Beyond Civilization and Barbarism. Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina by Brendan Lanctot (original) (raw)
Related papers
Graffiti and the Poetics of Politics in Rosas's Argentina (1829-1852)
Hispanic Review, 2010
This article considers the function of writing in Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century by examining graffiti, a scriptural practice that occupies the margins of what Á ngel Rama termed the ''lettered city.'' Against the grain of the durable myth that dissident letrados of the Rosas regime wrote in a cultural void, an interrogation of this corpus demonstrates how an array of social actors struggled to establish and define the operative terms of shared political and aesthetic discourses. The inscriptions of political adversaries, despite claims to the contrary, similarly appealed to the emotions of their audiences in order to imagine the nation as an organic, preexisting social field sharply divided between a ''we'' and an internal other: civilization versus barbarism, or federalists versus unitarians. In other words, graffiti demonstrates how competing models for hegemony were debated through a common aesthetics and a mutually intelligible, modern political language.
Between 1835 and 1852, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) held the Office of Governor of Buenos Aires and was granted extraordinary power. During his ruthless rule, political opponents were eliminated by means of state terror. Through travel reports, political essays and the press Europe got acquainted with the ruler of a region which began to bear more and more political and economic relevance to French and British interests. Eventually, these nations got involved in the Uruguayan Civil War between the Argentine Confederation led by General Rosas and the liberal Unitarians in Montevideo. If Charles Darwin, who had met Rosas during his second voyage of HMS Beagle, considered him “a man of an extraordinary character” and eulogised his proficiency in leading his hacienda and the province, French writer Alexandre Dumas père depicted the governor in his 1850 novel Montevideo, or the New Troy as a cruel despot without morals. Whether in the shaping of a historical figure or in the character of a novel, emotions play a decisive role. Besides this, as argued by Hayden White, nineteenth-century historiography bore plot similarities with literature genres. My paper seeks to highlight the role of emotions (e.g. fear, terror, honour, hope etc.) within the migration of the images of this controversial ruler from Argentina to Europe. In doing so, I engage a view by means of multidimensional narratives of otherness under constitutional (parliamentary regimes vs. dictatorship), political (colonial vs. post-colonial situation) and geographical aspects (Western Europe vs. South America).
The Politics of Artistic Expression in the Andes
Tinkuy Boletin De Investigacion Y Debate, 2008
Literary critics concerned with cultural politics in the Andes-and in the Americas in general-have focused a great deal of attention on the conflict between orality and textuality that originated during the early days of the Spanish Conquest. The last ten to twenty years have witnessed particularly creative and thoughtful scholarship about the political ramification of textuality in the colonial and postcolonial context. In Escribir en el aire, for example, Antonio Cornejo Polar introduces the concept of a heterogeneous literature, where the producer, referent and consumer of a text belong to different interpretive communities. This was a critical breakthrough for cultural critics in general, but especially for those dealing with the indigenista legacy. In his alternative literary history, La voz y su huella, Martin Lienhard unsettles the oral-textual binary by focusing on the appropriation of writing by native populations who were historically marginalized by the text. These are two seminal works in a scholarly trend that, if it didn't exactly begin with the publication of two now classic texts by Angel Rama, certainly picked up speed and self-awareness. In La ciudad letrada, Rama discusses the pivotal role that textuality played in securing social privilege during the colonial, republican and nationalist periods in Latin America. Rama's propositions in this posthumously published book are all the more interesting since they follow on the heels of his equally groundbreaking text, Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina, where by contrast, he stresses the ideological potential of transculturated literature 1. In recent years La ciudad letrada has not only come supercede Transculturación narrativa as a critical reference, but has been employed by critics to critique the earlier text, which arguably, has had an unparalleled influence in the field of Latin American cultural criticism. The disciplinary critique that is implicit to La ciudad letrada and the critical reflection that addresses literature as a political tool bring to mind Hegel's famous dictum that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk," or in other words, wisdom about literature arrives as its hegemonic efficacy is coming to an end.
