Marginality Beyond Return: Us Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s by Lillian Manzor (review)

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

MARGINALITY BEYOND RETURN: US CUBAN PERFORMANCES IN THE 1980s AND 1990s. By Lillian Manzor. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2023; pp. 321.

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...