Colloquium: "The Best Show in Town, Straight from the Countryside"

About the talk:
In the mid-1880s popular itinerant circus troupes in the Río de la Plata incorporated short plays called Creole dramas into their acts. These dramas told variations of the story of a noble gaucho who sought revenge for the disruptions modernization wrought. Much more than simple stories of country life under siege, though, these plays became the most widely attended form of entertainment in the region for close to two decades. What made them the best shows in town?

About William Acree:
William Acree (Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington University) earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and teaches courses on Latin American literary history and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata, 1780-1910 (2011), and co-editor of Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations (2009), and Jacinto Ventura de Molina: los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata (2010). His current research centers on the development of a popular culture industry and the theater-going public in the late nineteenth-century Río de la Plata. For this project Acree is particularly interested in cultural flows throughout the Americas and the role of popular spectacles in rural settings.