickly, and aptly, be assigned in classrooms and discussed by students, artists, and activists who will take up the politics of presence in their practices. Taylor challenges us to reexamine what we believe we know, how we know, and the obligations and responsibilities that accompany such knowledge." - Kimberly Skye Richards (TDR) "Taylor writes an excellent study that encourages the reader to take a walk with her. . . . This book collects past Encuentros and invites all of us to be ¡presente!" - Paola S. Hernández (Theatre Journal) "¡Presente! is a vital and timely text that speaks critically to our current national rhetoric." - Karina Gutiérrez (Modern Drama) "Taylor gives us a deeply captivating book that takes us on a journey across a substantial period, across sites, archives and personal memories. This book is lucidly written and is highly accessible, providing a rich treasure trove of stories and concepts for scholars in performance studies, Latin American and hemispheric studies, Native Studies, Latinx, Chicana/o studies, de- and anticolonial studies, memory, affect, trauma, gender, queer and trans studies. The readers will appreciate and find particularly instructive its method for writing presences, conceptual interventions as well as provocations." - Adwaita Banerjee (Space and Polity)