World War I, the Russian Revolution, the new leftist and authoritarian political experiences, and the crisis of the European cultural model, marked, in general, strong transformations in the Latin-American intellectual spaces. The certainties of yesteryears disappeared, to finally bring forth a search for new legitimacies. This work aims at making a contribution to the Latin American historical research through the study of the Argentine case during the 1920s. Argentine political opening-up in 1916 configures a new scenario for public debate and the consolidation and rise of vanguards in the whole of Latin America. Within the context of an atmosphere of ideas marked by the post-war crisis and the growing politicization of intellectual spheres, manifests, magazines and other interventions gained ground within cultural spheres, and the concepts of ?the new? and ?the modern? articulated the interventions of the vanguard programs that sought to controversially burst into a cultural atmosphere that appeared to be stagnant and poor. The work of Raúl González Tuñón is engendered amidst this atmosphere of ideas. When it comes to approaching the politicization of the cultural spheres of the time, his figure presents a singular character and his poetry, a patchwork of elements coming from diverse aesthetic and ideological sources that configure a unique synthesis. There is a consensus, within the historiography of literature, on dividing the poet?s career into three periods of time. This work aims at analyzing the first part of Raúl González Tuñón?s intellectual path, which starts between 1922 and 1925 as a journalist and poet in the circles of intellectual bohemia until 1930, where the grotesque, the denounce and the street jargon represent, in the poetic gender, the caricature of the turn-of-the-century?s liberal idealism breakdown. A world that appeared to be new and modern demanded new words and required the articulation between art and revolution. Based on the study of his early works and publications on the local press, and the cultural magazines of the 1920s, we aim at surveying his acquaintance with national politics and his relations within the intellectual networks of the time ? considering them as interchange and mobile border spaces ? as well as the reception of this discourse within the intellectual society of the 20s, through the recovery of his political-intellectual rapprochement within the framework of political-ideological and social turmoil, at the domestic and international level. A review of his works, the magazines he worked for and collaborated with at that time, as well as his labor as a journalist in the newspaper ? directed by Natalio Botana ? allows us to notice his conception of poetry and the trade of journalism, where his poetical, adventure and testimonial chronicle of the society he lived in and his romantic passion for journalism and for initiating a vibrant journalism converged. Our analysis only covers up to 1930, time of the coup-d?état and the imposition of a new model for the country. Through the use of intellectual intervention bodies ? traditional of the time ? such as magazines, press and journals, and even the radio, Tuñón ? within the framework of a mass society and culture ? becomes one of the symbols of a decade of political-intellectual commotion.
Cronfa, British Library and Worldcat , 2021
For many decades, Argentina's former populist President Juan Domingo de Perón has been frequently compared with the infamous nineteenth-century Federalist dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. The official liberal historical perspective postulates that the Perón government was the 'second tyranny', the first being the notorious Rosas regime, but this assertion is problematic. Despite the evident parallels to be drawn, both men's zealous supporters and archenemies use the similarities to reinforce their own political agendas. This thesis explores the plausible comparisons between Argentina's most polemical political leaders, focusing on the literary representations of both figures in a series of nineteenth and twentieth-century fictional and historical works. Studying Rosas and Perón is even more significant in view of the striking similarities between their wives, who were instrumental in elevating their husbands to long-term political supremacy. Both women assumed unofficial roles in their spouses' administrations and one, namely Eva Perón, is arguably Argentina's most celebrated political icon. The parallels between both men and women have-strangely-never undergone literary treatment. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of the four most controversial political figures who have influenced much of the historiography of Argentina.
Confluenze. Rivista Di Studi Iberoamericani, 2022
This paper analyses the activities of the Litografía del Estado in Buenos Aires, and its ambivalent relationship with the governments of Juan Manuel de Rosas. This story is read in the light of two wider phenomena affecting the Atlantic world: the diffusion of new forms of visual politicisation linked to republicanism and the construction of interconnected and interdependent market economies. The lithography permitted and was sustained by the two aforementioned processes.