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In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor explores the ways in which diverse acts of embodied memory-from gestures to movement, from orality to singing, from theater to dance-participate in the production and transmission of knowledge in the American hemisphere. Defined in contradistinction to the (written) archive with its myths of immediacy and durability, the repertoire offers a mediated and dynamic form of knowledge that reproduces itself according to its own rhythms (19-20). Literature, as Ángel Rama has shown, has been an integral part of Latin America's "lettered city" since the colonial period, and Taylor unsurprisingly categorizes it under the archive (Rama 20-25). Yet what happens when literature invents, stages, and opens itself to performance? What can stories and novels tell us about the repertoire? Conversely, what can performance thematized within fiction reveal about the performativity of fiction itself?
The Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón's work offers hemispheric insights at this intersection of the archive and the repertoire. Since his first collection War by Candlelight (2005), Alarcón has explored in his fiction not only the performativity of everyday life but also the dynamics of Latin American performance from the acts of street clowns to those of avant-garde theater collectives. Due to considerations of space, this article focuses on the novel At Night We Walk in Circles (2013) and the short story "Provincials" from The King is Always Above the People (2017) to examine the ways in which theater, theatricality, and more broadly performance mediate tensions along various temporal and geographical axes in Alarcón's fiction. Both narratives are set, like most of Alarcón's works, in an unnamed country whose political history, pattern of urban development, and ethnic composition closely resemble those of Peru.1 Whereas theater and performance open up ways of dealing with the trauma of state violence in the novel, in the story they touch on the aspirations and resentments of South-North mobility from the provinces to the capital and from Latin America to the United States.2 To understand how performance imbricates these issues, I read Alarcón alongside theories of spectacle, theatricality, and performance by Guy Debord, Diana Taylor, and Richard Schechner, among others.
An American Author
Born in Lima and raised in Birmingham, Alabama from age three onwards, Alarcón...