Research Bio
Dr. Angela Marino (Chazarra) (she/hers) is author of Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela (Northwestern University Press, 2018); co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas (Seagull Press/University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is lead faculty of the Critical Perspectives on Democracy and Media Lab at UC Berkeley (demoxmedia.org). She received her PhD from New York University (2011) and her MA in Latin American Studies (2006) from the University of New Mexico. Marino was a Fulbright scholar in Venezuela and a recipient of the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received a university-wide Graduate Mentorship Award in 2016, co-organized the UC Regent's residency lectureship of Luis Valdez (2014), and served as co-chair of the Latinx Faculty Association (2018-2021).
In Populism and Performance, Marino brings a performance studies analysis to a critique of populism. She argues that populism is often analyzed and even measured by methods devoid of culturally specific qualitative analysis, and thus omits repertoires of popular constituent power or embodied acts of populism. Methods like polling, surveys, or counting words deemed 'Manichean' from speeches fall short of recognizing the agency among voters. The result was an erasure and abnegation of sovereignty, where populism became a categorical weapon to justify US intervention by discrediting the strengthening of democratic processes as otherwise 'authoritarian' or coercive. Yet examples of democratic participatory repertoires are plentiful and meaningful in the making of one of the most significant social movements in the American hemisphere since the Cuban Revolution.
Based on ethnographic and archival research, Marino focuses on performances of the devil figure, tracing this beloved trickster through religious fiestas, mid-century theater and film, and other media as it both antagonizes and unifies a movement against dictatorship and interventionist policies. She then demonstrates that performance became a vehicle through which cultural producers negotiated boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in ways that overcame the simplistic logic of good versus evil, us versus them. The result is a nuanced insight into the process of building political mobilization out of crisis and through monumental times of change.
"While the book focuses on performance, it also lends heavily to studies of populism, primarily through these recurring arguments that (a) populism is a performance practice; (b) populism is mediated by performance in the social and material environment; and (c) populism carries its own history of reproduction through performance and embodiments, which implies an epistemological (and therefore methodological) shift of analysis. A performance studies approach would help foreground the embodied, spatial, and temporal dimensions of populism both as constituting and representational acts.”
Dr. Marino is currently working on a book that examines the overlapping relationship between festivals and governance.
Research Expertise and Interest
Latin American Studies, performance studies, Venezuela, Chicanx Latinx studies, Chicano Latino theater, political cultures, Populism, Festival and Carnival Studies, democracy, Latin America