Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Sarah J. Townsend
My work asks how an attention to culture can illuminate histories of capitalism (and vice versa). Although my interests are wide-ranging, some recurring concerns include the dynamics of uneven development, race, labor, the role of the state and intellectuals, infrastructure, the extraction and export of natural resources, and the material dimension of art. I’m primarily a Latin Americanist and a specialist in theater and performance, but I frequently stray across geographical and linguistic boundaries, and I consider how theater and performance engage with other genres and media (particularly sound technologies). On occasion I also write about novels - if only to maintain my literary chops. In addition to Spanish and Portuguese, I work with materials in Italian, French, and (less frequently) German, and long ago I spent two years studying Yoruba, which continues to inform some of my teaching and research endeavors.
My current work focuses on the Amazon and has led me to engage with political ecology, geohistory, and debates about extractivism. For the past several years I’ve been conducting archival and field research in Manaus, Brazil for a book-in-progress called Opera in the Amazon: Culture, Capital, and the Global Jungle. This project revolves around the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house in Manaus that was built in the late nineteenth century during the Amazonian rubber boom and is now the site of an annual opera festival. Opera in the Amazon examines the building’s history, productions performed on its stage (as well as other events such as political meetings), and films and literary works in which the theater appears. In doing so, it charts the changing dynamics of global capital from the vantage point of a region defined by natural resource extraction, and it challenges traditional cartographies of cultural creation and circulation by showing that opera has always been a global genre closely tied to the historical development of capitalism. In 2021-2022 I was in residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago working on this project with funding from an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars.
My first monograph was The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil (Northwestern UP, 2018), which was short-listed for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Best Book in the Humanities Prize (2018) awarded by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Along with Diana Taylor I also co-edited Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (U of Michigan P, 2008). Most recently, I co-edited a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies titled "Redesigning Modernities I: Infrastructures, Ecologies, and Emancipatory Openings."
This last endeavor grew out of Redesigning Modernities, a collaborative grant-funded project led by the School of Global Languages and Literatures at Penn State, which I coordinated during 2019-2020. In 2022-2023, I collaborated with a colleague in Art History to co-organize a workshop series called Why Materials Matter, which brought together faculty in the humanities, arts, sciences, and engineering. For several years I also organized the annual Hemispheric Americas lecture series, as well as events such as a teach-in on the fires in the Amazon and a lecture and workshop on "Black Narratives in Brazilian Comics" by the graphic novelist Marcelo D'Salete.
At the graduate level, my recent courses include Amazonia and Extractivism; Brazil and Comparative Modernisms; Race, Performance, and Possession in the Americas; History, Time, and the Contemporary Latin American Stage; and Latin American Modernisms and (Old) New Media. Undergraduate courses include Luso-Brazilian Theater Workshop; Avant-garde Primitivisms; Amazonian Ecologies; Through the Looking Glass: Race in the United States and Brazil; Media and the Mexican Revolution; and Literature and Slavery in the Americas.
I received my PhD from New York University and my BA from the University of Iowa. Prior to coming to Penn State I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley and an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My current work focuses on the Amazon and has led me to engage with political ecology, geohistory, and debates about extractivism. For the past several years I’ve been conducting archival and field research in Manaus, Brazil for a book-in-progress called Opera in the Amazon: Culture, Capital, and the Global Jungle. This project revolves around the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house in Manaus that was built in the late nineteenth century during the Amazonian rubber boom and is now the site of an annual opera festival. Opera in the Amazon examines the building’s history, productions performed on its stage (as well as other events such as political meetings), and films and literary works in which the theater appears. In doing so, it charts the changing dynamics of global capital from the vantage point of a region defined by natural resource extraction, and it challenges traditional cartographies of cultural creation and circulation by showing that opera has always been a global genre closely tied to the historical development of capitalism. In 2021-2022 I was in residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago working on this project with funding from an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars.
My first monograph was The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil (Northwestern UP, 2018), which was short-listed for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Best Book in the Humanities Prize (2018) awarded by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Along with Diana Taylor I also co-edited Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (U of Michigan P, 2008). Most recently, I co-edited a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies titled "Redesigning Modernities I: Infrastructures, Ecologies, and Emancipatory Openings."
This last endeavor grew out of Redesigning Modernities, a collaborative grant-funded project led by the School of Global Languages and Literatures at Penn State, which I coordinated during 2019-2020. In 2022-2023, I collaborated with a colleague in Art History to co-organize a workshop series called Why Materials Matter, which brought together faculty in the humanities, arts, sciences, and engineering. For several years I also organized the annual Hemispheric Americas lecture series, as well as events such as a teach-in on the fires in the Amazon and a lecture and workshop on "Black Narratives in Brazilian Comics" by the graphic novelist Marcelo D'Salete.
