The Cuban Theater Digital Archive: Between the Real and the Virtual: Dr. Lillian Manzor
The Cuban Theater Digital Archive: Between the Real and the Virtual: Dr. Lillian Manzor
The presentation takes the Cuban Theater Digital Archive as an example of how theater, performance, and digital culture can help in the reconciliation of diasporic communities. Based on Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, on the one hand, and in contemporary analysis of digital archiving, the talk analyzes the bridges created between the island and its diasporas, presences and absences, the real and the virtual. It argues that digital documentation of ephemeral theatrical life broadens the traditional concept of the archive and approaches theatricalities not as something that disappears, but as an act of permanence and a means of reappearance.
Dr. Lillian Manzor specializes in 20th and 21st century Latin American, Hemispheric Caribbean and Latine Theater and Performance Studies. Before coming to UM, she taught at UC-Irvine Comparative Literature (1988-1995). She is co-editor of the book series Sualos, published jointly by Havana’s Editorial Alarcos and Miami’s CTDA Press. She is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Marginality Beyond Return: US-Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s. Dr. Manzor has been an innovator in using technology in her teaching and research. She is the Founding Director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive, a digital publication that serves as a space for communication between politically divided communities. She has also published a bilingual online exhibit Cuban Theater in Miami: 1960-1980, and the multimodal book, El Ciervo Encantado: An Altar in the Mangrove. Her ongoing research project, Sites that Speak, uses GIS and the Scalar platform to create digital cultural map of performing arts spaces in Spanish in Miami. Her research has been funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Cuban National Council for the Performing Arts. As a community engaged scholar, she serves as dramaturg and cultural advisor for theater companies in the United States and Cuba, and she has been actively involved in developing US-Cuba cultural dialogues through theater.