January 26, 2024
Monday, January 29, 2024
12:00pm, 5125 Dwinelle
The Spanish & Portuguese Library
Katherine Zien* is Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at McGill University. Zien is also co-editor of the book series Routledge Studies in Cultures of the Global Cold War (https://rb.gy/hpju33) and Co-Director of the Réseau d’Études Latino-américaines de Montréal (https://relam.org/). Zien researches and teaches theatre and performance in the Americas, with special focus on transnationalism, racialization, militarization, and gender. Following her 2017 book Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone, Zien is undertaking two research projects. The first is Bodies on the Front Lines: Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean (2024) (https://press.umich.edu/Books/B/Bodies-on-the-Front-Lines2). The second, slated for publication in 2026, investigates performances of counterinsurgency and inter-American military training during Latin America’s cold war, through a monograph and accompanying digital project.
*Zien rhymes with “Lion.”
Abstract: In this talk, Zien presents her current research monograph. “Theater of War” examines sites of inter-American military training in the Panama Canal Zone during the ‘counterinsurgency era.’ Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US government poured aid and resources into Panama’s School of the Americas, Jungle Warfare Training Center, and Inter-American Air Forces Academy, among other sites. At these schools, soldiers gathered from the USA and eighteen Latin American countries to form a hemispheric military brotherhood. Through performance practices of simulation, scripting, and improvisation, these military leaders rehearsed expanded forms of war and crafted new relationships. The hemispheric network, centered in Panama, unleashed the worst violence that the region had seen in decades and ultimately collapsed from varied pressures. Zien discusses how discourses and performance practices of training in the Canal Zone created a split definition of warfare, framed Latin American militaries as ‘nation builders,’ and impacted the isthmus, from the 1960s to the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