At the graduate level, my recent courses include Amazonia and Extractivism; Brazil and Comparative Modernisms; Race, Performance, and Possession in the Americas; History, Time, and the Contemporary Latin American Stage; and Latin American Modernisms and (Old) New Media. Undergraduate courses include Luso-Brazilian Theater Workshop; Avant-garde Primitivisms; Amazonian Ecologies; Through the Looking Glass: Race in the United States and Brazil; Media and the Mexican Revolution; and Literature and Slavery in the Americas.
I received my PhD from New York University and my BA from the University of Iowa. Prior to coming to Penn State I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley and an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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The editors have added comprehensive critical commentary that details the origins of each play, affording scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and Latin American studies the opportunity to view the history of a continent through its rich and diverse theatrical traditions.
O filme AmarElo: É Tudo Pra Ontem entrelaça cenas do concerto realizado pelo rapper Emicida no Theatro Municipal de São Paulo em novembro de 2019 com uma narrativa histórica que transforma o teatro em um “elo” entre o movimento modernista, a música negra e a militância política negra. A exemplo do filme, este artigo aborda o Theatro Municipal como o cenário de lutas em torno da raça, mas focaliza tensões e contradições raciais existentes entre os modernistas que se registraram na música e nos debates relacionados com ela. O artigo se centra em três eventos: a Semana de Arte Moderna, uma “noite cultural” organizada pela Ação Integralista Brasileira em 1935 e uma comemoração da abolição em 1938. A análise procura iluminar diferentes “elos” musicais que conectavam o movimento modernista com fenômenos políticos divergentes e atavam a vanguarda ao passado.
representation at moments when media become increasingly integral to the economy.
play about the final days of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint
L’Ouverture by the Martinican writer and theorist Édouard Glissant.
Written between 1959 and 1961, when Glissant was forced to remain
in France due to his political activities, Monsieur Toussaint was
not performed until 1977 and, by the author’s own account, “was not
crafted according to the economy of theatrical representation.” Rather
than taking the later version scénique [scenic version] as the definitive
version (as critics and translators invariably do), I consider the
non-performance of the original play as integral to its commentary
on the Haitian Revolution and to what Glissant calls the Antilles’s
“non-history.” Ultimately, I show how, when faced with an impasse in
the movement for decolonization, Glissant circumvents the here and
now of “live” performance in order to create what he calls a “prophetic
vision of the past” – a spectral stage.
The editors have added comprehensive critical commentary that details the origins of each play, affording scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and Latin American studies the opportunity to view the history of a continent through its rich and diverse theatrical traditions.
O filme AmarElo: É Tudo Pra Ontem entrelaça cenas do concerto realizado pelo rapper Emicida no Theatro Municipal de São Paulo em novembro de 2019 com uma narrativa histórica que transforma o teatro em um “elo” entre o movimento modernista, a música negra e a militância política negra. A exemplo do filme, este artigo aborda o Theatro Municipal como o cenário de lutas em torno da raça, mas focaliza tensões e contradições raciais existentes entre os modernistas que se registraram na música e nos debates relacionados com ela. O artigo se centra em três eventos: a Semana de Arte Moderna, uma “noite cultural” organizada pela Ação Integralista Brasileira em 1935 e uma comemoração da abolição em 1938. A análise procura iluminar diferentes “elos” musicais que conectavam o movimento modernista com fenômenos políticos divergentes e atavam a vanguarda ao passado.
representation at moments when media become increasingly integral to the economy.
play about the final days of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint
L’Ouverture by the Martinican writer and theorist Édouard Glissant.
Written between 1959 and 1961, when Glissant was forced to remain
in France due to his political activities, Monsieur Toussaint was
not performed until 1977 and, by the author’s own account, “was not
crafted according to the economy of theatrical representation.” Rather
than taking the later version scénique [scenic version] as the definitive
version (as critics and translators invariably do), I consider the
non-performance of the original play as integral to its commentary
on the Haitian Revolution and to what Glissant calls the Antilles’s
“non-history.” Ultimately, I show how, when faced with an impasse in
the movement for decolonization, Glissant circumvents the here and
now of “live” performance in order to create what he calls a “prophetic
vision of the past” – a spectral stage.
- Nelson Rodrigues