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Ali Kulez
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. 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. 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. 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. ("The Task" 403) As a second-generation Latino immigrant, Alarcón grew up with a minority language and culture at odds with, on the one hand, the U.S. mainstream culture and, on the other, with the particular cultural setting of the American South. [...]as the author notes in another interview, Peruvian-Americans often lack the sense of diasporic community that anchors other Latino groups in the U.S.; one instead witnesses a strong sense of connection to and continued emotional investment in the country of origin (Alarcón vividly recalls how his parents talked about Peru "en tonos cada vez más sombríos, más tristes") ("'I Am'" 192; "La transmutación" 158). Alarcón actively engages with the Peruvian literary landscape: in 2010 he created a Spanish graphic novel adaptation of "City of Clowns" in collaboration with the Peruvian artist Sheila Alvarado; another instance of such overseas promotion was the publication of El rey está siempre por encima del pueblo (2009), which first appeared in Spanish translation, playfully thwarting not only the supposed precedence of the original over the translation but also the hierarchies of recognition between the North and the South. Besides these literary engagements, Alarcón has created and contributed to journalism of hemispheric circulation
